• Dr. Dennis Ciesielski
• University of Wisconsin at Platteville
•  ciesield@uwplatt.edu

Like words in a sentence, we are meaningless
unless we take our senses from one another.
I. A. Richards

In many academic departments, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) has become one of those ever-present, yet peripheral, threats to a traditional service-based pedagogy. Although it's been around for a long time now (see Walvoord, Bizell, Fulwiler, Writing), WAC still evokes a sense of new-fangledness and suspicion in the uninitiated. And it is toward the uninitiated that this [re]presentation of WAC's dialogic and pedagogical concerns is aimed. "Uninitiated," here, relates to a sort of theoretic xenophobia, an individual's or a department's isolationist attitude toward progressive pedagogies and inter-curricular concerns that deserve, at least, a cursory investigation, a critical survey, or even some practical experimentation. Because we read so much positive input regarding WAC protocols, many of us forget that there are still pockets of foundationalism and generally mis- or ill-informed individuals and departments that continue to hold forth from traditionally static curricular strongholds. This foundationalist attitude, however, may not be so much the product of a strong, active theoretical position as much as a representation of a typical status quo orientation. As Barbara Walvoord suggests, this orientation might simply be a manifestation of residual values and methods intrinsic to the movement toward what Raymond Williams calls "emergent forces" (Williams 121-26) (Walvoord 71). In this case, William's emergent force relates to the move toward a policy of dialogic interaction between faculty, students, and traditionally insular college departments. However, until these emergent forces come into their own, WAC pedagogies and the inter-active stability they offer find little acceptance in non-WAC college departments.

In these departments, instructors generally see the teaching of writing as the sole enterprise of the English department; and, even within the traditional English department, the responsibility to teach good writing often falls to the generally undervalued "sub-department" of freshman composition. This type of academic buck-passing, of course, sets up hierarchies and reductive premises that serve only to maintain the traditional barriers to inter-departmental dialogue and writing's pragmatic application in all of our students' courses. As Robert Scholes avers in Textual Power, this tacit academic elitism devalues student texts while insisting that the writers of these texts come to course-specific environments readily armed with a finely tuned sense of academic discourse and all of what the specialist sees as essential to this perceived skill (4-7).

Scholes' observation of student writing's devaluation even within the confines of its own bailiwick is discouragingly true. And the same devaluation too often continues across curricular lines to the point that one of the primarily shared opinions in some institutions is, "I haven't time to teach both my course and composition too." Of course, Schole's hierarchy breeds a sort of class distinction that promotes an attitude that students should learn writing skills in one class so that these skills can be applied on command in another. Yet, the minimal writing that many of these instructors require generally is assigned without the requisite frequency, practice, and heuristic considerations necessary to good student products. Testing, essay exams, and term papers are generally assigned, collected, graded, and returned without much emphasis on the students' means to a course's required end. Hence, the type of "drop down" writing assigned in so many of our students' classes comes not as a next step in a progressive writing-as-learning model but, rather, as an exercise in anxiety and futility. To ask the unpracticed writer to produce a well written product is the same as asking a well informed but "un-pumped" athlete to win the day. And, to [de]grade an unpracticed writer's work is to blame the poorly coached player for a loss when much of the responsibility obviously falls upon the coach as well.

From Scholes' position on academic hierarchy and class distinction, the irony is clear. One of the most over-arching complaints-across-the-curriculum is laid at the doorstep of one of the academy's most devalued resources--the freshman composition course. Yet, while other of our colleagues go about the traditionally more important business of "higher intellectual pursuits," the very process by which these pursuits might be made visible through application by undergraduate and graduate students is all too often neglected. From the attitude that writing is an informational tool rather than a generative vehicle for discovery, instructors generally design a final product/evaluation model based in simple information retention rather than assignments that encourage assimilation and synthesis of this information into meaningful new knowledge. Yet writing to simply answer questions is neither the premise of a practical education nor the goal of a contemporary Composition class.

Although writing class is the more specialized area where writing and interpretive thinking can "happen," a student's other classes must support and maintain what composition study/practice sets into action. They need to convey the basic sense that writing and thinking are essentially linked together in their progressive move toward meaning. And, as much as all teachers want our students to think, writing is the only way to a sustained sense of what we traditionally feel "thinking" can supply. A responsible Writing Across the Curriculum program can supply instructors with a means to both greater information retention and the means by which students' will come to value this information through their own application of it to inter-personal (and inter-curricular) agendas. WAC's inter-curricular nature also promises to bring together many of our politically and pedagogically diverse institutional factions in the name of a dialogic pedagogy that seeks connections rather than barriers--a theory that works well in both the classroom and the faculty meeting room. In order for our students to make the necessary intellectual connections we require, we, as teachers, must connect as well. And this inter-collegiate dialogue is probably WAC's most profound offering.

