Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs generally agree on certain basic principles:
- that writing is the responsibility of the entire academic community
- that writing must be integrated across departmental boundaries
- that writing instruction must be continuous in all years of an undergraduate education
- that writing promotes learning
- that only by practicing the conventions of an academic discipline will students begin to communicate effectively within that discipline
Source: WAC Clearinghouse
Resources:
- An Introduction to Writing Across the Curriculum
- Purdue OWL: Writing Across the Curriculum
- Vidcast "An Introduction to Writing Across the Curriculum"
- Writing Across the Curriculum at the Community Colleges: Beating the Odds
- Writing Technologies and Writing Across the Curriculum: Current Lessons and Future Trends
Reading Across the Curriculum:
"The research is clear: discipline-based instruction in reading and writing enhances student achievement in all subjects. Studies show that reading and writing across the curriculum are essential to learning. Without strategies for reading course material and opportunities to write thoughtfully about it, students have difficulty mastering concepts.... Yet, as research shows, reading and writing cannot be learned once and for all; these skills represent complex arrays of capacities that vary from one discipline to another. "
Resources:
- Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success
- International Reading Association
- NCTE: On Reading, Learning to Read, and Effective Reading Instruction: An Overview of What We Know and How We Know It
- Reading Apprenticeship: Improving Academic Literacy
- Reading Plus: Changing the Way Students Read
- Strategies to help students build their reading abilities in content-area reading
- RAWAC: A Policy Research Brief produced by the National Council of Teachers of English
- CTE: Reading Across the Curriculum
- TED: Tom Wujec: 3 ways the brain creates meaning