JAC Volume 16 Issue 3

Whenever I am approached by a faculty member, department chair, or college dean about the way they could improve writing instruction in their classes, I inevitably walk them through two related options that should be addressed: how writing can help students learn course content and how writing prepares their students to become better professionals in their fields. The two, of course, are always related in my discussion. I emphasize how learning to write according to the disciplinary norms of a certain profession is inextricably linked to encouraging the type of thinking valued within that discipline. Writing-to-learn activities, I explain, have the ability to not only make disciplinary concepts more familiar to students but also to serve as preparation for more transactional writing about these concepts. This approach has served me well as one of the primary WAC people on two different campuses . . . until recently.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit however, how recently my perspective changed. During my involvement with WAC—almost eight years now—I had moved from a rather expressive pedagogical practice to one more informed by critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and poststructuralist theory. While my teaching in both first-year and advanced writing classes has represented the more critical approach to discourse encouraged by these theories, my WAC practice did not change at all. Somehow I blithely assumed that WAC was and had to be different than teaching writing within my home department. Herein lies the irony. I had revised my pedagogical practice wholesale over the past six years to focus on cultural studies because I firmly believed that discourse has the power to inscribe individuals such that it marginalized and silenced voices which threatened its monopoly on ways of thinking and modes of expression. Because much of my research and past teaching experience focused on multicultural education, a concern for student difference, particularly cultural difference and alternative literacies, has pervaded all my professional work, except, it seems, for WAC. I never once turned this ideological lens toward my WAC work with faculty.

Given the re-examination of approaches to writing across the curriculum currently taking place within composition (e.g., Herrington and Moran; McLeod), now seems an ideal moment to examine not only what should take place in writing across the curriculum but also how the goals of such efforts respond to the field's concerns about writing instruction in other contexts, particularly first-year and advanced writing instruction. While I realize the field has by no means come to a consensus on how first-year writing should be taught, my hope is that examining WAC through the lens of the poststructural and cultural theories currently gaining a voice in these conversations will allow us to view WAC critically, thus opening up new possibilities.

From this perspective, it seems that the field's approaches to WAC are subject to the same description and critique of how academic discourse seeks to inscribe students as subjects that has been forged against composition instruction in English departments (e.g. Clifford, Faigley). Ironically, through WAC, we have presumed a clear mission for writing instruction in our effort to accommodate other disciplines that is not nearly so evident in our own approach to advanced literacy. While much of the work in first-year writing presumes that writing instruction should study how cultural discourses position those who seek to be a part of them and offer strategies of resistance to such discursive positions, WAC focuses upon accommodating students to that discourse. In particular, we seem to have forgotten the concern for alternative literacies and voices Other to the academy that permeates much of our discussion of writing courses in an English department. Yet, writing instruction in the disciplines is perhaps even more dangerous to representations of difference or challenges to the dominant than even first-year programs because their localized, specific articulations of a more generalized academic discourse have the potential to be even more restrictive and totalizing, particularly when a student sees the immediate effects rejecting these norms could have on their future livelihood. In sum, a close examination of how WAC has been theorized points to some disturbing possibilities which include (1) the acculturation of students into already normalized discourses, (2) the reproduction of dominant ideologies that these discourses support, and (3) the silencing of difference, particularly cultural, socio-economic, and gender differences as well as alternative literacies and other ways of knowing. While this reading of WAC may seem harsh, there are many reasons for the disparities which seem to emerge between approaches to WAC and first-year writing. The most obvious of these is the different position we hold within the institution as WAC consultants. In our role as consultants, rather than faculty with control over our pedagogies, we cannot simply foist our ideology of writing instruction onto other disciplines—the "missionary" approach. This institutional position must, indeed, affect our approach to other disciplines, but it need not, I argue here, result in an accommodation to that discipline.

