WAC Mission & History

WAC Mission & History
Writing Across the Curriculum is both a pedagogical reform movement and a curricular program that varies considerably across institutions (McLeod and Maimon 2000). Its theoretical origin has been traced to the work of James Britton and his colleagues at the University of London in the 1960s and Charles Bazerman's studies of writing in the disciplines (1987, 1991), and its programmatic nature has been identified with the work of scholars such as Elaine Maimon (1981), Toby Fulwiler and Art Young (1981), and Anne Herrington (1981).

As an institutional program, Writing Across the Curriculum came of age with the publication of Writing in the Arts and Sciences (Maimon, et al. 1981) and the concurrent work of Toby Fulwiler and Art Young at Michigan Tech and Anne Herrington at the University of Massachusetts. Maimon, Fulwiler, and Young featured professors from different departments describing both their pedagogy and the kinds of discourse valued in their disciplines. The distinction between "writing-to-learn" (expressive) and "learning to write" (transactional) and their integration in the curriculum has become a cornerstone of such programs (McLeod and Maimon).

By 1985, C.W. Griffin's survey of 404 institutions had identified 139 WAC programs. That number has continued to grow, with numerous Writing Across the Curriculum programs existing in U.S. colleges and universities today.

According to McLeod and Maimon, (2000) a fully-developed WAC program should include:

(1) faculty development
(2) curricular components from the freshman year onward
(3) student support in the form of writing or learning centers
(4) assessment of the program and of student writing, and an administrative structure and budget.

At Eastern Michigan University most of these components have been in place since the Fall Semester, 1999.