Writing Across the Curriculum: Students as Scholars,
Scholars as Students

Charles A. Bergman

The first thing he did was rearrange the tables. Repositioned, the tables allowed no central focal point in the room. Later I realized that this change in the room was more than spatial--it would represent a shift in consciousness. I should have seen the clue.

Twenty faculty gathered around the tables to discuss student writing. The change that occurred among them during the workshop is indicative of the way writing across the curriculum is transforming colleges and universities around the country. Good teachers, concerned with student literacy, they were eager to talk. A chemist asked, "How can I adapt writing instruction to my chemistry courses? I've never even taken a course in writing?" A sociologist asked, "How can we assign more writing when our workload is already too heavy? Won't we have even more, and harder, work to do?" An historian: "Won't I have to sacrifice course content to work with writing? I have a responsibility to my department and material." These faculty knew about the writing crisis first hand, had heard about writing across the curriculum, but did not really know what they could do to improve student literacy. Their questions, I thought, got to the heart of the problems.

But again, he turned the tables on us. "Time," he replied, "is our scarcest resource. Right now we haven't got time to go into these questions." Although a national authority on writing, he didn't want to talk theory. This to a group of academics. Well, maybe on the last day. I grew a little concerned.

Instead, he made us write.

The rearranged tables announced that we, the faculty, were ultimately the topic of the workshop. As we wrote and dis- cussed our own writing, the shift in consciousness took place. Without our quite realizing it, the teacherly questions were replaced with questions of another kind—writers' questions. The faculty began to view themselves as writers.

We were asked to do what we teach.1 During the workshop, we went through the entire writing process, publicly and collaboratively. We discussed ideas for our essays before the whole group. We read our drafts aloud to the group. We evaluated each others' writing in small groups. We revised our drafts, working with our ideas until they were "finished." Going through the writing process made a basic principle of writing across the curriculum experientially clear to the faculty: writing is a means of discovery as well as communication. Writing is a way of knowing, of thinking, of making meaning. If we had only talked about writing, we might not have realized that writing an idea on paper changes it: writing enables us to control complex ideas, to organize them, and to discover in the logic of the parts a coherent web of meaning.

As one of my students put it once, "If I don't write about an idea in class, it's as if we didn't really study it." Since one of the central themes of the workshop was that writing is a way of learning, the method was in fact the meaning.2

It is remarkable how many faculty, even in colleges and universities, do not see themselves as writers. It is a sign, I think, of the self-doubt and defensiveness that pervade so much of the academic world. Yet the shift in consciousness that I have described in our workshop was not a radical transformation of teachers into something new. Rather, it was a reminder: academics are writers. Our disciplines are defined by the kinds of writing we do—by the questions we agree are appropriate to write about and by the ways we agree to write about them. But not all of our writing is published articles: we write assignments, comments on student papers, reports, grant proposals, memoranda, letters, journals. All these constitute the daily business of a university. Writing across the curriculum reasserts the notion that we should teach writing throughout the university because, through writing, we teach what we are.3

When faculty can see themselves as writers, they answer many of their own questions about the functions of writing. Through workshops in writing across the curriculum, faculty become less jealous of course content because they realize that they are responsible for more than content in their courses—they teach how to read, write, and think about course content. Not only do faculty-as-writers empathize with the difficulties students have while writing but they also realize that through writing they can teach students as apprentices. The question of how to integrate writing into course content also becomes clearer: faculty should teach the forms of writing that are appropriate to their disciplines.

Writing across the curriculum reasserts a fact which should be obvious, but which seems to have been forgotten--that it is properly the business of the academy to teach the forms of writing of the academy. We should teach what we do. Faculty are reminded that the conventions which govern academic writing impose unaccustomed demands on the apprentice writer. For example, students are used to speaking to friends or family who usually understand what they mean before they say it. As a result, students use language as a kind of gesture at an idea; they feel no pressure to explain an idea at length. Unwittingly, the typical teaching situation reinforces students' instincts: the teacher knows more about the subject than the student, so the student needs only refer to, or gesture at, a shared idea. But successful academic writing requires an objective stance on the part of the writer, and emphasizes well-developed ideas expressed in clear, logical relationships to each other. We are accomplices to student immaturity if we let them imagine that, in writing, they need only gesture at an idea in the course, and the teacher, expert and sympathetic, will supply the deficiencies.4

Typically, in workshops I have led, faculty are unaware of the differences in the kinds of writing required by the disciplines. It quickly becomes clear, however, that the disciplines have different criteria for evaluating writing. Often, the criteria are deeply rooted in the way the disciplines define their perspectives on reality--in the forms of thinking that characterize the fields.5 In one workshop, social scientists denounced a paper on Indian rights as unacceptable. Although humanists thought the paper was weak, their response was much less violent and unequivocal. It took some time in discussion to discover that the problem lay in differing concepts of evidence. The paper hinged upon a single example. For the social scientists, legitimate inferences could not be drawn from such a narrow base. For humanists, however, the single example was the starting point, the raw material of insight. Unraveling our disagreements over the paper led to a real breakthrough: we realized that the criteria used to evaluate writing vary among the disciplines because the modes of thinking differ. The conventions of academic writing reflect the conventions of academic thinking.