In this essay, then, I propose first to examine representative samples of WAC theory and pedagogy through the lens of first-year writing. Rather than engage only in critique, however, the essay concludes by offering yet another alternative WAC model, which I call the critical model, that addresses not only the concerns about an accommodationist model but also the institutional position we are forced into when we work with other departments. In other words, I hope to offer a model which mediates between the binary of "missionary" and "accommodationist" while still retaining some of the critical sense about discourse and ideology which pervades our approaches to writing instruction in our home departments. As Susan McLeod notes in a 1989 Staffroom Interchange, the challenge of WAC programs in the "second stage" is no longer simply to "convince" but to "provide for veterans" and resist the idea that institutionalization indicates success (339). Instead, McLeod argues, we need to stay open to experimentation, lest we lose the vitality and opportunities for changing institutional structures opened up by the unique interdisciplinarity of WAC programs (342). It is in this vein of resisting the rigidity and homogenization of administrative structures that I offer up a possibility for WAC in its "third stage."

A Critical Reading of the "Second Stage"

As a result of the re-examination of how WAC programs have situated themselves within composition theory, an intriguing disparity has presented itself between writing to learn and writing in the disciplines. These two threads of WAC theory and practice provide a useful rubric for my purposes here. As McLeod points out, these two approaches, which she designates the "cognitive" and the "rhetorical," respectively, exist in most programs simultaneously despite their radically different epistemological assumptions. What I suggest in this essay, however, is that despite the two approaches' seeming epistemological differences, they work toward a similar goal: the accommodation or inscription of (student) subjects into the various disciplinary strands of academic discourse. If we examine both these models from the more critical perspective that pervades many of our discussions of first-year writing, we see that the goals of both these models function as a coherent technology of subject production. Writing-to-learn exercises provide a discursive space in which students learn to write themselves as subjects of the discourse, using the writing space to "practice" an integration of self with a disciplinary subjectivity. The rhetorical model reinforces such an integration even more strongly, providing explicit instruction in how the discursive subject must write herself in order to produce "effective" prose which mirrors the texts of other "speaking" subjects of the discourse.

Although there is an expressivist side to writing to learn (and I will return to this articulation later in the essay), this approach has more often drawn upon the way writing-to-learn activities focus on learning itself. James Britton describes this function in terms of a "predisciplinary theory" which is disinterested in the subject being taught and more interested in how "a teacher comes to an understanding of what will result in an understanding on someone else's part" (60). Yet such an argument about predisciplinarity becomes suspect when we consider that writing-to-learn activities are always used in the service of particular curricular goals by particular teachers in particular contexts. As John Ackerman has recently argued, writing-to-learn activities can never be only about learning. "Each program or classroom instance," he writes, "in some way, reproduces or challenges ecologies of academic and professional discourses as well as cultural values and routines" (351).

The way in which a writing-to-learn focus can become particularized into a disciplinary ideology has become more overt in recent years as arguments about its viability come in the form of connecting it to a writing-in-the-disciplines approach. In this reinterpretation, writing-to-learn activities provide an effective way to learn content in the disciplines. This emphasis on learning content knowledge is perhaps most clear in McLeod's designation of this approach as "cognitive" because of its emphasis on individual knowledge construction. As she explains, "writing to learn demonstrates that knowledge is not passively received, the theory goes, but is actively constructed by each individual learner; these constructions change as our knowledge changes and grows. . . . We might think of writing to learn as a knowledge-transforming' rather than knowledge-telling' task " ("Introduction" 4). Other applications of writing-to-learn activities characterize them as preparation for more transactional writing. In fact, the emphasis of most of the recent work on WAC is on how writing-to-learn activities can serve the goals of more disciplinary-centered WAC instruction. For example Robert Jones and Joseph Comprone see writing to learn as developing "conventional knowledge" of a discipline, while writing in the disciplines joins that knowledge with "rhetorical acumen" (61). Another characterization focuses less on content knowledge and more on the process of making knowledge. Judy Kirscht, Rhonda Levine, and John Reiff present writing-to-learn activities as "a way not only to interact with declarative knowledge, but also to develop procedural knowledge concerning the field—to learn how knowledge has been constructed as well as what that knowledge is" (374).

Given the way that writing-to-learn activities are increasingly seen as either a way to learn content, preparation for more disciplinary writing, or both, these cognitive or process-based activities serve to reinforce the ways of thinking and status of particular knowledge emphasized in the writing-in-the-disciplines approach. As such, an analysis of writing in the disciplines might be said to include these more content-based approaches to writing to learn since the latter work to further the goals of such programs.

