Hawk: whak: WAC

In graduate school I studied rhetoric in the disciplines—the idea that rhetoric operates differently in different discursive contexts. By chance I ended up at George Mason University, which has a well-known Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program. In it, the university went from two FYC courses to one FYC course and one JYC. The first-year course continues to operate on the traditional model that writing exists in a general sense. The junior-year course functions as an entry into the disciplines and is broken into 4 sub-types: Humanities, Social Science, Natural Science, and Business. But studying rhetoric in the disciplines didn't prepare me for WAC.

When asked to teach the course, I felt it was a little daunting. I teach the Humanities section that is supposed to include Art, Dance, English, Foreign Language, History, Music, Philosophy, and Theater students. I know nothing about the rhetoric or writing in about half of these fields. My field is predominantly rhetoric and I had always taught the second course in the composition sequence as an argument/rhetoric course. After looking at many of the texts others were using for this course, I realized that students going through this sequence may not be getting any explicit instruction in rhetoric. My solution was to teach the course as an argument/rhetoric course and have the students gather texts from their own disciplines to analyze rhetorically. This allows me to teach something I actually know about and to get students thinking about rhetoric as a field and in the context of their fields. Rather than passively have me tell them the genres/styles of their disciplines, they learn, at least theoretically, how to approach that problematic on their own.

The problem of expertise that I encountered, however, has not gone unnoticed by others. In "WAC, WHACK: You're an Expert-NOT!" Sam Watson asks, "Should the aim of writing across the curriculum (WAC) be to get students to write like experts? If so, what does that mean?" (319). Watson is right that my 302 students do not have the expertise, the basic knowledge in their fields, to write like experts, and they probably will never become experts in their disciplines. I was more concerned, though, about my own lack of expertise in these fields, and Watson confesses his own lack as well. But even if I had the expertise in these fields, there are other problems. If I choose to do assignments on art and music, for example, what if I have no students in those fields in my class? And as I began to teach these classes I realized that students regularly ignore the breakdown of the course into the four generic areas. I regularly get Anthropology, Communication, and Poly-Sci students in my classes and I always have the stray Psychology or Biology student in my classes. They will certainly never be experts in art or music either.

Watson also argues that examining the texts of experts in WAC courses, as I do, is not necessarily a good strategy because some of them are not good examples of writing in their fields or in general. Even if they were, it would only tell students about form, not about the process of such writing. Watson's strategy is to reconceive/revalue the concept of expertise. For him, to be an expert is to be naive. An expert is typically seen as "someone who knows something, something systematized, with clarity and rigor that the rest of us don't know" (321). Watson recognizes that this definition of expertise excludes him along with his students. In Watson’s revaluation, an expert is someone who knows what he doesn't know and sets out to work on that rhetorical problem. Since developing such rhetorical expertise in a field is an ongoing process of enculturation, or as he puts it, seeking to enrich our naivete, the best we can do, I think, is set our students on this course. My course tries to do this. I know and the students know that they can't read difficult texts in their fields. But trying to do so makes them recognize their naivete and attempts to give them some rhetorical strategies for beginning their process of enculturation.

This doesn't address the issue of restricting the course to academic writing, however. Even though the course is writing across the "curriculum" (which is an inherently academic structure), there have been concerns that the course focuses too much on academic writing to the exclusion of writing outside the disciplines. I'll be including more writing for general audiences in upcoming iterations of the course, but this doesn't solve the expertise problem. It really only highlights it. It is becoming increasingly difficult to say what writing in general is, and more and more necessary to articulate the specificity of any writing. One can't teach genre as form abstracted from its specific situatedness and the affects it produces in those situations.

Mystory, I think, is an attempt on Ulmer's part to address this problem. It's primary assumption as a research process is the naivete of the writer; therefore, its primary purpose is to 1) situate a writer to his/her specific relation to past history and present research, and 2) to get that writer to invent a method and genre of writing partiuclar to that situation. That's why we can't teach it like a form: there is no one way to write a mystory.

For me, teaching writing continues to be the possible impossibility.

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