The relativity of conventions in academic writing is a difficult pill for faculty to swallow. One of my colleagues in the Sociology Department once wrote me a memo; he said that we do a disservice to our students in "promoting the idea that writing 'sociology' is different from writing English." Although this colleague is clearly an ally in improving literacy, like many faculty he forgets that writing is a strategic action, dependent on time and place, on the requirements of the particular situation. Our one language takes many different forms, like Jove to his many loves. We mislead students if we tell them otherwise. The disciplines differ in the nature of evidence they require, in the types of logical and inferential thinking they employ, and in formal matters like organization, diction, and format. A philosophy paper, for example, is argued differently from a piece of literary criticism. A biologist can show students how to keep a field journal, how to write a lab report, and how to transform an experiment into a professional article. In the process, teachers become experts in the rhetoric of their disciplines.

If the conventions that govern academic writing are not obvious to faculty, they must be even more of a mystery to students. Although the departments in a modern university present different demands on students, too often students perceive these demands as merely the caprice of the individual teachers. By teaching the forms of writing appropriate to their disciplines, faculty give students the explicit help they need in mastering the various roles they are expected to assume. But since we often hold students to unstated professional criteria, our standards for evaluating writing become a well-kept secret, inaccessible becomes inexplicit, left for students to figure out on their own. Many never do.

On my campus, faculty in several disciplines said they felt a kind of "conversion" when they encountered this method of using writing in their teaching. Through an emphasis on writing, they said, they have become clearer about what they teach students: they teach students what to do with ideas. They know that they cannot assume an idea is taught to students simply because they, the teachers, heard themselves say it. Through writing they help students learn more thoroughly and they teach students how to behave like professionals in their fields.

Academic writing raises the issue of jargon. This was part of the concern felt by my colleague in sociology. Too often, academic writing is ponderous and pompous, choking the ideas in our scholarly journals. In workshops on writing, faculty inevitably confront jargon, and the important distinction to be made is between technical language that is a mask and technical language that fulfills its purpose as a kind of shorthand among professionals. We do not want to give lessons in jargon. Rather, we want to recognize writers like Lewis Thomas and Hannah Arendt and use them as models.

If faculty are "converted," if there is a shift in consciousness occasioned by writing across the curriculum, it is probably to something deeper than writing. Writing leads to a renewed confidence--a renewed faith, even--in our subjects and our material. The reluctance to teach writing as it is practiced in the arts and sciences is part of the well-documented crisis of confidence in the academy. It is as if we would deny what we do as scholars and professionals. We have become defensive about the value of Shakespeare in a society obsessed with jobs. Yet if we do not value what we do enough to teach it, our students will not value it either. As Elaine Maimon points out, this is the lesson of Tom Sawyer and his fence. Through writing teachers can make their material more accessible, can make it matter, to a wider range of students. In the process, faculty may also be reinspired by the discipline's muse.

Most faculty respond enthusiastically when they get wind of a program in interdisciplineary writing on their campus. Not viewing themselves as writers, however, they usually question their ability to teach "reeling and writhing." They also worry that they might have to teach grammar in their classes: a unit on, say, mitosis and the comma splice. So they are usually relieved to learn that they can help students by drawing on their own expertise about the writing in their fields. Writing across the curriculum is not an attempt to get more faculty to help shoulder the guilt for the writing crisis. It does not try to transform that modern Pegasus, the university, into a beast of burden.

Yet if colleagues across the curriculum are to integrate writing and course content, they often feel they need training in responding to student writing. If at all possible, the workshop should be led by a writing consultant with a national reputation as a scholar: not only will a scholar put faculty on their best behavior, but more important he or she will carry an authority on some difficult issues that the workshop organizer could not muster. A prophet in his own land.... Although not all workshops in writing across the curriculum make faculty write, as my workshop leader did, they should include discussions on designing effective writing assignments and responding appropriately to student writing. Student papers are the best way to get at both these issues without educational jargon. A single student paper is a microcosm of every issue in teaching, a crucible of academic issues.

The most important question in responding to student writing is when teachers can most effectively intervene to offer help. Clearly, it is not when we have traditionally made our comments--when the student is done writing. It is when the student is still working with his ideas--still writing. As in my faculty workshop where faculty wrote, students should learn to write in multiple drafts. As the students revise their essays, they can learn that most writing is not illiterate, but "unfinished." In the process, both peers and faculty can help them learn to think about ideas in appropriate ways. By using methods of collaborative learning, faculty can have students write more, get a wider range of response (from peers), and not appreciably increase the paperload.

