Schoolwide Approaches to Writing Across the Curriculum: Adaptations and Outgrowths

No longer simply synonymous with "writing in the content areas," WAC has come to represent a wide range of approaches in middle and high schools during the past five to 10 years. Changes in student populations, educational policy, funding, and technology have fueled a wave of innovations in secondary WAC programs, as well as new partnerships with other schools and programs. A few of the more common adaptations and outgrowths are described below.

Writing centers

Although still few and far between, writing centers have been a key feature of writing across the curriculum efforts in some schools for more than a decade. Staffed variously by full-time teachers, paraprofessionals, community volunteers, preservice teachers, and student tutors, most writing centers offer one-on-one tutoring to students working on assignments for classes across the curriculum.

In addition to working individually with students, staff in some middle and high school centers also lead workshops, create course-specific writing resources, consult with teachers on assignment design, and lend a hand in grading student work. At one Nebraska middle school, writing lab became a required class, replacing study hall on all seventh- and eighth-graders' schedules. For 12 weeks of the school year, students spent a full period every day on writing projects and assignments developed by lab staff (Graham, 1989).

The latest addition to some centers is online tutoring. Modeled after online writing labs (OWLs) offered by two- and four-year colleges, some high school centers use e-mail or Internet discussion forums to dialogue with students about drafts, providing a way for students to receive feedback across campus or after hours. In eastern Washington, students from rural middle and high schools submit their work to the online lab at Washington State University, where they receive feedback from college students majoring in education.

School-university partnerships

Another outgrowth of WAC efforts at some middle and high schools are collaborative partnerships with local colleges. While some partnerships aim to ease students' transition from high school to college writing, others are designed to promote discussion about writing instruction and better articulation of writing goals. Still others, like the Bridges program profiled at the end of this booklet, seek to increase the number of minority, first-generation, and low-income students enrolling and succeeding in college.

One example of a multifaceted partnership is the collaboration between Tidewater Community College in Virginia and several area high schools. The program, funded through a federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant, aimed to reduce the number of recent high school graduates placing into precollege-level writing classes. As part of the collaboration, the community college sponsored one high school's writing center in its first year, providing writing resources for the center and training student tutors. High school students also exchanged letters with college students about what to expect in college classes. The central piece of the partnership, however, were workshops and regular team meetings in which participating teachers discussed writing instruction and developed alternate methods of assessing student work (Jennings & Hunn, 2002).

Service learning

Service learning projects designed in conjunction with writing across the curriculum efforts aim "to help students understand the connection of learning to life, to stimulate students' social consciences, and to help establish writing as social action" (McLeod & Miraglia, 2001, p. 9). As McLeod and Miraglia write, several factors make WAC and service learning "natural partners," including the emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration. Additionally, "both programs provide students with meaningful writing tasks—real projects for real audiences" and "both programs link writing to a particular social context and knowledge base, demonstrating the importance of contextual issues in learning how to write" (p. 10).

The Montana Heritage Project, profiled at the end of this booklet, is one example of a statewide WAC/service learning program that helps students develop writing skills while collecting oral histories and doing archival research on their communities. A similar project developed by an interdisciplinary team of eighth-grade teachers in Alaska asked students to apply skills learned in each of their classes to write a book about their community. The completed publication, Away from Almost Everything Else: An Interdisciplinary Study of Nikiski, "featured oral histories from social studies, poetry from language arts, field reports and research papers from science, and statistical projects from math" (Christian, 2002, p. 60).

Peer tutoring

Peer and cross-age tutoring, long used to support learning in all subject areas, have become important features of some secondary WAC programs. Based on the notion that "students can learn from each other as well as from teachers and books" (McLeod & Miraglia, 2001, p. 15), peer tutoring is often seen as an inexpensive means of providing students more one-on-one feedback on their work. In some schools, peer tutoring happens within a writing center, while in others, time is set aside for tutors and tutees to meet during the school day.

Stuckey (2002) describes an eight-year tutoring program, the South Carolina Cross-Age Tutoring project, which trained struggling students to tutor younger students in both reading and writing. After each session, the tutors reflected on their tutoring experiences by writing letters to program coordinators, who then wrote students back. "Although students in the past had been asked, and often failed, to write in school settings," Stuckey asserts, "they succeeded in this writing because of the real audience of peers and interested educators who were listening and responding to their ideas" (p. 222).

Learning communities

In learning communities, the same group of students takes one or more content-area courses together, often linked with a writing course. In many cases, writing assignments support the subject-area learning students are doing in the other classes, giving them multiple opportunities to draw connections between the material covered in each class. Although writing across the curriculum is not a central piece of all learning community projects, it is a driving force behind many recent efforts.

To be certain, this is but a small sample of ways in which WAC programs and principles have been adapted to meet the needs of different schools, students, and communities. The Northwest Sampler at the end of this booklet offers a more indepth look at WAC-based approaches that area middle and high schools are using today.