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WORKING WITH FACULTY WRITERS
By ANNE ELLEN GELLER, MICHELE EODICE Utah State University Press
Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-901-2
CHAPTER 1
BEYOND THE CURRICULUM Supporting Faculty Writing Groups in WAC Programs
Chris Anson
An acquaintance, the director of a writing across the curriculum (WAC) program at a highly prestigious, research-obsessed university that sports a number of Nobel prize winners, once shared with me her frustrations attracting faculty to workshops and activities that focused on teaching. The program's heart beat to the rhythm of improving support for student writing. Outreach was its vascular system, circulating vital instructional reform throughout the campus. Participation was its lifeblood. But no matter how hard the program tried to draw faculty to its events, they shied away, almost embarrassed to be seen vacating their well-appointed labs and offices to attend a teaching-related event—even for the best box lunch in the state or a wine-and-hors d'oeuvres reception to rival an elegant fundraiser. Workshops, informal presentations, and colloquia on student writing drew scattered interest and uncomfortably few participants. What goals and interests, the director wondered, motivated her colleagues? Clearly, they feared wasting valuable time on something they were trying to do less of. How could she get them to that place where the hope of gain lines up, like a rare celestial phenomenon, with a willingness to engage?
After much thought, she decided to put on a session about faculty publication. Widely billed as an event focusing on how to improve the chances of getting into print, it featured three faculty members from different disciplines who each edited a prestigious journal and could provide advice and strategies about publication from well-informed positions. The session included testimonials by prolific scholar-writers about their own best practices, breakouts for small-group discussion, and presentations on campus resources.
Faculty packed the room, giving up office hours, lab time, lunch dates, and even class sessions to attend. Realizing that they had a captive audience, the director and her colleagues drew attention to their program and urged faculty to become involved in some of its teaching-related activities. The faculty were there because, deep in their work ethic and reinforced through years of both explicit and tacit systems of rewards and punishments, they held sacred the goal of academic publication. But their need to understand and develop strategies for their own writing was potentially a way to begin thinking more deeply and productively about the role of writing in their courses.
Descriptions of WAC programs usually highlight their focus on instructional development and curricular improvement. Although today the approaches to this work vary considerably, shaped to specific institutional needs and cultures, it's still the exception to find activities and resources focusing on the faculty's own scholarly and professional writing. However, a number of WAC programs have mounted initiatives that draw on or support the writing experiences of faculty themselves. While these efforts are scattered, their success suggests that, on a national scale, we should pursue more opportunities to assist faculty with their own writing, in addition to helping them more richly understand, and tend to, the needs of their students. At the same time, we must continue to explore the assumption that focusing on the professional writing of faculty leads them inductively to improve their support for student writing. Although several chapters in this collection offer useful arguments for this relationship, it still remains largely unexplored and theoretically questionable.
This chapter will first briefly contextualize faculty writing in the history of the WAC movement. It will then turn to several types of writing-related activities that WAC programs are currently sponsoring as a way to extend their reach into supporting faculty members' own professional writing and making stronger connections between that writing, their teaching, and their students' writing. Finally, it will offer some cautions, particularly with respect to issues of agency, ownership, and disciplinarity, about how to encourage faculty writing in WAC programs even as this appears to define the next stage of program development and the creation of a culture of writing on college campuses.
