Serendipity35

Tomorrow, three of us from the Writing Initiative group at PCCC are headed to the University of Texas at Austin for the 2008 International Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Conference.

My first conference of the summer: workshops, speakers from around the world, presentations by colleagues across the disciplines.

Writing Across the Curriculum was a hot initiative about 20 years ago when I was still in secondary education, but I haven't paid much attention to it or heard much about it the past few years. But, since our own writing initiative at PCCC is working to develop 20 GenEd courses as writing-intensive, it's time for me to tune back in to WAC.

The University of Texas at Austin has a "Substantial Writing Component" requirement aimed at helping students improve their ability to formulate ideas in writing ability, write across disciplines and incorporate critical thinking skills. That matches some of our own grant goals pretty closely.

From their site, I see that a UT SWC course uses low-stakes writing activities (e.g. freewriting, outlining, email responses to class questions) to allow students to manipulate the language, thinking processes, and concepts of the discipline so that they can more effectively complete formal, high stakes assignments (e.g., arguments, research papers, analyses, web pages). A combination of low and high stakes writing activities that include opportunities for revision, peer review, quality instructor feedback, and conferencing will improve students' critical thinking as well as their writing.

We also share their interest in using the freshman/first year experience course and composition course as an important introduction to the Initiative and the minimum two required WI courses that must take to graduate. Our own high-stakes writing includes passing the college's required writing exam (GWE).

I'm not a "live blogger" who types during sessions at workshops. I like to take my notes and process things before writing, so I don't expect posts this week to be full of the conference. Any Serendipity35 readers in Austin this week?