The biggest barrier to WAC's positive collaborative goals is simple misunderstanding. Those who resist have not investigated WAC's possibilities, have not researched its historical emergence, have not experimented in the classroom. Or, if they have, they might turn their backs on the extra work they perceive in this type of teaching. Because of this generally un-researched resistance, Writing Across the Curriculum has come to represent yet another academic buzz word rather than the interdisciplinary opportunity it truly is. Of course, WAC's indictment as buzz word is simply a diversion, an attempt to stay out of progressive education's on-going conversation rather than actively joining in the dynamic re-contextualizations that the postmodern classroom requires. Realizing that some colleagues might see my previous statement as a sort of anti-traditionalist indictment of "tried and true" pedagogy (and perhaps it is), I see a need to [re]define WAC back into practical existence by allowing both traditional goals and contemporary methodology to realize the importance of each other's cooperative existence to a full, practical education.

Defining Terms

Patricia Bizell and Bruce Herzberg, in an historical outlay of WAC theory offer that,

"[WAC]" has come to mean three things to writing teachers in America. It denotes, first, a theory of the function of writing in learning; second, a pedagogy to encourage particular uses of writing in learning; and third, a program that applies the pedagogy in a particular school. (340)

In essence, WAC is political. It requires the collaboration of teachers. The WAC premise is teacher oriented, while its practice is undeniably student centered. For WAC to work efficiently, faculties must subscribe to two logical conclusions: 1) students who write more know more; and 2) classes offering more opportunities for both expressive and persuasive writing produce better students. Based as it is in pedagogical policy, WAC questions positivistic structures and standardized methods of teaching and assessment that often undermine the humanistic qualities necessary to a community oriented classroom. Because many teachers see themselves as course-specific facilitators, they tend to overlook the important language-related concerns necessary to the useful application of the information they bring to their students. This general desire for one's students to [re]relate course-materials as proof of their scholarship undermines the social reinvestment of these facts into meaningful real-world discourse. A good example here is the four way breakdown of the college essay sequence--narrative, expository, argumentative, persuasive. A real-world requirement will seldom call for one or another of these false genres inasmuch as all writing contains each of these types in a ratio specific to context. To sell skillful writing in a four-way box implies to the generally naive rule-seeking freshman writer that if she learns the rules and gets an A she will be armed with the rhetorical tools necessary to communication outside of the college environment.

Inasmuch as WAC will be perceived, by some, as a professional imposition, the reconsideration of traditional classroom structures that maintain much of the curricular isolation to which our students will fall prey requires a healthy sense of dialogue and faculty community. We need, in many ways to erase the old lines of demarcation and reconsider the nature of boundaries in the college environment. In order for our students to see and use the links between science and art or liberal arts and the school of business, we, ourselves, have to raise our academic curtains and [re]explore our goals and the means by which they might be achieved. Knowing what kind of learning is taking place and what kind of learning we would like to take place is the first step to a more intellectually active student body. WAC is the first step in this direction.

Professional territorialism is a problem. Because of the seemingly intrusive nature of WAC discussion groups and workshops, the program risks being perceived as a professional bugaboo. Because of inter-departmental isolation and closed-door teaching policies, many good (and many inadequate) instructors have come to feel very uncomfortable in what they might tend to see as coming under the scrutiny of "the new guys" who want to force them to change their teaching styles. Because many of our colleagues have, indeed, become set in their ways, WAC's progressive nature does have the potential to be unsettling; yet WAC's goal is not so much to break down barriers and expose or swallow up those that won't play. Rather, WAC's goal is to recognize these barriers as positive lines of identity instead of negative lines of demarcation--as connectors instead of separators. Like a sort of academic "gossip fence," curricular distinctions can reinforce our self-identity while we discuss--dialogue--with each other the happenings in our own inter-departmental neighborhood. In this sort of dialogue we must reveal self in order to know other; and we must know other in order to realize self. Becoming comfortable with this sort of positive interaction is WAC's primary concern; without the professional comfort necessary to meaningful dialogue, anything else that WAC might hope for can never fully occur. Like Frost's two fence builders in "Mending Wall," we are responsible for the each other's side inasmuch as it is the other's side that supports/validates our own interests. We can accomplish helping others only through the responsible maintenance of our own identity in concert with our neighbors. And this requires trust.

The first step into meaningful dialogue requires us to reveal ourselves, often in ways that might seem a threat to tried and true teaching techniques we have, over time, become comfortable with. Yet, this comfort too often exists behind the teacher's desk where the dominant mode of instruction has been, as Toby Fulwiler observes, "top-down and one-way" (Writing 36). In this type of monologic, single-voiced classroom it is the teachers who use language and writing to make meaning, while the students are generally responsible for a passive proof of their ability to retain this meaning. In this light, WAC require's that we reconsider Bizell and Herzberg's first two premises--theory and practice. Reassessing the traditional lecture course, WAC asks us to share language with our students so that they, too, can enjoy the broad gesticulations and active making of meaning that they witness at the front of the classroom. We learn through active participation much better than through passive collection of untried concepts and ideas; and, by not inviting students to join in meaning, the traditional lecture class supplies only one part of the educational experience. The missing link is participation, application of information in process. But a call for change, especially at this level, is at best tenuous. To ask that one reassess both theory and practice after years of classroom service is a breech of territory and thus a political problem based in resistance to any type of change. Hence, this threat to traditionalist attitudes compels many of our colleagues to denounce WAC as a decentralized theory, one that has no real official foundations in the academy. And, unlike general textbook systems, WAC does not have an official foundation. This is its charm. Malleable and contextual by nature, WAC realizes that the search for centralization and closure is as close as we will ever come to it; that education and knowledge flourish in the penultimate search for the unattainable closure we can only envision and discuss from within the parameters of our own experience. Those who have enclosed themselves within the non-expandable boundaries of positivistic curricula feel uneasy sharing authority with others--especially their students--and tend to remain on "proven" ground.