The "writing in the disciplines" approach brings the work on discourse communities and social construction to a conception of WAC. As Charles Bazerman explains, "critical commonplace now has it that disciplines are socially and rhetorically constructed and that academic knowledge is the product of sociolinguistic activities advancing individual and group interests" (61). In short, the "writing in the disciplines" approach recognizes that forms of writing do not become conventional innocently; instead, they serve as reflections and are constitutive of the ways of knowing and the modes of inquiry valued within certain disciplines. This approach recognizes a dialectical relationship between texts and disciplinary epistemologies: that knowledge and discursive practices are inseparable. Adherence to certain discursive practices ensures that the knowledge generated within a text will be reflective of disciplinary epistemologies, thus writing practice serves to perpetuate epistemological assumptions. Similarly, it is these epistemological assumptions that generated the forms of discourse most appropriate for their expression. As epistemology changes so does writing practice, yet it is through writing and other linguistic practice that epistemologies can change.

The emphasis on "writing in the disciplines" has led to calls for more research into disciplinary writing by both English-trained and content-area instructors (e.g., Bazerman; Jones and Comprone; Farris and Smith), an emphasis on rhetorical analysis as a way of making conventions explicit (e.g. Peterson), and the need, as Judith Langer puts it, to "look beyond generic terminology about thinking and reasoning in discipline-based writing . . . to finding more specific vocabulary to use in discussion with students . . . that can be used to talk about the shapes of knowledge within a discipline (85). As the Langer quote illustrates, a "writing in the disciplines" approach does not mean teaching blind subservience to disciplinary conventions; instead, in most articulations of this approach the emphasis is on creating rhetorical situations in assignments that encourage disciplinary ways of thinking, and/or connecting, as Kirscht, Levine, and Reiff argue, "discussions of methodology to concrete inquiries in various contexts, and especially to the languages of their conduct" (Nelson, et. al., qtd. in Kirscht, Levine and Reiff 370).

Although the writing-in-the-disciplines approach does not immediately seem an accommodationist enterprise, its possibilities for accommodating students to a normalized discourse become clearer when we examine the goals of the approach more closely. While making the process by which knowledge is made more explicit has critical potential, the goal of such an approach is almost always put in terms of teaching or initiating the student into a certain way of thinking valued by the discipline. In sum, to "train" students to think and write within a certain discourse community. Consider the variety of ways such goals have been articulated within work in WAC below (all emphases are mine).

While the references to "culture" and "social behavior" most explicitly invoke the reacculturation aspect of initiation into discourse communities that has been so vehemently criticized in our own field, the focus of such a critique centers on the way in which communities are described as demarcating clear boundaries between one community and the next, boundaries constituted through the differing consensus reached by different communities. Such a consensually-based and rather codified notion of community can be seen operating clearly not only in these quotes but also in the way I have summarized the "writing in the disciplines" work thus far. Disciplinary communities exist as entities to be studied in and of themselves because of the uniqueness of their epistemological and discursive practice. Thus, the many calls to investigate disciplinary discourses without the presumption that language functions the same way in any discipline. Students learn how the conventions and discursive practices of a discipline relate to the consensus reached about modes of inquiry, what counts as knowledge, and the best way to express the two.

It is precisely this consensual characterization of community and discourse that has been so vehemently criticized within the conversation about first-year writing. Such critiques demonstrate clearly how this reified concept of community merely serves to reproduce dominant ideology and to accommodate students in the ways I have been arguing. Greg Myers, for example, points out that focusing only on the consensual workings of a discourse community ignores the wider social discourses that influence that consensus as well as the differences a consensual discourse is designed to silence, prohibit, and marginalize.¹ In short, focusing on consensual practice enables the discourse to operate as a Foucauldian technology of power, privileging and excluding certain types of knowledge, perspectives, ways of thinking, values, and voices. Lester Faigley echoes this point in Fragments of Rationality: "A holistic and closed notion of community encourages a simplified view of a discursive field, where the influences of contradictory and multiple discourses that one encounters in daily life are minimal" (226).

