The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) was created to support teachers in implementing college and career readiness standards. Teachers work collaboratively with coaches to further develop their expertise and design standards-driven, literacy-rich writing assignments within their existing curriculum across all content areas. Findings from…

In September, 2016, the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) and the National Center for Education Research (NCER) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) convened a group of experts to discuss and provide input on research needs in the area of middle and high school writing for students, including English learners (ELs) and…

Many community college students are entering college-level courses underprepared for the critical literacy and critical thinking skills required to be successful in discipline courses (Tsui, 2002). Discipline faculty are considered experts in their content area and are often not trained in pedagogy and literacy instruction, yet they are faced with…

In 1991, as an experiment, the Director of the Writing Center at Siena College (a comprehensive college with a Franciscan tradition, located in a suburb of Albany, New York), agreed to team-teach a "Scientific Writing" course with a colleague who is a biologist. As they worked together, it appeared that for the biologist, knowledge was…

Examination of the different types of courses and course materials can help identify the parameters and configurations of advanced composition. While usually referring to nonfiction writing, courses labeled "advanced composition" range from expository and narrative nonfiction through fiction and poetry. They also include legal and…

Having students compile annotated bibliographies can promote collaborative learning. For example, when a class on writing across the curriculum was asked to survey the writing emphasis of courses in various departments at the University of Arizona, cooperation and collaboration were integral to the overall project. Students had individual…

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement has gone from valuable but less effective individual efforts to organized, district- and campus-supported projects based on goals for improved student learning in every area and every program. On the college level, WAC takes two forms: a more traditional, formally structured approach from faculty…

The anchor of successful writing-across-the-curriculum programs is an organized nucleus of features called the four Ps: planning, proposing, preparing, and prototyping. Planning requires organization and connections among the mechanisms of designing and implementing both program activities and evaluation designs. It should begin at least two years…

Examines the underlying meaning of the phrase, "writing across the curriculum," its various administrative forms, and its implications for the faculties of colleges, particularly for English department faculties. (AEA)

Effective informational writing assignments show students that creativity and imagination are essential to the generation of new ideas in all content areas. A collection of these assignments has been arranged into five categories of increasing complexity based on the following criteria: whether the point of view is assigned as self-selected;…

The writing program at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) is based on the idea that writing is taught best when it is emphasized in every discipline. There is an upper division writing requirement, and all departments design and teach advanced writing courses. In 1978, at the same time that the program was created, an outreach program to…

Freshman composition teachers who are attuned to real-life writing situations can extend the scope of traditional research paper assignments and at the same time meet the writing needs of other disciplines. For example, history students could record data from old records, or fine arts students could describe their artistic observations. To lead…

The writing across the curriculum program at La Salle University, Pennsylvania, derives its basic philosophy from Charles Bazerman's "The Informed Writer" which stresses that students learn about academic writing and reading in terms of a community of discourse. Though Bazerman's text is not used in the freshman composition course,…

To describe a cross-curriculum writing model designed for a middle school, this paper provides a condensed script of what the designer of the program said and did during its first year to steer the program in a productive direction. The paper is written in the form of exerpts from relevant conversations. The first conversation relates how the idea…

Three premises are basic to Writing Across the Curriculum: (1) when learning involves writing, more learning is achieved; (2) learning to write involves learning to manage and coordinate the component skills of writing within real writing tasks; and (3) through writing, students can learn how to actively touch the content of a class. The role of…