Because of the traditional relationship between writing and grammar, many teachers tend to maintain an attitude toward correctness rather than inquiry as writing's major concern. This attitude serves to centralize (in the negative sense) other curricula as well. If one course can be stratified in a "right way to teach," then all others can as well. Exclusive centralization is the sanctioned security blanket of traditional pedagogy, while inclusive integration ([re] rather than [de] centralization toward an active dialogue) is WAC's strongest feature. Although WAC is essentially a "local movement" (see Walvoord 61-64), its influence is universal. WAC's proponents act within a dialogic field rather than an administrative bloc based in authorial codes and managerial concerns. This dialogic field is inclusive; it opens all disciplines to a world where dialogue is a fundamental skill. Our students' (and our own) ability to negotiate, discuss, diversify--or in the words of Kenneth Burke: merge and divide (Grammar 403-06)--is essential to their success in the world to which we, as a learning institution, offer them access. WAC is a positive means to keeping this promise. Interested in teaching and learning, WAC has no regard for traditional power-bases. It is interested, instead, with enabling students to acquire the skills necessary to reach their own levels of power through language. The main thrust of the movement, then, lies in teachers helping teachers through honest dialogue based in the realization that students who use language, writing, and imagination in all of their course-work are more able to combine the various parts of their education into a useful and viable whole knowledge necessary to success in an increasingly diverse world .

Dialogue: A Politics of Concern

Too often many of us see curricular diversification as a series of protective, territorial fences that isolate us and our students from the means necessary to a modern pedagogical dialogue. In this sense, one of WAC's greatest advantages is its ability to pull us together in our search for a common pedagogical ground. The dialogue inherent in WAC discussion groups, seminars, or even simple bi-weekly coffee klotches will make us all better teachers without ever having to invade anyone else's space because we will discover, through discussion, that we all share the same goal: to become better, more efficient, teachers. The sharing of perspective, technique, and classroom goals allows us, as a group, to understand just what kind of teaching and learning we want to occur in our classrooms particularly and in the college generally. And from this type of conversation evolves the consensual policy necessary to a sound institution.

WAC's major premise lies in the fact that writing is fundamental to discovery and the development of intellectual thought; that it is, "a value forming activity, a means of finding our voice as well as making our voice heard" (Fulwiler, Language x). It is neither a simple informational tool nor a mechanical skill based in correctness and evaluated as such. Thus, at the center of the WAC dialogue lies the realization that writing is a means to dynamic knowledge rather than the static recording/repeating of information. In fact, if writing can be seen as a recording of anything, it must be a record of the dialectic processes involved in the organic (and incremental) linking of facts with personal concerns into a useable knowledge unique to the writer and her perceived audience. This knowledge-in-context informs both the successful retention of information and the ability to reinvest it back into the world transactively--a manifestation of the students' ability to dialogue in both classroom and real-world situations.

We all have noted that students who read and write more excel in the classroom. But we need to realize that, in most cases, these students don't read/write more because they are smarter; the reality here is that they are smarter because they read/write more. They are, quite simply, more mentally active than those students who resist or are not given the opportunity to employ language as a tool of discovery. The active linking of retained facts with personal experience creates a practical knowledge that far transcends simple standardized telling and testing. A student's knowing occurs in the synthesis and application of information. The learning process, from the WAC point of view, lies in this pragmatic application. Elaine Maimon's "Writing to Learn," refers not to a course's information, but to the student's ability to find a valid reason for retaining this information beyond the necessary exam time. Unless course information is deemed important i.e., useful, it will seldom pass from the classroom into the world outside. And we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that simply telling our students that "this stuff is important" will do the trick anymore than we can responsibly stand back and laud those who drink from our academic fountain while damning those who do not. WAC offers a means to making our curriculum important.

