“Presumably, what any classroom seeks to nurture is intellectual conversation, leading to enhanced powers of discernment. Since writing enables both learning and conversation, manifesting and enlarging the capacity to discover connections, it should be a resource that all teachers in all disciplines can rely on to achieve their purposes.”
–Knoblach and Brannon
The Writing Intensive Program encourages faculty to use writing strategically in the disciplines to promote the process of learning and to teach the kinds of writing that competence in a discipline requires. Emphasizing the value of writing, WIP courses should reflect these principles and communicate them to students:
1) Writing increases student engagement, teaches critical thinking and problem solving skills, and deepens learning of subject matter, the “content” of any course (see Writing and Learning).
2) Writing teaches discipline-specific ways of thinking and communicating that are important to performance in university courses and in post-university professions (see Writing in the Disciplines and Teaching Disciplinary Conventions).
3) Teaching writing in math, science, or art means interpreting and guiding the writing process and responding to student work in productive and helpful ways that encourage revision (see Teaching the Writing Process, Teaching Revision, and Feedback Strategies).
WIP Course Planning and Design Criteria
Based on the above program goals, the following criteria drive WIP course planning and design. An elaboration of these criteria and other guidelines may be found in WIP Course Guidelines. Though writing-intensive courses vary, for example, from “Archaeological Geography” to “History of Music” to “Physical Chemistry” to “Elementary Latin,” writing-intensive courses
involve students in innovative writing assignments that promote course learning;
stage and sequence assignments to encourage writing as a process of creating and communicating knowledge;
maximize opportunities for guidance, feedback, and revision;
teach the writing conventions that are inseparable from modes of inquiry in a discipline.
Features of Successful Writing-Intensive Instruction
In general, writing-intensive courses should offer the following:
• Feedback/interaction from instructors, WIP teaching assistants, and peers. Students, of course, must be trained to respond usefully to each other’s writing (see Grading in WIP Courses). When they are, they provide not only an important channel for feedback but also a real audience for writing in the disciplines. Furthermore, by reading and responding to each other’s work, they help themselves as writers, becoming better skilled at revising their own writing by suggesting revisions in the work of their peers.
• Opportunities to revise. In addition to teaching the writing process, staged assignments permit this.
• Writing assignments that are relevant to the course and to a student’s career plans. Designing such assignments requires innovation, so as to create “real” as opposed to artificial assignments, which are perceived by students as “busy work.” Also, students in WIP courses tell us that writing assignments need to be integrated fully and relevantly into a course—not just “tacked on” to make students do some writing.
How WIP Courses Develop Teaching: Possible Elements
This kind of re-orientation to teaching through writing is one of the ways in which writing-intensive programs claim to foster teaching development for faculty. Overall, writing in the disciplines faculty report that attending to writing effectively in a course leads them to teach more effectively.
Possible influences of writing-intensive courses on teaching include the elements that incorporating writing into a course requires: better planning; clearer communication to students (including more fully articulated goals and schedules directions, models, and grading criteria); greater engagement in course issues through thinking about, designing, and explaining writing assignments; increased communication with students through reading their work; a better sense of how students are doing; and more opportunities for management of the learning/writing process.
Creating a Writing-Intensive Environment: Class Size, Interaction, Process
Because they offer greater instructor involvement in the writing process, writing-intensive courses work best in regular-enrollment courses, which allows greater student-instructor interaction. The assignment of a WIP teaching assistant, along with more thoughtfully staged writing tasks, helps WIP faculty to offer additional opportunities for interaction with students and permits greater involvement in the student’s writing process, even in larger classes. Large classes may be structured effectively as writing-intensive (see Writing in Large Classes) and may permit the kind of interaction associated with much smaller classes by offering writing-intensive instruction in breakout/discussion sections led by WIP teaching assistants. Having instituted a writing-intensive course requirement for majors, the School of Music has been prominent in delivering writing-intensive courses in this way.
Writing Intensive Should Not Mean Time Intensive
We realize that for many faculty, teaching with writing sounds time and labor intensive, an endeavor likely to complicate their own research goals. The assistance of a specially trained WIP teaching assistant, however, should help considerably in offering a successful WIP experience to your students. Nevertheless, faculty have expressed concerns about writing-intensive courses, which are variations on a lack of time and resources theme, for instance:
• “How can I teach the content I want to cover if I have to teach writing, too?”
Our response: You can’t. It’s a matter of pedagogical preference. You probably will have to cover less content when you teach a writing-intensive course, but the content you do offer, which is inseparable from the writing that presents it, will be learned more deeply because students engage course issues in writing.
• “I don’t assign more papers because I don’t have time to teach them…”
Our response: On this familiar theme, we maintain that teaching the paper (how to write it) or giving feedback on the writing assignment forces us to teach the very things we should be teaching: the processes, questions, patterns of evidence and argument, styles and formats that are specific to making knowledge in a discipline.
• “All those papers to read and grade. I don’t want to spend time correcting students’ grammar and mechanical errors…”
Our response: There’s no need to. Not all student writing needs to be responded to, and when it is, fewer and more strategic comments prove more useful. It is always an inefficient use of faculty time to “correct” papers, even though students (and many faculty who were taught to write this way) assume that “correcting” errors is what instructors do—and what writing is most about. WIP guidelines for syllabi, writing assignments, feedback strategies, and working with a teaching assistant address such concerns.