mcleod's WAC

Susan McLeod - WAC pedagogies
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) has always interested me because of its focus on teaching the content of a discipline and the discourse features used in writing about that content. This instructional strategy has afforded Tech Comm a long history with various Engineering disciplines, as well as the social sciences (as C. Miller has addressed in her seminal essay). McLeod illustrates this focus when she discusses WAC as a transformative pedagogy aimed at, “moving away from the lecture model of teaching to a model of active student engagement with the material and with the genres of the disciplines through writing” (150). Nothing is more common to the Tech Comm than this.

WAC is really about writing to communicate. Again, this is essential to the practicing technical writing (it is her livelihood) and the central emphasis of most Tech Comm instruction. “… it focuses on writing to an audience outside the self in order to inform that audience, and the writing therefore is revised, crafted, and polished. Writing to communicate is reader based rather than writer based, and uses to the formal language of a particular discourse community to communicate information” (153).

I have a high comfort level with this type of teaching (not to be construed as boasting), which is why I think we’ve been so successful with WRT 407. “Writing as writing to communicate… focusing on helping students to learn the discourse of the discipline; the relationship is … not the composition teacher, but the teacher who is already grounded in the content of the field and who is fluent in the disciplinary discourse” (154).

I see WAC pedagogies situated somewhere in the area of rhetorical and process pedagogies –- aligned with other transactional theories and perhaps an off-shoot of social constructionism because of the way students objectify their knowledge in ungraded papers to help them discover both what they know and what they need to know. This is writing to learn. This is Tech Comm instruction. Consider an engineering student’s design document – “an expressive document that helps her explore and assimilate new ideas, create links between the unfamiliar and familiar, mull over possibilities, explain things to the self before explaining them to others” (152). More illustrative, consider the engineering student’s laboratory notebook. “It is not a polished work intended for an outside audience; sometimes it is comprehensible only to the writer” (152).