JAC Volume 13 Issue 2

As the first book in the new MLA Research and Scholarship in Composition series, Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the Disciplines should hold a unique place among the histories of composition. Editors Herrington and Moran claim in their preface that writing across the curriculum/disciplines is a powerful movement, evidenced by recent surveys which found WAC/WAD programs in more than one-third of institutions surveyed. And they cite MLA's decision "to support and publish this volume" as further proof of the movement's power in higher education. And yet this may be the primary reason why this volume "should" hold a unique place among composition histories. That is, without the MLA's sanction, we are left to wonder how writing across the curriculum/disciplines or language-for-learning would ever have achieved "field" status, and we are expected to applaud MLA's move because it legitimizes an otherwise "flourishing" (read floundering), "diverse" (read fragmented) field. After reading this book, I found myself pondering the effects of institutional interests (university, state, and federal funding, and professional-association support) on writing pedagogy more than the effects of writing pedagogy on students. In fact, this book is not really about students or writing per se, but about why teaching-across-the-curriculum "carries with it the potential to bring about positive changes in the structures and values of higher education in the United States." To put it "generally," it is a dramatization of the struggle between the "priorities of government" and the "conditions in which teachers work." The volume is not, however, without "particular" value. In other words, what may overshadow its "legitimation" in the field does not necessarily diminish the particular individuals who contributed the essays, nor the individuals they studied. In this sense, it is possible, perhaps imperative, that we study this book for both its complicity with institutional interests and its resistance to those interests as represented by the individual efforts of the contributors. The results will be that some may discover that "writing" and "value" are intimately related, and some will find their suspicions about the relation confirmed. Either way, it will have been a worthwhile venture.

In a recent essay (College English, February 1991) on the "second stage in writing across the curriculum," Charles Bazerman hails the end of WAC's first stage and looks toward its second. He writes, "As we start to turn the microscope on academic disciplinary writing, it will take us a while to know what we wish to concentrate on and how to get our analytic tools in focus. Now we are rightfully searching for striking details, intriguing possibilities, and organizing patterns. . . . It is too early to prejudge which concepts will produce the most useful analyses." Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the Disciplines seems organized to fit under Bazerman's microscope. That is, each section of the volume considers one aspect of WAC that brings specific benefits and possibilities into focus. Herrington and Moran present five organizing patterns: Historical Perspectives, Disciplinary and Predisciplinary Theory, Teachers' Voices: Reflections on Practice, Studies in the Classroom, and Disciplinary Values, Discourse Practices, and Teaching. Their own concluding essay then looks to the future of WAC. Here are some highlights of each section.

The first, "Historical Perspectives," contains Nancy Martin's "Language Across the Curriculum: Where It Began and What It Promises," a history of the WAC movement in Britain, and David Russell's "American Origins of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Movement," a history of the influence of that movement on the evolution of WAC in the United States. Martin, a former member of James Britton's research team, traces WAC to nineteenth-century pedagogy in which "English was taught at all levels as if it were Latin." According to Martin, the "classics teachers who became the teachers of English transferred their procedures, learned in the teaching of Latin, to English." One of the driving forces of the WAC movement in Britain is thus linked to the study of language as the study of its grammar. Martin skillfully explains the roots of the relation between learning and language by discussing the 1950s' growing interest in psychologists and linguists such as Piaget, Brown, Labov, McNeil, Bruner, and Vygotsky. The British movement came to be known as "language in the curriculum." Following the Dartmouth conference in 1966, Martin claims that they rejected the "skills" model and the "literary heritage" model in favor of a "language and personal growth" model. In contrast, Russell explains how the American WAC movement is rooted in the combined influences of the British emphasis on language and learning and the American tradition of progressive education. He includes the social events of the 1960s and the revival of the discipline of rhetoric as equally decisive turning points in the shift from writing as skill to learning through writing. He claims that the literacy crisis of the 1970s shoved the WAC movement into the foreground. One of the key statements in Russell's piece, however, is that "WAC was a tool for faculty development, for reforming pedagogy, though of course improved writing was an important benefit." This insight proves to be the guiding framework of the rest of the volume and for the current focus of many WAC participants.

The fact that WAC has reopened pedagogical issues is important and worth further inquiry. The shift to a focus on pedagogy, to the diminishment of a focus on writing or students, is an interesting turn of events; but I will return to that in a moment. The second section, "Disciplinary and Predisciplinary Theory" attests to an even further-removed focus: the rhetorical analyses of disciplinary discourses. Herrington and Moran include this section to address the question of what should be emphasized in WAC research and teaching: "disciplinary discourse and ways of knowing, or more general issues of teaching and learning that are assumed to transcend disciplines." James Britton's "Theories of the Disciplines and a Learning Theory" calls for a focus on general issues of learning and teaching, while Charles Bazerman's "From Cultural Criticism to Disciplinary Participation: Living with Powerful Words" asks us to include careful rhetorical analyses of disciplinary discourses in the general field of English studies. Britton's notion of "predisciplinary theory" as "a method by which a teacher comes to an understanding of what will result in an understanding on someone elses part" seems mired in sentimental lamentations about what he views as the unfortunate direction of both British and American postsecondary education "toward increasing specialization and the devaluation of teaching." The inclusion of Bazerman's piece is baffling. That is, its focus on the need for rhetorical analyses of disciplinary and professional discourse practices to "enable students to enter into disciplines as empowered speakers rather than as conventional followers of accepted practice" seems out of place.

Judith Langer's "Speaking of Knowing: Conceptions of Understanding in Academic Disciplines" deals with epistemological concerns, specifically the relation between "the content of instruction" and "what teachers look for as evidence of such learning." Her work, however, hones in on the problem of writing-assessment differences in discipline-specific writing, an area that deserves further study. In the final essay of this section, Lee Odell's "Context-Specific Ways of Knowing and the Evaluation of Writing," the problem of how meaning-making affects teacher evaluations of writing is closely inspected. Odell calls for persuading teachers in disciplines outside of composition itself that "judgments about the quality of writing cannot be separated from judgments about the quality of meaning-making reflected in that writing."

