Writing as Learning through the Curriculum

Writing-across-the-curriculum is an increasingly visible educational concept these days, attractive, it would seem, to and non-English faculty alike. The spread of cross-disciplinary programs, the cooperative spirit of colleagues in other fields, and the recent success of textbooks such as Writing in the Arts and Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1981) testify to the power of the idea and perhaps even to the likelihood that writing will become, as it once was, the concern of all educators and not just the narrow specialty of a few. Yet, as we hear teachers talk about writing across disciplines, whether they come from departments or elsewhere, we are struck by the predominantly negative quality of discussion, its preoccupation with declining verbal abilities, its prescriptivist character, and its grimly resolute, back to basics tone. We note, especially, the limited and contingent role that writing is expected to play outside composition courses, a signal that instructors are resigned to do their bit for literacy but have not considered the relevance of writing to their classwork. It seems a pertinent question, therefore, whether teachers are getting as much out of the concept of writing-across-the-curriculum as they could-whether, that is, writing is seen as an important activity in courses or as just a necessary inconvenience, tolerated in the interest of collegiality. Our review of high-school and college programs offering cross-disciplinary writing shows the greater number of them to be little more than grammar across the curriculum, in which teachers counsel their colleagues in other departments about deviations from standard written English so that history and biology teachers can learn to correct student writing with the same reverence for prose decorum displayed in the department. Even at their best such programs emphasize packaging information across the curriculum, offering ideal models for the presentation of knowledge in different fields. In either case the main concern of a content course is the mastery of information