The WAC Movement: Unlocking the Power of Writing

According to the “Writing Across the Curriculum” movement (WAC), writing makes students communicate more clearly, logically, and persuasively.

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is a movement in the United States that is designed to ensure that all students have the opportunity to write, review, and discuss what they wrote in their classes. Its purpose is to make students better thinkers and communicators by being able to write consistently. WAC has been around for approximately four decades, being part of institutions of higher learning throughout the United States, and is defined as a model of active participation. It goes beyond just writing; it includes reading, writing, thinking, and revising, giving students the ability to communicate more clearly, logically, and persuasively.

Its basic points are that writing is the responsibility of the entire academic community. Therefore, it must be part of all areas, promote learning, and that only through doing it as an academic discipline will students begin to communicate more effectively. Additionally, WAC is about using writing as a tool to learn more deeply rather than on tests. Writing is a complete and complex exercise in which students –in addition to drafting, revising, and rewriting– learn to explain their ideas better and ask themselves questions about presenting and developing critical thinking and solving problems. The teacher will be in charge of being a facilitator, asking questions, prompting to think more or answer questions, but not to correct or judge the writing since that will be the student’s responsibility.

Writing serves many things, such as writing to learn and writing to communicate, benefiting students in different ways. In addition, the WAC movement can be applied to both regular classrooms and individual classrooms or complementary programs.

What are the benefits of the WAC movement?

For educators, including writing in all classes has great benefits. In the short term, student-written texts can better assess how much information students retain and where they need support. In the long term, students can learn to use writing as a learning and communication tool. Additionally, teachers get students who understand the fundamentals better and are ready to engage in deeper analysis.

Lynn M. Patterson and Vanessa Slinger-Friedman wrote about their experience integrating WAC into their geography classes. This resulted in better teaching and implementation of new methods, received instant feedback from students, achieved their course objectives, and created a higher learning community. The benefits are even more noticeable for students since many do not write during class, not even to take notes, their writing and spelling skills deteriorate. This is even more obvious for students taking multiple-choice tests, which do not involve writing or describing anything. In this sense, the WAC movement helps them not to lose the ability to describe the processes or to be able to analyze what they are learning more effectively.

In addition to that, WAC helps students learn the material better and develop deeper thinking about the courses. And not only that, it improves your practical communication skills, something that is very necessary in the world of work and one of the most demanded “soft skills.”

Why should you think about using writing to achieve the learning goals?

If recent high school graduates are not prepared to think critically, colleges and universities should encourage that learning. In a 2009 study, it was found that high school teachers assigned writing that needed little interpretation or analysis, causing college teachers to feel that students were underprepared.

Performing focal writing tasks help you learn more about a topic as they help influence your way of thinking as it forces you to organize your thoughts and refine your ideas, making you more analytical. Writing can be added in different ways throughout your higher education, whether in proposals or reports in finances, laboratories, or other areas; analysis, case studies, engineering memoranda, presentations, and many ways beyond just testing.

Julie Libarkin and Gabriel Ording investigated the effects of writing in bioscience courses across three subjects and found that their students’ ability to write about scientific topics increased. In addition, he improved his ability to discuss scientific concepts, use data to support his positions, and draw conclusions. Beyond that, WAC only works if teachers link their classes to writing assignments that truly support the goals of each course. Finally, it is important to remember that students need explicit instructions, especially in exercises that are outside of what they are used to. Supporting WAC with peer review, questioning, hypothesizing, or jointly explaining and brainstorming will help strengthen writing and retention of learning over time.

The “Writing Across the Curriculum” movement, WAC, is a testament to the important role that writing plays in students’ lives. It not only helps prepare them for the world of work by developing their communication and critical thinking skills, but it also helps academia create future researchers and teachers.

What do you think of the WAC movement? Do you think it is beneficial for students to include much more writing? Would you have liked to write more during college? Leave your comments below.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Paulette Delgado

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0