John Trimbur, however, is perhaps the most clear about the way acceding to an already constituted consensus allows the discourse to appear natural and pragmatic, and thus ideologically free. In his critical reading of Kenneth Bruffee's alignment of collaborative learning with teaching the normal discourse of the academy, Trimbur points out how referring to the "real world' authority of such consensual practices neutralizes the critical and transformative project of collaborative learning, de-politicizes it, and reduces it to an acculturative technique" (612). Although the writing-in-the-disciplines approach focuses only on epistemology in its references to ways of thinking, epistemological concerns cannot be separated from ideological ones. An uncritical approach to disciplinary communities—the assumedly reified authority of already constituted practices—only serves to perpetuate and instantiate the worldview and ways of knowing already valued within the dominant professional ideology. In sum, teaching conventions as reflective and constitutive of epistemology still acculturates students into certain ways of thinking, providing a specific venue for ideology to replicate itself. If we define ideology as giving people "the structures through which they make sense of their world," teaching "ways of knowing and writing conventions" erforce suggests adopting the ideological position inherent in those ways of knowing (Myers 156; see also Williams and Freire).

Admittedly, replication of ideology or initiation into appropriate ways of thinking may not seem an entirely accurate way of characterizing the goal of writing in the disciplines since most of these approaches emphasize the active and social nature of such disciplinary communities. As Jones and Comprone put it, research into disciplinary conventions "does not mean that those conventions need to be slavishly imitated. Rather, it means that students should learn these conventions in ways that encourage them to fit their own intentions and the varying demands of rhetorical situations together in their writing" (65). For others, making the relationship between epistemology and writing allows the "field" of discursive practice to become more opaque, providing students with the ability to more easily explore new ideas of their own. Kirscht, Levine, and Reiff put it this way: "The forms and conventions of the disciplines become, in turn, tools used consciously to aid students in moving beyond the boundaries of previous belief systems and in exploring new perceptions" (374). The ability to create an intention or perception that is more personally located seems to provide the opportunity for students to bring alternative literacies and ways of knowing into the discursive realm of a particular discourse.

If we take the Marxist critique of community and consensus seriously, however, such new perspectives and/or personal intentions will be constructed in accommodation with the discipline's ideology rather than providing a space for students to "name" the discipline or construct knowledge in terms other than those already laid out. The seeming range of discursive intentions students can construct matter little because their seeming choices are, themselves, ideologically constituted through the disciplinary discourse. As John Clifford has argued via Althusser, "the myriad ways in which writing subjects can make the world intelligible have already been carefully proscribed so that the dutiful subject, true to ideals already internalized, believes it is possible to inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the action of his material practice'" (43). Put simply, writers perceive their discursive options as being naturally those created by the discursive context. In many ways, we give ourselves over to the discourse by presuming, as we've been taught, that to do so will help us realize our intentions. Once the student accepts the role she is to play within the disciplinary discourse, her own "free" actions will themselves be determined by the options she perceives as viable.

Yet we need not turn only to Marxism for this critique. Even in the initial explanation of a rhetorical situation, Lloyd Bitzer contends that intention is constituted through the exigence brought about by the rhetorical situation. In other words, the rhetorical context itself—lodged firmly within the disciplinary discourse—creates intention, or at least, limits the ways in which the writer can conceive of his intention. Further, the insider/outsider or apprentice/expert language of many of the goals of writing in the disciplines set up the discursive options for the student as seemingly only "accept or reject." As Min-zhan Lu has illustrated in her critique of basic writing, setting up such rigid boundaries of seemingly unitary paradigms "might also lead students to focus their energy on accommodating' their thoughts and actions to rigid boundaries rather than on actively engaging themselves in what to [Gloria] Anzaldua is the resource of life in the borderlands: a continual creative motion' which breaks entrenched habits and patterns of behavior" (899).

