Writing Across the Curriculum: Some Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on the Development of Writing Programs in U.S. Higher Education (United States).

Abstract

In the 1970's and 1980's new ways of thinking about the task of teaching writing on the college level emerged in the shape of what have become known as writing across the curriculum programs. Many of these programs represent a successful struggle against a pedagogy and a language philosophy derived from the classical era. The first three chapters of the dissertation examine the nature of that struggle. The evolution of the classical "product-centered" bias of composition teaching is outlined in Chapter One. Chapter Two considers the contribution of two thinkers who resisted in their work the philosophical and epistomological premises of the classical language curriculum. Chapter Three considers the evolution of three research traditions which helped forge a new approach to composition teaching by rejecting many of the key assumptions of "scientific" writing research. The current state of writing across the curriculum programs in the United States is the subject of Chapter Four. Some programs have fully integrated the new writing research into their curriculum organization, others have remained remarkably immune to the new approaches. A final chapter looks to the future and to the specific ways research and evaluative strategies can be used to improve our teaching of writing across the curriculum.