What Is Writing Across the Curriculum?

More a commitment to a set of core principles than to a rigid set of practices, writing across the curriculum (WAC) may look quite different from one school to the next, even within the same district. Uniting all these different programs, however, is the belief that language is "integral to learning as well as to communication in all disciplines" (Farrell-Childers, Gere, & Young, 1994, p. 2). According to Robert Bangert-Drowns, faculty researcher at the University at Albany, SUNY who recently completed a meta-analysis on writing to learn:

WAC seeks three things: to increase the frequency of student writing, to integrate and elaborate writing strategies throughout the different content areas, and to promote the instrumental use of writing as a tool for other academic ends.... Seen in this way, WAC is more than just writing instruction, more than just making students write more, more than trying to get students to write better. It is the strategic integration of carefully designed writing tasks in any content area to serve the ends of learning, authentic communication, personal engagement, and reflective authorship. (personal communication, 2004)

What this looks like in practice, of course, depends on student needs, faculty and administrator support, community resources, and specific program goals. In districts in which WAC forms a central piece of broader reform initiatives, full-time staff members may be hired to provide training and work with teachers on curriculum development. In other districts, lead teachers from each department receive release time to plan and disseminate materials. WAC efforts may also be headed up by a small group of volunteer teachers, or reflected less formally in a school's approach to writing, learning, professional development, and assessment. The following sections provide a more detailed look at how middle and high schools today are implementing WAC at both the school and classroom level.

Two related movements that bear mentioning here are Language and Learning Across the Curriculum (LALAC) and Electronic Communication across the Curriculum (ECAC). Proponents of LALAC call attention to the important role played by all areas of language—reading, speaking, and listening, as well as writing—in learning and communication. Similar to WAC, LALAC is based on the notion that classrooms in which "students talk, read, and write frequently [are] places where they learn better and their learning lasts longer" (Blalock & Nagelhout, 1997). "No matter what the subject," asserts the LALAC Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English, "the people who read it, write it, and talk it are the ones who learn it best."

ECAC, on the other hand, focuses special attention on ways in which e-mail, Internet, word processing, and other new technologies are changing the way writers write. As Abdullah (2003) notes, "the malleable nature of electronic text has made the physical process of composing more 'elastic' in that writers are quicker to commit thought to writing and to reorganize content...." At the same time, the Internet offers students and teachers a "new rhetorical space" in which to communicate with audiences beyond the school building. Not only does the Web provide more opportunities for collaboration and publication of student writing, it also opens up new ways to organize and sift through information. ECAC emphasizes the importance of teaching students to read, analyze, and produce a broad range of texts, including the kinds of documents commonly found on the Web. Teachers may encourage students to integrate sound, images, and links to others' documents into their writing, for instance, or ask them to produce a series of interactive Web pages related to course material.