Programs in writing across the curriculum help to demystify the academy. They enable us to re-see what we do and to revise our estimate of ourselves. Through writing we can show students what it means to profess a field of knowledge and exercise an educated imagination. As we teach the writing we do, we are able to explain and justify the conventions of the academy to ourselves and, more important, to our constituency--our students. With its basic premise that writing can be used to teach thinking in all the disciplines, writing across the curriculum has excited a renewed commitment to the traditional goals of a general education in colleges and universities of all sorts. By becoming more aware of the central place of writing in the academy, faculty reaffirm the differences that unite us.

Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, Washington

NOTES

1 The leader of the workshop on writing for my faculty was Kenneth A. Bruffee, Brooklyn College. In the workshop, we wrote using several of his techniques or models for collaborative learning, group interviews, five-person groups, paired interviews, and public readings by writers. He describes both theoretical underpinnings and practical applications for collaborative learning in several excellent articles and his text on writing. See, “The Brooklyn Plan: Attaining Intellectual Growth through Peer-Group Tutoring," Liberal Education, 64 (1978), 447-68; “A New Intellectual Frontier," The Chronicles of Higher Education, 27 February 1978, p. 40. A Short Course in Writing, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1980); and "The Structure of Knowledge and the Future of Liberal Education," Liberal Education, 67 (1981),177-86.

2Elaine P. Maimon provides the most penetrating rationale for workshops in writing across the curriculum as well as suggestions for organizing and structuring them. See "Cinderella to Hercules: Demythologizing Composition Across the Curriculum," Journal of Basic Writing, 2, No. 3 (1980), 3-11; “Talking to Strangers," College Composition and Communication, 30 (1979), 366-69; "Writing in the Total Curriculum at Beavor College," CEA Forum, 11, No. 2 (1979), 7-10; and Elaine Maimon, Gerald Belcher, Gail Hearn, Barbara Nodine, Finbarr O'Connor, Writing in the Arts and Sciences (Boston: Little Brown), 1981.

3 Most workshops on writing across the curriculum have faculty talk about writing. The structure of workshops, the goals, and the topics discussed can vary widely, however, depending on the particular circumstances of individual institutions. The following provide an indication of the range that is possible in comprehensive writing programs and in interdisciplinary workshops on writing: Peter J. Connelly and Donald C. Irving, "Composition in the Liberal Arts: A Shared Responsibility," College English, 27 (1976), 668-70, Dan Donlon, “Teaching Writing in the Content Areas: Eleven Hypotheses for a Teacher Survey," Research in The Teaching of English, 8 (1974), 250-62; Randall R. Freisinger, "Cross Disciplinary Writing Workshops: 'Theory and Practice," College English, 42 (1980), 154-55; Toby Fulwiler and Robert Jones, "Faculty Workshops in Writing,” Freshman English News, 8 (1979), 3-4; David Hamilton, "Interdisciplinary Writing," College English, 41 (1980), 780-96; Anne Hamilton, "Writing to Learn: Writing Across the Disciplines," College English, 43 (1981), 379-87; Ann Raimes, "Writing and Leaning Across the Curriculum: The Experience of a Faculty Seminar," College English, 41 (1980), 797-80; Mike Rose, “When Faculty Talk About Writing,” College English, 41 (1979), 272-79; Judith A. Scheffler, "Composition with Content: An Interdisciplinary Approach," College Composition and Communication, 31 (1980), 51-7; and Robert Weiss and Michael Peich, "Faculty Attitude Change in a Cross- Disciplinary Writing Workshop," College Composition and Communication, 31 (1980), 133-41.

4 For additional consideration of the relationships between writing and thinking, see particularly Linda Flower, "Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing," College English, 41 (1979), 19-37; with John R. Hayes, “The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem," College Composition and Communication, 31 (1980), 21-32; and "Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process," College English, 39 (1977), 449-61.

5 For discussions of the conventions of thought and expression as they are defined by specific disciplines, see: Deborah C. Andres, “An Interdisciplinary Course in Technical Communication,” Technical Communications, 25 (1976), 12-15; Barry K. Beyer and Anita Brostoff, “Writing to Learn in Social Studies," Social Education, 43 (1979), 176-77; Jean C. Creager, “Teaching Writing is Every Teacher's Job," American Biology Teacher, 42, No. 5 (1980), 273; Toby Fulwiler, “Writing in Biology," College Composition and Communication, 30 (1979), 308-10; and Claire Gaudiani, "French Composition Teaching: A Student-Generated Text Editing Approach," The French Review, 53 (1979), 232-8.