Lu's use of Anzaldua here is telling in that it points us toward the direction needed in order to make disciplinary writing less of an accommodation to dominant ideologies and ways of thinking. What we need is a way to present and discuss such discourses that allows both the discourse and the student to be envisioned as sites of conflict wherein competing discourses interact, allowing the student writer the possibility of resisting and/or changing the constitution of the discourse through her subject positions in other discourses. As Joseph Harris and Lu have shown, our students are always located at points of conflict among discourses whether writing in WAC courses or those in our own department. In fact, as Jim Henry demonstrates in his narratological analysis of student writers in a Landscape Architecture course, these are the positions in which our students frequently find themselves in WAC courses. Henry's research highlights the student writer as an "intratextual self," pointing to the numerous discursive identities the student brings with her from cultural, personal, and other disciplinary discourses that compete for authority within a particular disciplinary, rhetorical situation.

Despite the reality that Harris, Lu, and Henry assert of the writer as always already a site of conflict and mulitvocality, the critiques cited here also point to how this conflict can be sublimated in favor of ways of thinking and writing already constituted by disciplinary communities unless we become more explicit about how discourse not only constitutes epistemology but also the ideological positions that come with that epistemology. Henry's narratological analysis points to just this possibility. The assignment he focuses upon to illustrate how student writers write from an intratextual self is one that all the writers have difficulty with because it explicitly asks for the personal within the disciplinary realm. The students, he points out, "had difficulty meeting the [discursive] scene's mandate to embrace the personal as both theoretically valid and discursively viable" (817). In other rhetorical contexts, students have less difficulty because of the more unified disciplinary self called for in the writing. Examples like Henry's point to the very real possibility that students, eager for acceptance and validation in their chosen fields, will allow the disciplinary discourses to name their reality for them by internalizing its ways of thinking, accepting them as more authoritative and viable than alternatives they may already possess.

Moving toward a Critical WAC Model

Altering such an accommodation to disciplinary ideology necessitates, I believe, two changes in our current conceptions of WAC theory and practice. The first must alter the ways in which we conceive of disciplinary communities. The second must position the student as an active partner in a dialectic with such communities, making space for the personal—for difference—within the disciplinary.

Reconstituting Community

The critiques forged by Myers, Trimbur, Faigley and others point not only to the problematic of a reified concept of community but also to how community can be reconceptualized to be less hegemonic. Their work suggests that a more open and critical approach to disciplinary discourses would (1) recognize the continual conflicts currently being played out within the discourse, (2) examine the influence of wider social discourses on their construction, and (3) interrogate how a discourse's constitution is both productive and silencing.

Some moves are already being made in these directions, although they are few. Bazerman arguably provides the most comprehensive argument for how disciplinary writing can be reimagined in the ways I outline above. In "From Cultural Criticism to Disciplinary Participation," Bazerman argues for rhetorical study of the disciplines with attention to the "locales of heteroglossic contention they are" (63). Such analyses would look closely at the historical constitution of a current consensus not to justify it but to "reveal exclusions and enclosures of discourse to see how and why they developed and to question their necessity in any particular case" (64). Pedagogically, Bazerman suggests that instructors teach a disciplinary discourse in these very terms, holding what is taught up for inspection" (64), providing students with a critical initiation into the discourse which opens up avenues for "active, reactive, and proactive" participation (67). "With a sense of individual power," he explains, "students can press at the bit of the disciplinary practices they are trained into or run up against" (67).

While I find Bazerman's suggestions extremely persuasive because of his emphasis on opening up discourses so that students are provided with ways to resist as well as accommodate disciplinary epistemologies and ideologies, there are also some problems that need to be addressed in his suggestions. First, his pedagogical suggestions may be difficult to institute because they require, as he admits, significant research commitments from both disciplinary and language professionals (68). Second, and more importantly, he locates the possibility for student resistance in the ability of the instructor to present the discourse itself as a site of contention and possibility. While such a presentation is preferable to a reified concept of community, it still subjects the student to a professional reading of such debates, perhaps limiting the critiques her own multiple positions in culture might be able to offer to the discourse. Further, locating the starting point for resistance and action in the discourse itself rather than in the student's multiplicity still subjects the student to the effects of power exacerbated by the discipline's cultural status.

