Though for better or worse most colleges and universities in the U.S. have stand-alone first-year comp (FYC) courses not coordinated with other courses in the institution, more and more schools have attempted arrangements that introduce first-year students more directly to “writing in disciplines.” One model is the “Freshman Seminars,” small-size classes in a wide variety of subjects; in these classes, teachers from a wide variety of disciplines assign regular writing that receives feedback that enables the student to learn how professionals communicate in the field. In the best of these programs, such as that at Cornell, teachers are trained in the arts of assignment design and constructive response to student writing.
A second model is the “linked course,” a section of FYC coordinated with a section of an intro course in a specific field. In George Mason’s “Mason Topics” Program, for example, English faculty teaching FYC work with faculty from such departments as history, psychology, and biology to develop some common assignments, while also maintaining the integrity of each course. Such an arrangement has the potential to (a) teach students some common principles of writing across academia and (b) give them intensive practice in the ways of thinking and communicating in a specific field.
A third model is the “learning community,” an intensive writing course focused on a theme that brings together teachers from several disciplines. These team-designed and –taught courses enable students to see how different fields think and communicate, and how new fields are forged out of this cooperation. When teachers are trained in techniques of assignment design and response to student writing, as in George Mason’s New Century College, students get the multiple benefits of the FYC experience and of cross-disciplinary work.
GMU’s linked courses and learning communities, and those of several other institutions, are described in Terry Zawacki and Ashley Williams’ essay, “Is It Still WAC? Writing within Interdisciplinary Learning Communities,” in WAC for the New Millennium, edited by Susan McLeod, Eric Miraglia, Margot Soven, and Christopher Thaiss (National Council of Teachers of English, 2001, pp. 109-140).
Even if the relationship between FYC and writing across the rest of the institution is not formalized in ways such as these, it is possible for directors of composition programs to work with course and program coordinators in other fields, in order to design some compatible objectives and some common, useful practices in helping student writers. Indeed, if FYC is articulated with writing expectations across the institution, there is no reason why FYC cannot be as good or better an introduction to “academic writing” than these other types of first-year writing experiences.
What Should First-Year Composition Students Learn about Writing across the Curriculum?
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