Premises Rather Than Rules

Barbara Walvoord observes WAC as a local "micro-movement" rather than an officially recognized (and funded) part of academia (58); and because of this non-official position, WAC has no real "rules" to follow. Yet, each WAC oriented institution grounds its program in a set of generally accepted premises. Toby Fulwiler offers a brief account:

1. Language is at the center of the academic curriculum: reading, writing, talking, and listening are modes through which people think and learn; it is through language-- verbal, numerical, visual, and musical--that students learn science, art, social studies, and the humanities. 2. The more that people write, the better they learn; writing is the most powerful use of language for developing sustained critical thought; it helps people to visualize thought and therefore to modify, extend, develop, or criticize it. 3. The more that students write, the more active they become in creating their own education: writing frequently, for themselves as well as their instructors,helps students discover, rehearse, express, and defend their own ideas. 4. Learning to write well means learning to rewrite often: to improve their writing, students must write regularly about things that matter for audiences that care. 5. College teachers are the primary agents of language instruction in the curriculum: their beliefs, knowledge, methods, and attributes about language largely determine what schools do and stand for--and what their students stand for and can do. (Writing 36)

Resistance to Resistance: Removing the Barriers of Tradition

Because the teaching of writing is linked traditionally with grammatical and mechanical concerns, many non-English instructors tend to resist what WAC has to offer based on the fear that they will be forced to deal with writing as they see it. Hence, it is this general view of writing as a linear, rule-based skill rather than a recursive exercise in free discovery that lies at the bottom of many of our current pedagogical shortcomings. As rhetorician Ann Berthoff avers, "How we see language is how we will teach it" (42). The obverse works on the same principle: How we see teaching is how we will language it. Because all learning and knowing is based in language, all teaching must consider how language works. If we see writing/language as linear, mechanical, as the simple record of thought rather than the means to thought, we will teach our subjects as information to be correctly recalled. If we see language as recursive, malleable, as a dynamic tool for discovery, we will teach our subjects as a means to higher knowing. And from this attitude, we will come to understand how writing works as a means to this end. WAC's designation that we write to learn removes the barriers and anxieties of grammatical authority so that a student can participate in the making of meaning (Berthoff 69) rather than simply adhere to a course's pre-set tenets. Instead of forcing the repetition of lecture notes and reading-facts during exam time, WAC allows an active participation in the learning experience by promoting the discovery/generation of new ideas through writing. A major difference here is the distinction between short-term and long-term memory patterns. Once the exam is over, much of the information stored in short-term memory fades with the student's test anxiety. However, an active personal use of the same information will last with the satisfaction that the young writer has assimilated the course information into her own personal sphere.

Once an instructor realizes that writing to learn is not based so much in correctness as it is in interpretive thinking, rhetorical strategies, and the positive linking of course-specific facts with the writer's own pre-knowledge (or in this sense, we might even say cultural significance), the WAC protocol becomes quite clear. WAC programs can bring course-work alive through heuristic devices designed to compel students toward a synthesis of values and information. Writing about their course work, the students actually USE what the course offers; and in this use comes a positive sense of ownership. The psychology of ownership and identity has strong implications here. Identity and self-actualization is essential to us all. If, as Kenneth Burke avers, we are known (identified) by what we own (Rhetoric 131), the successful student writer becomes proud proprietor of her own academic property and finds a positive sense of identity in the process. Lecture-biased course information is neither the student's premise nor property. It belongs to the teacher who insists we accept information as offered. Even though this information is not wrong, it is often presented in such a way that a lot of students in the audience simply take notes in preparation to passively repeat the lecture's high-points come exam time. And, during the exam, the teacher is given back what the student sees, either consciously or subconsciously, as the teacher's property. Unused and in the same general condition as when it was taken in, the information has served its purpose as an academic slot-filler.

Even if the exam is in the form of an essay question or a traditional term paper, the test's non-heuristic quality still requires information over synthesis, facts over generative application. In this model, the teacher's property still returns to its source in the form of an answer rather than the active raising of further questions and intellectual discussions of the information's significance. Fulwiler makes an obvious, yet profound, observation regarding the traditional teacher-centered lecture course: "In such classrooms," he tells us, "it is the teachers, not the students, who practice and explore language skills" (37). He further relates this "top-down" type of teaching to Paulo Friere's well known "banking" technique where a teacher simply deposits knowledge into his students with the intent of [re]collecting it (and evaluating the students' ability to return it) at a future time. (See esp 57-60). (The metaphor here could continue to include investment for the future, yet interest rates would be much higher if the deposits were more dialogically diversified.)

Once WAC's goals, expectations, and various applications become apparent, the many instructors who resist it on unfounded grounds might embrace its tactics as the means to better collaborative teaching methods. Rather than bemoaning the poor grammar and mechanics in many undergraduate texts, the science, history, business, math teacher can, instead, discuss their students's ideas and logic and guide them through some of the tough spots. If a course follows WAC tenets from the beginning of a term to its end--applying frequent writing and generative heuristics--a majority of student writing problems can be addressed in process and continual practice. The entire course can be seen as a sort of active revision/editing process centered on the chances we give our students to progress toward a final product that will realize the expectations of both course-specific models and a general audience. The cross-curricular call for strong synthesis skills and interpretive thinking occurs during the frequent writing required of WAC components. As Peter Schiff has discovered, When students accept [WAC's] chances to revise and edit before evaluation, they fulfill the promise of writing across the curriculum programs that embrace the entire composing process. Such students use writing to think anthropology. They use it to think technology. They use it to think history. They use it to think. (165)

As a test of both individual knowing and social communicating, WAC offers teachers and students alike a valuable dialogic space where they can meet on a mutual turf. It offers students the power of language and a place where they can use it to their advantage. But, perhaps the most positive production within this space is the goodwill and attitudinal motivation necessary to our students' desire to do well. The close collaboration between teacher and student offers to remove the negative authorial barriers that so often alienate teachers from their teaching and students from their learning. By working together, both student and teacher can realize the same results traditional pedagogies often cannot reach. In this sense WAC is a win-win community situation.