These problems, however, are manageable. The challenge is to attend to student difference without falling back on a banking concept of education and without necessarily putting us in the unenviable position of the one who analyzes another community's discourse or convinces our colleagues to engage in such rhetorical criticism. Instead, what seems both pragmatic and a viable way to facilitate students' critical consciousness about disciplinary discourses would be to have students conduct such investigations themselves. At my own institution, I have been making moves in this direction in more subtle ways than those that Bazerman proposes. The first has been to start students off in such investigations in first-year writing courses, the only writing instruction over which I can exercise more overt control. Thanks to the hard work of our composition staff, particularly Laura Thomas, Jon Leydens, and Steve Reid, our first-year writing course now focuses upon cultural criticism and includes a critical component of disciplinary discourses. The final "unit" in this course asks students to investigate and perform a rhetorical analysis of the discourses of their chosen majors in collaborative groups using the techniques of cultural criticism they learned earlier in the course. While such investigations are similar to those proposed by others seeking to connect first-year writing more closely with WAC efforts, the assignment goes one step further than preparing "students to attend to the writing demands of new situations and thus speed[ing] their enculturation into new communities" (Linton, Madigan, and Johnson 65). In our course, students are also asked to investigate disciplinary discourses critically, with an eye toward what the discipline's rhetorical practices include and exclude in terms of knowledge. In my role as WAC consultant and facilitator of faculty workshops, I propose and model similar rhetorical investigations as possibilities for assignments in my colleagues' courses. I meet little resistance to this idea since we already use rhetorical criticism in these workshops to help faculty gain metaknowledge about discursive norms.

I want to emphasize here that I do not turn to student analyses only as a way to mediate institutional realities. Instead, by making students the rhetorical critics, we ensure that students are attending to such criticism themselves rather than only receiving another's knowledge. As Bazerman himself argues, "it is not the serious attention to disciplinary discourse that restricts our intellectual options but the refusal to attend that fosters the hegemony of narrow discourses" (66). Such practices as hose I recommend here rely on the presumption that in attending to how discursive norms both include and exclude certain types of knowledge and perspectives, students can learn how to perform their own critical reflections on discourse, an ability that they will hopefully carry with them beyond the institution into their chosen professions. Such a critical consciousness will not, however, take place if students must rely on discourse or disciplinary experts to perform such critiques for them.

Student Difference within Disciplinary Discourses

While "opening up" discourse communities to critical examination is a necessary first step to a more critical model of WAC, it remains too focused on the internal workings of the community itself. Given our institutional constraints, this might be the best we can do, but I am not as confident as Bazerman that allowing for critical reflection on disciplinary discourses will necessarily in and of itself open up routes for action, for change and resistance in student writing. I fear such attempts will fail unless there is a concomitant focus on the writer's multiple discursive positions as a way of allowing for student difference and alternative literacies to find a space within disciplinary discourses. Further, allowing for student difference might open up the even more critical version of discourse communities that Trimbur points to, one whose goal is "not simply to demystify the authority of knowledge by revealing its social character but to transform the productive apparatus, to change the social character of production" (612). In short, in order to avoid the power of disciplinary discourses to prescribe discursive positions that only reinforce its ideology, we also need to provide ways to let students negotiate these positions via authority gained in discourses not necessarily constituted in relationship to the discipline. For example, a Native American student majoring in history should be able to resist the discursive convention of past tense, which implies a certain epistemological and ideological version of time that he may not be willing to accept, and construct an authority based in a different cultural conception of time and history. In so doing, his forms of resistance need not rely on the dissensus within the discursive community itself; instead, his writing can create such a dissensus. As such, student difference provides a viable way to help us situate disciplinary communities within the larger social discourses that also influence their construction, using students to bring critiques to disciplinary discourses that might elude experts without the cultural experiences our increasingly diverse classrooms offer.

Ironically enough for someone who has been taking a Marxist perspective throughout this essay, I find the most viable opportunities for this component of a critical WAC model in a return to an expressivist concept of writing to learn. By expressivist, I refer to the ways writing to learn was once characterized as a way of helping students develop a meta-awareness of how disciplinary knowledge impacts them personally. As Toby Fulwiler explained it over 10 years ago, writing-to-learn strategies encourage "writers to become conscious, through language, of what is happening to them, both personally and academically" (17). Admittedly, invoking Fulwiler here also brings with it romantic conceptions of the autonomous individual who controls language and speaks with a "natural" voice that are antithetical to the WAC model I propose. As Janice Peritz has shown in her historical analysis of writing to learn, such expressivist practices are equally open to the ideological critique I forge against cognitive writing-to-learn strategies above. What I want to retain from expressive concepts of writing to learn, however, is not this focus on autonomy but the ways in which such practices suggest an orientation that, as C.H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon have recently argued, is amenable to a more critical version of literacy instruction. Specifically, the ways in which expressivist concepts of writing to learn "honor the linguistic resources" students already possess and value what "learners already know" are particularly useful in a critical WAC model (Knoblauch and Brannon 128). It is this sense of the personal as valuable to writing that has been occluded by reinterpretations of writing to learn to fit disciplinary models.