THE LEGACY OF WRITING IN FACULTY WORKSHOPS
Engaging faculty in writing stretches back to the beginning of the WAC movement in the 1970s, when most workshops were organized at smaller liberal arts colleges that had strong teaching missions (Russell, 2002). By the 1980s, WAC was rapidly taking hold at larger research-oriented universities, where writing continued to play an important role in teaching-oriented faculty development activities. Art Young, for example, describes the genesis of the workshops he and his colleagues founded at Michigan Technological University, one of the most self-studied WAC efforts at a larger institution:
These workshops were hands-on-pen experiences that lasted two to four consecutive days and nights, and participants themselves spent much of the time writing.... Individual workshops were structured in such a way that teacher-writers experienced firsthand the pedagogical theories of James Britton, Peter Elbow, Janet Emig, Ken Macrorie, James Moffett, and others who advised teachers to consider the writing process in instruction and to emphasize writing as a learning activity as well as a means of communication. ... Teachers who participated in the workshops experienced, in one way or another, collaborative writing exercises, small-group dynamics, oral and written peer feedback between successive drafts, writing anxiety, writer's block, writing for themselves, writing for others, writing for discovery, writing to communicate, and feeling good about writing. (Young 1986, 9)
Having faculty write and share that writing during workshops that focused mainly on teaching was said to mirror students' experiences in the classroom. Engaging in writing exercises could "reacquaint [participants] with the frustrations (and joys) of the composing process" (Fulwiler 1986b, 23). The struggle to write, and the humility of sharing half-baked drafts with colleagues who normally showcase the outcomes of their considerable disciplinary talents and expertise, yielded sympathies for students grappling with challenging course assignments; more important, those experiences could quite viscerally show faculty why instructional support for writing is so important.
Initially, the process movement's emphasis on experience ("What happens when I write?") was meant to show faculty how to support students' writing through various activities that made explicit what was needed for success—including revealing their own struggles. Integrating this sort of meta-awareness into coursework was also said to encourage students and teachers to recognize each other as writers. Starting in now-classic works such as Murray's (1968) A Writer Teaches Writing and continuing throughout the history of the National Writing Project, teachers have been urged to "write along with their students." As one NWP participant rhetorically asks, "When we write with our students and share with them our uncertainties about word-choice, a topic, or organization, won't they be much more willing to do the same?" (Alber 2012).
Over time, the extensive writing experiences included in early WAC workshops were replaced with a stronger focus on teaching (Thaiss, personal communication). The forces behind this evolution are not entirely clear, but may have come from recognition of certain tensions and contradictions between the domains of faculty and student writing, especially in higher-education institutions where scholarly publication carries such weight.
For example, while asking faculty to write helps to reform what Fulwiler calls "simplistic notions" about student writing (1986b, 23), it often serves no purpose beyond the workshop; the experience is context-bound and ephemeral. Workshop participants may come to understand the link between their own sharing of the workshop journal they are required to keep and their students' potential thinking and learning that the method fosters. But this and other tasks are, after all, usually nothing like what the participants do in their own professional circles. In the interests of connecting with faculty who hail from diverse disciplines and who write sophisticated material often impenetrable even to academics in other fields, workshop leaders usually choose disciplinarily neutral prompts, purposeful for the socially significant moment but useless once the participants leave the room. Faculty often do enjoy working with other colleagues in a "community of scholars" (Fulwiler 1986a, 243), but the disciplinary mix can't allow much, if any, serious sharing of scholarly writing. And faculty do gain insights, but they are often short-lived, soon dissipating into the other complexities of their professorial lives.
At the same time, the strategy of weaving general writing experiences into WAC workshops was meant to overcome the fact that faculty and students often write in mutually isolating domains. The genres of the academic professions are sometimes at such a distance from canonical college assignments or the kinds of pseudo-disciplinary writing that students must produce that it's difficult for faculty to imagine that it all exists along a developmental continuum. While faculty are reporting the results of complex biological experiments in food science or arguing sophisticated statistical projections in economics, students are trying their best to summarize articles, develop a thesis about two conflicting events, or put together accurate, concise lab reports. If there is any flaw in the principle that "our reflective interaction with our own writing efforts informs and animates our interactions with our student writers" (Gillespie 1985), it's that the processes and struggles of college-level faculty are most meaningful to them in the context of the most meaningful work they produce, which is the least often included in cross-disciplinary WAC workshops. The wall between faculty and student writing is a construction based on misunderstandings of the common processes and needs of writers at different ends of the sophistication continuum. But not directly appealing to the writing interests of faculty may simply strengthen that wall instead of breaking it down.