Process to Product: A Pragmatic Transaction Theory

WAC is not, as some might observe, the over-liberalization of pedagogy. It is neither overtly subjective nor objective. It serves, rather, as a balance between the two by supplying a space, an area of overlap where information and abstraction reach consubstantiation. And from this area emerges the tertiary knowing of a dialectic discourse intrinsic to the application of one's self to the empirical world. To do well within a WAC heuristic, a student must have a course's required information base at hand; but she must also own the means to use this information to generate new questions which require further discussion and dialogue that will extend beyond the realms of specialized classroom protocols. This is where a transactive rhetoric comes into play. No matter how creative a writer might be, a course's empirical objectives must be met. No matter how strong a student's information-base might be, the ability to assimilate/synthesize this information must exist.

Indeed, the whole of pragmatic application (and WAC is pragmatic application) rests in the existence of empirical information. William James's dictum that "Pragmatism is uncomfortable without fact" (33-34), relates directly to this necessary part of I/Thou dialogue. Our love/hate relationship with fact compels us to discuss it on our own terms, to bring it into the comfort-zone of our own understanding. Once the empirical world is assimilated or, in other words, once fact is "owned," we feel secure in our self-generated sense of closure through application. The transaction between static reality and dynamic human-ness allows the pleasure of containment within active dialogue. Hence, the pedagogical importance od a transactive rhetoric rests in its ability to give students a say in how and why a course's information is valid, is worth knowing beyond the artificial testing ground of traditional examinations.

Here we see WAC's realization that a dialogue between traditional standards and practical goals must occur: objective knowledge is necessary to its transactive synthesis in real-world application; one is useless without the other. Timothy Crusius, a general proponent of WAC protocol, observes that process orientation, though necessary to learning, cannot be seen as the primary goal in a product oriented world (115), that we must move toward a "union of opposites" in the realization that, "any product theory requires a complementary theory of process;" Crusius continues, "it makes no sense to teach a writing process as if process were and end in itself, as if it were not what it is, a way to an end, drafts, and final or abandoned drafts" (115). Crusius recognizes the fundamental problem in accepting process and product as writing's "main opposites" (114). Seeing both terms as labels for "pedagogical or critical orientations" that require the taking of sides rather than the consubstantiation of relative goals, Crusius observes that "such opposites are always already unified in the sense that products imply processes and vice versa;" that, "we take [process and product] as opposites because language has us making sharp divisions or dissociations, the origin of one-sidedness" (114-15). An understanding of language--for both students and teachers--will attenuate this sort of theoretical specialization and allow us to gain dailogues in practice and intra-collegiate development. By combining resources, goals, and means to these goals through dialogue at all levels, we can, as Crusius offers, "overcome the one-sidedness of theories praised for rigorous adherence to a single perspective" (115). And in doing this we can achieve what we hope to pass on to our students as well: a strong sense of dialogue and the ability to accept and discuss new ideas and ways of thinking beyond their present knowing.

Because the classroom is, in every sense, a part of our students' dialectic move outward--from artificial to real situations--product orientations must be a part of our goal too. Hence, WAC proponents strive to exist in the middle, the area between fact and fancy, real experience and abstraction, to help guide students toward new dynamic truths by compelling them to continually make connections that will augment all their courses' information through the synthesis that generative writing heuristics bring forth. Seeing process and product as the simple working parts of a vastly more complex dialectic action-towrd-knowing, WAC realizes product's assimilation into newer process orientations as pre-knowledge--that which has already been discovered, another step toward further knowing.

Based in a process-toward-useable-product mode (rather than the expressivists general process over product model) WAC's teaching goal is socio-epistemic i.e., it promotes the ability to make meaning and to responsibly present this meaning to a general audience (see Berlin 15-19, 165-179). From this melding of subjective (writer) and objective (experience) goals, our students will learn specific course information in concert with the ability to augment and re-invest responsibly this information back into the world on new and relevant terms. When this occurs, both subjective rhetoric and objective rhetoric come together in a consequent transactive rhetoric alive in the dialogue, inquiry, and identity necessary to productive learning/teaching and practical education.

Practice

Information without the vehicle of responsible language is useless; fine style without information is a snowjob. WAC's goal is to join both of these extremes in the young writer's ability to use information to advantage. The main tenet of writing across the curriculum bears repeating: Rather than learning to write, we write to learn--to reach new levels of knowing incrementally through the recursivity of the writing process.