It is also this sense of the personal which may provide a means for students to interact proactively with disciplinary discourses. Of course, how we define "personal" would necessarily have to be reconstituted for such a concept to work in a critical WAC model. The personal in this context more accurately refers to the multiplicity of voices and discursive positions constructed in contexts other than school. What a focus on the personal defined in this way gives us is a way to imagine a space within disciplinary discourse for alternative literacies to interact with the discourse: a way for the personal and disciplinary to interact in a dialectical fashion rather than one in which one voice must be silenced for the other to speak. Such a dialectic not only provides the student with a means to speak an alternative literacy or worldview but also a way to speak it without sacrificing his investment in a disciplinary discourse necessary to his professional reality. In sum, it becomes critical literacy in the truest sense of the term: the ability to recognize ideological structures within language while still interacting with them to produce texts that express difference in terms the discourse must take seriously.

Henry's study of a Landscape Architecture course points to just how "productive" such a space might be. In addition to suggesting how easily the multiplicity of a student's subject positions and voices can be silenced by disciplinary writing, Henry points out how this multiplicity emerges as both natural and viable within the disciplinary discourse in an assignment which merges the personal and the theoretical. In fact, Henry attributes the ability to construct an "intratextual self" to the nature of the assignment: "By locating the expressive' instances of writing among the forms of transactions, we allow students to perceive the many discursive contingencies with which they are always already contending when writing" (822). While Henry makes no explicit connection between an intratextual self and critical literacy, such an intratextual self is precisely one which engages the multiplicity of a student's discursive positions with the disciplinary discourse in the ways I have been arguing for here. Henry's analysis points to how a return to the personal within the disciplinary might be just the way to allow students to write from a multiplicity of positions rather than only the unified voice constructed in the disciplinary discourse.

Similarly, Bonnie Spanier points to the value allowing the personal in the disciplinary has for achieving a critical perspective on disciplinary knowledge. In "Encountering the Biological Sciences: Ideology, Language, and Learning," she discusses the difficulties "students trained in the sciences" have in overcoming "a passive, nonexpert stance and plac[ing] their views into assignments about science in social context" (204, my emphasis) when responding to her assignments which explicitly ask for the students to personally situate their knowledge. On the other hand, her feminist students, "educated to take themselves seriously and to place their knowledge and values at the center of their education achieve a "balanced intersubjectivity" in these assignments (204). Significantly, Spanier points out how such an intersubjectivity allows students to more clearly perceive the ideology in the discourse and practice of science. This critical sense, however, does not come with feminism alone; instead, Spanier links it with the writing assignments themselves in her indication that students trained in a passive stance also perform well on such assignments with encouragement. Making a space for the personal, in other words, counteracts the students' perceptions that their alternative voices must be silenced within a disciplinary discourse.

Admittedly, asking our colleagues in WAC workshops to enact an explicit ideological analysis in the way Spanier does of her work in the biological sciences is not a viable option. Such a suggestion would definitely position us as ideological missionaries attempting to convert the masses. On the other hand, presenting the option for the personal within the disciplinary does not seem so radical a move. While I call such writing resistance, it is also an ideological production in itself, a conscious reflection on the ways in which ideology constitutes our world and an action upon it. It is, in this sense, enacting knowledge by reconstituting it through the multiplicity of a discursively situated self. Such a textual production would produce "new" knowledge in the best sense: new for the student in her creation of disciplinary subject positions which can productively interact with others, and new for the discipline in the challenges it poses to see our knowledge, and thus our discursive practice, in different ways. Such writing, if we attend to it closely, might also help us meet one of the primary challenges Herrington and Moran locate within writing in the disciplines: the challenge "to reflect critically on our teaching and our disciplinary values" and "to understand discourse practices and values that may be different from our own" (238; 239). Using student writing as a form of challenge to disciplinary norms also presents a more effective way of opening up a space for student difference than asking teachers to reflect on the effects of disciplinary norms through their writing assignments in a workshop (see Peritz).

