"Perspectives on the Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum: A Dialogue Between the Sciences and Humanities"

The Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum 

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement started in 1980, and has proven to be the most successful method for teaching interdisciplinary writing to date (Russell 3).  As defined by two of the pioneers in the field, Susan McLeod and Elaine Maimon, WAC is:

a pedagogical reform movement that presents an alternative to the "delivery of information" model of teaching in higher education, to lecture classes and to multiple-choice, ture/false testing.  In place of this model, WAC presents two ways of using writing in the classroom and the curriculum:  writing to learn and learning to write in the disciplines.  (579)

In other words, rather than presenting information in formalized and informational lectures and expecting students to return the same information on exams, WAC strives to induce learning through the act of writing; as McLeod and Maimon put it, “writing to learn and learning to write” (579).  Such a method has two separate approaches, the first being the act of learning how to write, including aspects such as the mechanics, diction, and traditional rules of writing within the designated discipline.  The second approach is the concept of writing to learn, which uses the very act of writing in order for a student to learn a concept.  Given these two approaches then, ideally, WAC is a program that enables students to learn in as well as write for all the disciplines they will come across during their college career.  The WAC model also aides Writing Center consultants in that it focuses on the writing process rather than the product because writers in a WAC program are taught that the process is just as important as the final product. 

However, the problem often encountered with WAC, or any other interdisciplinary writing program for that matter, is as Rebecca S. Nowacek points out in her article, “Why Is Being Interdisciplinary So Very Hard to Do?,” that “we do not have a robust vocabulary for talking about the differences in writing in different [contexts], which can make the differences salient” (496).  As Nowacek explains, little interdisciplinary dialogue and terminology exists to examine writing across multiple university divisions.  Students often have a difficult time picking up on the nuances of writing for various disciplines because such differences are often not directly pointed out, nor is a fluid, universal writing method ever explained.  With no direct model of similarities and differences to follow in writing, students are often left to their own devices, trying to navigate through what individual instructors in the discipline desire in a paper, as well as the expectations of the discourse community as a whole.