WAC as Critical Pedagogy: The Third Stage?.

Abstract

Whenever I am approached by a faculty member, department chair, or college dean about the way they could improve writing instruction in their classes, I inevitably walk them through two related options that should be addressed: how writing can help students learn course content and how writing prepares their students to become better professionals in their fields. The two, of course, are always related in my discussion. I emphasize how learning to write according to the disciplinary norms of a certain profession is inextricably linked to encouraging the type of thinking valued within that discipline. Writing-to-learn activities, I explain, have the ability to not only make disciplinary concepts more familiar to students but also to serve as preparation for more transactional writing about these concepts. This approach has served me well as one of the primary WAC people on two different campuses .. . until recently. I'm almost embarrassed to admit, however, how recently my perspective changed. During my involvement with WAC?almost eight years now?I had moved from a rather expressive pedagogical practice to one more informed by critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and poststructuralist theory. While my teaching in both first-year and advanced writing classes has represented the more critical approach to discourse encouraged by these theories, my WAC practice did not change at all. Somehow I blithely assumed that WAC was and had to be different than teaching writing within my home department. Herein lies the irony. I had revised my pedagogical practice wholesale over the past six years to focus on cultural studies because I firmly believed that discourse has the power to inscribe individuals such that it marginalized and silenced voices which threatened its monopoly on ways of thinking and modes of expression. Because much of my research and past teaching experience focused on multicultural education, a concern for student difference, particularly cultural difference and alternative literacies, has pervaded all my professional work, except, it seems, for WAC. I never once turned this ideological lens toward my WAC work with faculty.

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