In the beginning we have only words; content holds sway over form. Ideation, unhampered by grammatical tenets or stylistic goals, flows from the pen/keyboard onto paper/screen. These mechanically unrefined ideas, shaped roughly by the students' pre-knowledge in conjunction with assignment prompts/heuristics, allow the writer to use her knowing to make meaning. But this primary sense of meaning comes to one in a sort of gestalt image, a potpourri of relative disconnected words, concepts, pictures, dreams, etc. that seem important within the context of their reemergence. A swirling intuitive tangle of potential communication, it "means' only to the thinker. To convey this meaning to a general audience is writing's end goal; however, the starting point is important and must be recognized for what it is: a collection of subjective possibilities that need sorting out, evaluation, formatting. And because this process is difficult and time consuming, writing-as-thinking can record the thought process--the good, the bad, and the ugly--so that the writer/thinker can go back to pick and choose from ideas and connections she would otherwise have forgotten. Writing allows the recursivity necessary to the self-evaluation and rhetorical [re]constructions good writing/communication requires. As Ann Berthoff observes, this making of meaning through writing allows the student to see as important information that would likely drift away from her immediate memory. But, in light of writing's recursive quality, this information survives to shine in use through its application. If we, as teachers, see composing as forming (Berthoff 83) rather than mental planning and editing before the fact, we can bring to our students the creative freedom necessary to composition per se. A favorite writing metaphor of mine is the all-one-color jig-saw puzzle: one cannot begin the hit-and-miss process toward a finished product without first pouring the pieces on the table. Once this is done, the fitting and re-fitting of piece to piece moves the puzzler ever toward a pleasurable sense of closure. Yet, when the process is over, when the product appears from the chaotic pile of pieces, the organizer will break it apart, re-box it, and start anew with other puzzles--or maybe even the same puzzle, just for the simple joy of doing. The same process applies to, essentially, the same pieces; yet each putting together of the puzzle is a new experience. Returning to the student essay: this same move toward closure works with the pre-existing set of words we have poured onto the writing table. To bring form to the miasmic meaning we know exists "out there" (or "in here"), we need to touch, feel, play with words until we find a pleasurable locking together relative to a series of expectations that include both our own goals and what our audience requires.

Because style, grammar, and mechanics are necessary to pleasing an audience--if for no other reason, our need for convention and standardization--all writers need the chance to [re]shape their work often. One major piece of information all writing-related courses should put forth is: "It's never right the first time through--NEVER." However, in order to really apply style, grammar and mechanics, the writing must already exist. To teach (and expect) these "skills" before hand is reductive to the process. Revision and editing can occur after the fact when the creative processes have supplied the primary parts to a language-puzzle that needs yet a few more well placed pieces. A successful final product will be a cogent, mechanically acceptable text based within the constructs of the assignment and audience expectations. Hence, both the student and the instructor have a responsibility to one another: the student must complete the assignment; however, the instructor must design a heuristic that will pique the student's interest, "test" her info-retention and her ability to discuss it responsibly, and allow time to realize the recursive value of revision and editing. Eventually, through repetition and practice, students will come to realize that revision and proofreading is their responsibility and that it works better when it happens at home rather than through time consuming classroom re-assignments.

What we've seen so far is that WAC is neither an attack upon objective information nor a call for liberal subjectivity. It is, instead, a call for a pedagogical joining of the two. Bringing active writing components into classes that have strayed from writing as a learning tool, WAC hopes to augment learning through faculty development and the re-evaluation of teaching methods. WAC is in the business of selling writing as a tool for learning. Understanding how rhetorical theory works, understanding the dialectic action from process to acceptable product, will help all instructors to help their students into a sense of their own knowing. Transcending the traditional standardized test designed to measure retention, WAC assignments challenge the student to apply retained knowledge creatively. Assessment of these types of assignments works two ways: one the one hand, if a student has not done her homework, it will show as easily in a WAC assignment as it would in a traditional evaluative tool--she will be ill informed. On the other hand, a student who is well read and knowledgeable fact-wise but cannot adequately synthesize these facts into a readable text reveals a weakness in communication skills that must be looked to if she is to leave the classroom with a useable education. Hence, the move from process to product is a large part of WAC's protocol. It seeks to [re]balance classroom goals by promoting across-the-curriculum thinking, thinking that goes beyond the confines of pedagogical specialism into a world of rational connections, synthesis, and interpretive ability. WAC assignments are viable evaluative tools inasmuch as they reveal a student's ability to read, listen, retain, interpret, and make meaning in ways (and these are diverse) that reach the expectations of standard English, the instructor's own course specific goals, and the expectations of future social inter-action.

Application

Because WAC protocol is often diametrically opposed to current traditional teaching models, many instructors might find it difficult to weave a dialogic principle into their generally monistic classroom practice. Too, a lot of our colleagues will simply see this type of course design as working outside of their discipline ("Teaching writing is not my job"). Here is where the general confusion sets in and here is where we have to confront this confusion with a fundamental, cross curricular policy: Obviously, our universal goal is to bring our students into a strong knowing of what a course offers. We want to be efficient teachers. WAC offers all of us a means to this end. Applying WAC components doesn't necessarily mean that we have to teach differently; rather these components suggest that we change the mode of evaluative instruments to allow a student's personal application in regard to subject matter. Science will still be science; but WAC heuristics will allow students to become young scientists through application rather than science-students expected to follow generic test-related facts.

