Precis: “The Pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum” by Susan McLeod

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) pedagogy is over 25 years old, dating back to open admissions crisis of the seventies. Of primary concern for WAC proponents is the failure of composition classes to teach students writing skills that adequately translate to other academic discourses. Though instructors may be urging students to compose in their “authentic voice,” that voice and the sort of expressive writing that accompanies it are not appropriate for, say, a course in the sciences. In reaction to this discursive disconnect, WAC pedagogy advocates for writing instruction that provides students with the kind of overarching skills that can be applied in any discipline – critical thinking, problem solving, and effective communication. WAC theory encompasses two main schools of thought, though they are not mutually exclusive or at odds.
Writing to learn is, above all things, student centered and reflective. This strategy, born of the Learning Across the Curriculum movement, helps students develop expressive skills, process complex and/or new ideas, and make sense of the language with which they’re working. This can take many forms – quick writes, focused free writes, and journals among them. These writings should not be graded, as the purpose of the exercises is to create a discursive environment in which students feel safe and comfortable expressing themselves in any way that best suits their needs.
Writing to communicate, sometimes referred to as Writing in the Disciplines (WID), is reader based and asks students to learn and invoke formal discourse language. As such, students are expected to create drafts, revise, tighten, and polish their work. In this light, the teacher-student relationship is much like the master-apprentice dynamic. While composition teachers can fulfill their end of the bargain by teaching their students discourse analysis, it falls to the instructors in specific disciplines to serve as “masters” of their respective fields. This requires from teachers a conscious recognition of the differences and gaps between various discourses and an active classroom pedagogy to help bridge those divides. This is also called genre theory.