Teachers' perceptions of their own writing abilities also play a role in deciding how or whether to tap into their experiences (Young and Fulwiler 1990). When working with faculty across a range of disciplines, WAC leaders are often asked, "How can I help students to write if I'm not such a good writer myself?" The response, almost unanimous in the literature, argues that all faculty write within their disciplines, and that it's only their (mis)conceptions about "good writing" that make that fact invisible to them. The concern rises to even higher levels when it comes to grammar. Many faculty, whether English is their first language or not, confess to not knowing all the intricacies of grammar well enough to be of help. They are admonished to "focus on students' meaning." When faculty argue that they're not great writers because what they teach isn't even remotely about writing (dance, drawing, small engine repair), they're encouraged to see writing as a powerful medium for learning their subject, rather than as a skill to be mastered. Such a response suggests to faculty that there is no necessary relationship between being an accomplished writer as a teacher and supporting students' own writing. This strategy, wise for orienting faculty toward the uses of writing to learn, doesn't always clarify the differences between what students will write professionally after graduation and what they're writing in the classroom.
Another possible reason for the decline of heavily writing-focused WAC workshops was an eventual differentiation of K–12 and university interests. Early on, leaders of college-level WAC programs were inspired by the work of the National Writing Project, which focused primarily on teaching in the K–12 context (see Russell 1992; McLeod and Soven 2006). The aim of encouraging K–12 teachers to write grew from similar beliefs about the relationship between experiential self-awareness and the improvement of teaching. But the teachers had to be encouraged to write in the first place, and to do so "in front of ... students, [so] they can see what a sloppy, difficult act writing is for all writers" (Gillespie 1985; see also Robbins 1992). This blurring of the needs of K–12 teachers with those of university faculty eventually gave way to sharper distinctions between the two groups. Books such as Teacher as Writer: Entering the Professional Conversation (Dahl 1992) inspired overworked K–12 teachers to write. Meanwhile, faculty in most colleges and universities needed no additional persuasion than their promotion and tenure codes, but few resources existed, alongside all the emphasis on student writing, to help them succeed.
Many teaching-oriented WAC workshops in colleges and universities still involve some vestigial writing, usually in brief episodes to demonstrate the principles of writing-to-learn. But the production of entire texts through cycles of drafting, sharing, and revising is now rare. Recognizing the loss of a focus on teachers' own writing, however, a number of WAC directors are rethinking ways they can bring faculty together to discuss and practice their own writing beyond the usual teaching workshop model. These opportunities appear to define the goals of faculty writing quite differently by avoiding the use of writing as a subterfuge for focusing directly on issues relating to students' own writing and learning, and enhancing opportunities for faculty to reflect on and learn strategies for their own professional publication. As we'll see in the next section, these more recent developments position faculty as writers in their disciplinary contexts and extend the role of the WAC program from student learning to faculty support. In this expansion of services, WAC programs rely on decades of instructional work helping faculty to think more deeply about the role of writing in their courses, but at the same time move into less charted territories where new dangers lurk beyond the edges of prior experience.
FACULTY WRITING WORKSHOPS AND RETREATS
The most direct expansion of WAC programs into the realm of faculty writing is through seminars or presentations that focus on strategies for writing and publishing, or on workshops or retreats where faculty work collaboratively to support the development of drafts in progress. Because they are brief, the former don't involve extensive work on individual projects, which will see progress at home or in the office as a result of the new insights and energy the sessions inspire. They typically include discussions of how to overcome self-defeating habits, how to target an article toward a specific journal, or how to create backward timelines or use online tools such as Timelinemaker to systematically move a project toward completion. Sessions sometimes include strategies for publishing a book and may feature invited editors from university and trade publishers or faculty with experience on editorial boards. Clearly, these sorts of events are especially helpful for early-career researchers and graduate students who recognize the importance of writing and publishing but have not yet developed tools for success.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WORKING WITH FACULTY WRITERS by ANNE ELLEN GELLER, MICHELE EODICE. Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of Utah State University Press.
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