Implementing writing components and exercises unique to each instructor's course, will compel students to making meaning through imaginative applications of what they already know from the text/course work in conjunction with what they know of and from their own experience. For example, if a history class were studying the civil war, a WAC exercise might ask students to create a dialogue between a northern industrialist and a southern plantation owner. Another exercise might ask students to imagine themselves on the streets of Atlanta both before and after Sherman's march. Becoming a news reporter for awhile would necessitate a knowing beyond standard testable knowledge. The idea here is to immerse the writer in a course-specific situation that will require both a working knowledge of the historical/cultural environment and the ability to link this information together with a sort of "storyline" in order to present, to their audience a working picture of the times replete with contemporary knowledge and a subjective appraisal of the situation. Other prompts could call for a letter, a short story, a description through the eyes of a photographer, a narrative from a time traveller's diary . . . The possibilities are endless. It should be noted here that many of these types of models might work better as open-book assignments. Because of the amount of information required to complete some WAC heuristics, the open-book approach can reinforce the retention of more information--through application as well as through the active search for textual support (research) and citations--than the more passive question/answer models used in generic evaluation strategies.

The "languaging" of a course's information parallels the concept of "storying" one's textual experience into a sense of personal experience. Relative to reader response theory, storying is the active application of information to a writer's own pre-knowledge (and vice versa). In their essay, "In Conversation: Theory and Instruction," Hanssen, Harte, and Short invoke M. Bakhtin's dialogic theories and Lev Vygotsky's socio-centrism in their observation that reading and writing are both the product of interpretation and perception. Insisting that the interpretive process is a search for unity "both within the evolving text and between the evolving text and our past texts (my emphasis)" (262), they offer that the process cannot stop with interpretation. "Perceiving and inventing a story is not enough." The story must be told--re-invested back into the dialogue--before the interpretive act can be validated. This re-telling is "storying."

Hanssen et al distinguish between info-retention and storying: While information is static, active interpretation is dialogic; and, in this sense, we can see a re-telling/storying of the textual experience from each reader's perspective: "In the telling of stories, we are trying to make connections clear for others, and in the process, we are forced to make them clear for ourselves" (262). This sort of creative interpretation (of both textual and empirical experience) relates directly to WAC's dialogic imperative and, as Hansen and colleagues observe, [storying] has clear curricular implications. Students need to create their own stories, their own explanations of the world. In traditional school settings, teachers have tended to expect students to replicate the teacher's stories rather than to draw from all the experiences they have had in relation to a topic and create a coherent story of their own. (262)

The importance of Hansen's story-theory is self-evident. By encouraging our students to join the traditionally required info-base with a non-traditional transaction between self and other, we not only reinforce traditional standards, we encourage a course's active application toward each student's personal growth as a scholars and productive beyond-the-classroom citizens.

Here is where Berthoff's composition as forming overtakes tradition's initial goals and expectations of mechanical correctness. The ability to generate ideas, to make connections, is the true skill intrinsic to good writing and competent knowing. This is why the WAC protocol places traditional correctness at the tail end of the process. Although correct and cogent writing is the desired end of all academic discourse, all writers (ourselves included) must be allowed the freedom to "spin our tires" for awhile before we gain the traction that will compel us to guide both vehicle and content to an as yet defined destination. To extend this metaphor, WAC prompts allow students to drive around a while, to cruise for ideas. This bit of intellectual sightseeing allows a sense of freedom and discovery generally discouraged in traditional product-only oriented syllabi.

However, as in all social movement (and writing IS social movement), the wandering must cease; the traveller must accept a destination, a stopping point, and deal with it accordingly. WAC works this way. From tire spinning to eventual discovery/choice of destination, the process always moves toward a socially acceptable product, one that everyone can see as good writing. Writing to learn, in this sense, includes learning to write. Although we should not expect generative processes to be audience-friendly in their beginnings, the progressive trial and error of recursive thought will eventually bring a writer into a transactive field where responsible revision and editing can take place. And, even though these transactive areas are often seen as beyond the realms of any other than writing courses, most instructors will discover that a responsibly applied WAC system will have cleared the logical road to well defined thought and synthesis skills. And, in this process, many of the grammatical and mechanical problems they now simple complain about will have receded through practice and simple writing experience. As well, the successful student will have come to specific ideas opinions, and a practiced writing style that will allow a clear thesis and its responsible discussion well before term paper time.

Journals and Collaboration

Other types of assignments promoting WAC include reading journals, observation journals, and collaborative group projects. The reading journal promotes interpretive development and assimilation of ideas. Unlike a simple diary, this type of journal demands a frank understanding of assigned (or chosen) readings AND a well supported discussion of the reading's significance (or non-significance) on personal, yet responsible levels--Storying. Journal assessment should be holistic, read with an eye toward logical development of an idea and the ability to support/sustain this idea beyond simple informative statement. The journal approach can be manipulated to fit each instructor's format. Aimed at the incremental development of a personal agenda, the journal can be a record of the student's progressive understanding of course material as well as her ability to apply it linguistically. A colleague in the sciences has integrated a writing component into an introductory Biology course. An observation journal with assigned entry times, this component asks students to choose one plant on campus (bush, tree, flower) and to keep a record of change as well as a record of how the writer/reader responds to this change. Hence, we have both a scientific data book and a humanistic journal on how this data based in natural development affects the observer. By asking students to both observe and interpret, the science instructor compels students into their own level of storying from which higher levels of thought and intellectual connections will emerge. This type of dual knowing relates the postmodern rhetorical distinction between savoir/connaissance--to know and to know how--and the necessary joining of the two in the name of practical application (Lyotard 18-22, also Steinman 18).