Part three, "Teachers' Voices: Reflections on Practice," contains two pieces in which teachers reflect on their motives and strategies for using writing in their teaching. The most interesting essay is an interchange among four faculty members who were asked why they use writing in their teaching. Each member of the group corresponded with the others; then they reflect upon how they as persons and professionals view writing; then they collaborate in a concluding chorus of differing understanding about writing in the disciplines. In my view, the productive aspect of this interchange (the shifting perspectives about writing as the interchange proceeded) mirrors the current status of a shifting field. That is, the act of sharing their writing experiences with each other and with their students leads to a demystification of expertise, though I am unsure whether it leads to better student writers.

The second piece of this section, "From Practice to Theory: Writing Across the Disciplines at Spelman College" by Jacqueline Jones Royster, focuses on the same shift in emphasis. Royster explains how the WAC program at Spelman has evolved from a faculty development program (writing workshops, strategies, and resources) to a complete change in "the conceptual framework of the program," to "higher-order literacy skills," to critical thinking. Royster says "the fundamental problem is to help students to learn and to perform. . . . The task is to determine how we (with more knowledge, experience, and expertise) can help students (often with very different knowledge, experience, and expertise) to operate effectively and efficiently within our disciplines." One way to characterize this shift in focus, she says, is not to say that we have moved away from writing, so much as that we have redefined literacy and created a "literacy across disciplines" movement.

The fourth section, "Studies in the Classroom," is a collection of four pieces on specific studies of academic writing. Susan Peck MacDonald and Charles Cooper look at "Contributions of Academic and Dialogic Journals to Writing about Literature." Their study asked "not how writing affects learning in general but what kind of learning a particular kind of writing promotes." Again, the shift in conceptual framework is visible. Their findings indicated that "undirected journal writing" (that is, dialogic journals versus academic journals) was "less likely to ensure that students would identify and grapple with the tension" inherent in some of the issues being presented to them. Toby Fulwiler's "Writing and Learning American Literature" is itself a journal chronicling the progress of one of his survey courses in American literature by discussing his internal thoughts about the problems he encountered, the students' responses, specific student's writing, and his conclusions about the experience. The final essay in the section is an account by Joy Marsella, Thomas Hilgers, and Clemence McLaren on "How Students Handle Writing Assignments: A Study of Eighteen Responses in Six Disciplines." This study sought to reveal the gap between teachers' "representations of students' approaches to writing assignments and what the students actually do."

The final section of the volume, "Disciplinary Values, Discourse Practices, and Teaching," moves us from the classroom into "the larger disciplinary and professional contexts" again. Specifically, its two articles "examine the values embedded in the language of disciplinary discourse and relate these values to the writing, teaching, and learning that occur in classes informed by these values." Bonnie Spanier's "Encountering the Biological Sciences: Ideology, Language, and Learning" reveals (as I have suspected all along) that writing across the curriculum is "a vehicle in this interchange of the humanities and the sciences." In other words, WAC is the agent of transformation in a field critiquing itself, rather than a vehicle for transforming students into better writers. I do not criticize here, but simply note that this is often not how WAC practitioners describe what they are doing (though the central theme of "pedagogy-across-the-curriculum" is very much in circulation in this volume). My personal, favorite essay (much to my surprise) is Louise Dunlap's "Advocacy and Neutrality: A Contradiction in the Discourse of Urban Planners." Dunlap looked at "neutral" and "critical" writing in the field of urban planning and found that its dichotomy of neutrality and advocacy is informed by the pressures of institutional contradictions. It was refreshing to look at the writing of someone who is both a professor of urban studies and a professional planner with "real" clients. Dunlap's comparison of her writing, complete with the contextual problems she encountered, suggests that "out there" there is a "contradictory balance" that requires both neutral and critical writers. Dunlap claims that what we perceive as "powerlessness" in neutral writing is not necessarily the result of student indifference, but is largely due to the fact that "the profession, itself, sanctions neutrality through the mixed models for writing that have been institutionalized in the field."

Herrington and Moran conclude the volume with "Writing in the Disciplines: A Prospect," an essay that echoes the concerns and values of all of the contributors. Focusing on current obstacles that WAC programs face, the editors suggest that WAC's greater significance may be that it provides "a forum for talk about teaching—talk that is satisfying to the teacher who lurks within even the most research-oriented member of our profession." The key dimension that WAC adds to such talk is of course that "it encourages such talk across and among the academic disciplines."

The value of this book, for me, lies in its bringing such acknowledgements to bear on a more primary problem, that students face conflicting views about what constitutes "good writing" and that they are evaluated in terms of those views. In the first half of their article, Herrington and Moran comment on this problem, but more in relation to its implications for teachers who discover that "when we work with teachers from disciplines not our own, we see our own teaching in relief, standing out against the goals and strategies of other teachers in other disciplines." Finally, they turn to the problems of students when they comment on the "challenge we face as readers of student writing: to understand discourse practices and values that may differ from our own." In the end they recall Mina Shaughnessy's 1976 article, "Diving In," especially for its fourth stage in the developmental scale for teachers of basic writing. Shaughnessy noted that "the teacher who has come this far must now make a decision that demands professional courage—the decision to remediate himself [or herself] to become a student of new disciplines and of his [or her] students themselves in order to perceive both their difficulties and their incipient excellence." I can think of no greater teaching challenge and no better note on which to end this review. In lieu of offering a rating or implicit recommendation, let me invite you to dive into this book yourself.