Program Philosophy
The Writing Across the Curriculum Program is a Berry
College initiative designed to enhance logical thought processes (head),
foster mature decision making (heart), and produce graduates who are
confident, skilled communicators in both written and spoken media
(hands). To accomplish these noble aims, the program involves College
leaders (President, Provost, and Deans), Faculty, Students and Staff in a
program of instruction which spans all four years of education.
Long-term WAC Program success will be measured by the contributions
Berry graduates make as citizens in an environment characterized by
complex ideas (head), competing values (heart), and changing systems
(hands).
WAC at Berry College
At our institution, President Colley's charge to
Berry's WAC Committee is to foster “excellence in thinking and
writing” within each graduate of Berry College. To accomplish this
goal, faculty in the First Year Writing Program work in concert with WI
faculty from all disciplines to foster a “thinking in writing” model for
all WI courses. First year writing students work to master analytical
thinking skills and to apply those in writing about contemporary issues
to academic, professional, and civic audiences. Faculty in the various
disciplines attend workshops to understand the goals, standards, and
methods of the First Year Writing Program and to understand how to apply
those elements to help students think and write analytically/critically
about specific subjects in all disciplines. Excellence among our
graduates in “thinking and writing” results from common, cooperative
effort of all faculty members in all disciplines.
A History of Writing Across the Curriculum
During the 20th century, American universities began to experience
a gradual (before W.W.II) and then dramatic (the baby boomers of the
1960's and 70's) demographic and democratic growth in numbers and
curriculum. Writing as a discipline was initially tied to the classical
models of rhetoric. Beginning in the 1920's at places like the
University of Chicago under Robert Hutchison, “composition” was
conceived of as a separate discipline with both intellectual and
pragmatic uses. During the 1960's and 70's, the radical “abolitionist”
movement saw many campuses abolishing required composition courses
altogether. The modern WAC movement was, in many ways, a response to
this vacuum. Writing specific to disciplines became a model to replace
“general writing courses.” Throughout the 1980's and 90's, WAC evolved
and many institutions reinstated discipline specific composition
requirements.
-Prepared by Dr. M. Cooley