Despite the potential combining the expressive and transactional has for changing the discipline from within, in the end, the writing produced is also simply good writing emerging out of learning through writing. It seems to me that this move is what WAC has always been about—the mutual concern for student learning and thinking through writing that brings all of us, no matter the discipline, to the workshop. A critical model of WAC simply redefines thinking and learning through writing in terms that recognize the viability of the students' discourses as much as disciplinary ones.

Conclusion

When I first discussed my ideas for this essay (originally a CCCC presentation) with colleagues from my own and other institutions, I was met with much resistance. Surprisingly, the resistance didn't come from my insistence that many writing-in-the-disciplines approaches to WAC were too accommodationist. Instead, everyone I spoke to, all WAC practitioners themselves, found it impossible to believe that faculty in other disciplines would be amenable in any way to a critical WAC model. Others were disturbed by what they saw as a return to the "missionary model" of early WAC programs, suggesting that it was not my role to foist my ideology onto my colleagues in other disciplines. Although my rather glib reply at the time was "we do that anyway, no matter how we run a WAC workshop or consultation," I'd like to suggest more seriously in this conclusion that these reactions are based in metaphors about our role as WAC consultants and impressions of our colleagues that need to be re-examined.

While I believe the reactions to the model I propose here are appropriately cautionary, I also think they do a disservice to faculty in other disciplines. As McLeod has argued in a recent essay, there are multiple ways to imagine our role as WAC consultants, ranging from "conquerors" who force institutional change via curricular mandates to "missionaries" who presume they must bring their superior knowledge to the "unenlightened" ("Foreigner" 109;111). Presuming that colleagues in other disciplines would automatically reject a critical WAC model in effect positions them as the "unenlightened" and the WAC consultant as missionary. Not only are there examples out there of faculty in other disciplines engaging in such work already—Louise Dunlap's course in Urban planning is an excellent example—but such reactions also ignore the pervasive influence postmodern theories are having in disciplines other than our own. I've encountered many faculty members engaged in ideological critique and/or political questioning of epistemological practices for whom my suggestions are only "new" in their application to discursive practice rather than content. Most persuasive for me, however, is the attitude toward student learning of the faculty members who attend WAC workshops. Most of the faculty members I've worked with are willing to put time and energy into writing across the curriculum because they honestly care about helping their students learn better and providing egalitarian access to their disciplines, particularly for those who have been traditionally excluded from them. Suggesting that discursive practices can serve to include some students and exclude others finds fertile ground in such educators.

While the use of the metaphor missionary not only prescribes an inaccurate picture of our colleagues, presuming that we should resist any attempt at change in our colleagues' ideological investments similarly masks the investments we already make in WAC work and leads to an inaccurate picture of our position. What I think we fail to realize when we express concern about foisting our agenda on our colleagues is that any WAC work involves initiating both pedagogical and theoretical change. If change is not included as part of WAC work, we effectively silence ourselves as much as the missionary model silences our colleagues. As McLeod argues, the ostensible aim of WAC workshops is to improve student writing, yet such a goal always includes suggesting changes in classroom practice, which, in the end, means changing "theories about teaching and writing" ("Foreigner" 113). When we set out to convince colleagues from more foundational disciplines that knowledge and language may not be neutral or objective (i.e. the writing-in-the-disciplines approach), we are already setting out to change theory; when we suggest peer workshops we not only suggest a change in practice but also theories of how knowledge is made and/or learning happens. Given that, in McLeod's terms, it is virtually impossible not to act as a "change agent" when doing WAC work, we might be better served by considering what the consequences of the changes we advocate will be rather than denying our role in such changes. Seen in this light, a critical WAC model is a much smaller step than those we've already taken, but, I'd argue, a very large step in terms of the consequences it might have for our students.