Collaborative group projects allow for the positive dialogue unknown in many lecture-biased classrooms. The main strength here is that the students literally get to work together with peers and instructors; they get to participate in the evaluation and application of course information. It is important here to assure all concerned that the lecture portion of the class cannot be totally dismissed anymore than the dialogic portion of learning ought to be neglected. The know/know-how model requires both information and a creative dialogue in its regard. Again, the evaluative process ought not become a barrier to learning. A holistic approach, at the assignment's beginning, allows for a creative space, a forum, in which a team of students can join in active, worry-free interpretation. As in most inter-active communities, the collaborative group will disallow a lot of "off-the-wall" offerings in light of the group's own collective sense of integrity. This democratic process promotes the social construction of a common truth as well as a group checks-and-balances system that self-evaluates this truth in light of audience consideration. As I.A. Richard's candidly observes, no one wants to be seen as a weak thinker (128-29). If a group reflects the individuals within it, each individual will work toward the shared image they all must accept in the end. Group collaboration serves both as forum for generative thought and as a support system where both blame and success can be shared equally.

Like journals, collaborative WAC assignments can be manipulated to fit curricular needs. Math and Science instructors might assign historical search teams whose mission it is to discover the wheres, whens, and whys of specific formulae or models for knowing. An accounting instructor could assign group dialogues or presentations that integrate sterile information with active applications, such as mock consultation meetings where the consultors design complex questions for the consultants who must supply satisfactory answers. The question and answer sequence relies heavily on a strong understanding of course material as well as the students' creative ability to put these terms into practice. As the collaborative process progresses, each member of each group might take turns keeping a journal of the processes by which the groups formed and presented their ideas. Action and inter-action are the key words here.

Collaboration allows students to take an active role in their education --to become part-owners of the means of production, to realize the profit of personal investment. Because the world of ideas does not exist in a vacuum, the planning of course-specific presentations often gains relevance when we allow our students to put their heads together, to discuss and argue, to create and revise ideas between them. If the information is correct, if the facts are retained, then we are halfway to our goal as efficient teachers. The final step in the process is to encourage a readable, socially acceptable application of course information to a waiting world.

Conclusion

WAC's main goal is to keep our students thinking, to keep them writing. The interaction between information and its use, between lecture and active participation/application, allows us all to join what Paul Goodman has called "a community of scholars" (Fulwiler, Writing 35). This community is not exclusive. It accepts us all, teachers, administrators, and students alike. Yet, to realize its force, we must achieve reciprocity. Teachers, administrators, and students must accept the postmodern community that is growing up around them. This acceptance is the first step toward the dialogic pedagogy that WAC can bring. A move from traditional banking pedagogies into interactive dialogue-based classrooms allows for the immediate use (and thus augmentation) of information. It strikes while the iron is hot. It allows this information to become, for our students, knowledge through application.

When we see writing as active inquiry rather than passive repetition, the classroom becomes a transactional forum where facts and ideas meet in dialogue. Although many instructors fear WAC programs will simply bring them more work, they need to realize that the work will be shared between the students and the instructors--and that this work will bring results. We need to realize, as well, the deployment of "fact" without a challenge to apply it is, quite simply, one half of a practical education. The assignment of a term paper does not qualify as a WAC assignment inasmuch as the majority of these papers require a representation of information retention at the term's end instead of the frequent writing connections in WAC oriented classroom. Too often the research part of a term paper leans toward total objectivity. And in this objectivity lies the risk of a student being controlled and coerced by her research, rather than her taking control of this information as a support system for her own important agendas. The overtly objective paper says" "This is what I remember from class," or "This is what I read in the library." What a generative research paper needs to say is, "This stuff is significant because . . .," or "My idea is important because . . ."

One of the better ways to put agenda-neutral writing aside is through the continual application of self to information through writing about it frequently, consistently, and honestly. In this way students learn not so much about writing in the traditional sense, but about thinking in the [post]modern sense. In the words of my scientist friend: "All knowledge is not relativistic, their are things a student must know." However, I add to this true statement a rider: Once we know the fundaments, it is our responsibility as human thinkers to [re]arrange them into the active knowledge we need within our own historical contexts. Facts, like words, are useless until paired with contextual goals and desires. And from this pairing emerges the useable knowledge that pushes human dialectic and dialogue forward. WAC offers the first step to this type of knowing in classrooms that promise to prepare us for life beyond school. Putting together ideas can't be relegated to the final exam in a classroom because, in all brutal reality, it is in the real world that our knowledge will be tested--again and again. Real knowledge is information in application. And acquainting our students with this very real process should be our first priority.

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