Printable Versions: Guidlines ||| Explanations
CRITERIA FOR WAC DESIGNATION
College Writing I & II and Courses that
Substitute for College Writing II (ENC 1102)
All courses that substitute for College Writing II will be taught by full-time faculty. Syllabi for new College Writing II-substitute courses must be submitted to the WAC Committee at least three months prior to the expected date of course implementation. The WAC committee1 will review and forward approved syllabi to the English Department's Writing Committee and will notify the author of approval, denial, or recommendations for revision.
All Teaching Assistants who will take primary responsibility for a College Writing I or II course and who do not have at least eighteen hours of credit in the discipline in which the course is taught must take a teaching seminar before or during their first term teaching, attend supervised colloquia in subsequent semesters until they have earned the eighteen credits, and be mentored by designated tenure-line Instructors.
All faculty who teach WAC courses will either attend a three-day WAC Curriculum Development seminar or a training program that is collaboratively determined by the Director of WAC and representatives within departments that are sponsoring the courses.
To receive a WAC designation, the 3-credit course, capped at 22 students, will provide a syllabus that does the following 2:
- inform students of the writing-intensive nature of the course and explain that WAC courses at FAU fulfill the state mandated Gordon Rule requirements if the course is passed with a C or better;
- include writing assignments that promote critical thinking, reading of sustained and challenging texts, and analytical writing;
- offer writing assignments that encourage students to recognize and examine intellectual and/or cultural assumptions that emerge in the readings and in the student’s own writing;
- include three or more substantial, out-of-class, thesis-driven writing assignments, each of which must be revised at least once (a revision is a substantial reworking of a draft as distinct from editing and correction of surface errors);
- include both finished writing and preparatory writing such as drafts, revisions, journal writing, written responses to texts, etc;
- provide a short, clear, written description of each writing assignment and its evaluation criteria;
- schedule writing assignments in such a way that allocates time for discussion of assignments, revision, and peer review;
- devote class time to discussions about how to improve students’ writing and to helping students understand how to complete and revise their responses to the writing assignments;
- help students learn to read and comment on one another's papers, focusing primarily on substance, i.e., issues that would be addressed by global revision;
- provide an explanation of how students will receive substantive feedback on graded assignments and drafts that students are required to revise;
- count writing assignments for at least 80% of the course grade;
- include a description of the error tracking mechanisms that will be used in the course;
- require students to write a target of 5,000 words (+/- 1,000);
- provide a list of class policies including but not limited to attendance, late papers, grading, participation, format for written assignments, and plagiarism;
- include the following language informing students about the University wide WAC Assessment project:
If this class is selected to participate in the university-wide WAC assessment program, you will be required to access the online assessment server, complete the consent form and survey, and submit electronically a first and final draft of a near-end-of-term-paper.
1For sample syllabi, information on these criteria and suggestions for teaching WAC courses, please refer to the WAC Guidelines and Recommendations. This Document and additional helpful information and links will be posted on the WAC web site: http://www.fau.edu/WAC.
2Deviations from any of the above criteria will need to be justified in writing for review and certification purposes.
PREFACE:
Since April 2004, when FAU's administration mandated a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative, a set of criteria have been carefully developed as a way of simplifying (and making transparent) the WAC certification process, and assuring that values central to WAC pedagogy are represented in syllabi that receive the WAC designation. The Ad Hoc Core Curriculum Taskforce initially proposed the WAC program to ensure consistent and extensive support for student writing across the University. Writing Across the Curriculum is first and foremost the use of writing to learn. This document explains the policies and criteria for courses to receive the WAC designation and serve as substitutes for ENC 1102. A separate document offers criteria for 2000-4000 level WAC courses.
PROCEDURAL STATEMENTS:
1. All courses that substitute for College Writing II will be taught by full-time faculty.
Courses that substitute for College Writing II, which are to be taught outside the context of the first year writing program, must offer a sustained focus on teaching writing in a disciplinary context. Substitutes for College Writing II must provide students instruction and writing opportunities that are equivalent to those offered in College Writing II. The WAC Committee has determined that full-time faculty have the most experience and training for delivering these courses. 1
2. All Teaching Assistants who will take primary responsibility for a College Writing I or II course and who do not have at least eighteen hours of credit in the discipline in which the course is taught must take a teaching seminar before or during their first term of teaching, attend supervised, semester-long colloquia in subsequent semesters until they have earned the eighteen credits, and be mentored by designated tenure-line instructors.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) policy requires:
Graduate teaching assistants who have primary responsibility for teaching a course for credit and/or assigning final grades for such a course, and whose professional and scholarly preparation does not satisfy the provisions of Section 4.8.2 must have earned at least 18 graduate semester hours in their discipline, be under the direct supervision of a faculty member experienced in the teaching discipline, receive regular in-service training and be evaluated regularly.In order to comply with this policy, a TA with fewer than 18 graduate hours is NOT the course instructor. Instead, such TAs are course facilitators that:
- conduct class discussions in accord with syllabi written by full-time faculty
- grade papers under faculty supervision according to departmental and/or programmatic criteria
- maintain class records
- provide tutorial assistance in class and during office hours
- may deliver lectures as a teacher-in-training, under the supervision of the course Instructor of Record (IOR)
3. All faculty who teach WAC courses will either attend a three-day WAC Curriculum Development seminar or a support program that is collaboratively determined by the Director of WAC and representatives within departments that are sponsoring the courses.
Florida Atlantic University’s Writing Across the Curriculum Committee, University Undergraduate Programs Committee, and Faculty Senate have determined that specialized WAC training is important if the WAC program is to be consistent, sustained, and successful because:
- Special seminars and workshops can establish a consistent set of pedagogical values that are transferable across the disciplines.
- Such seminars and workshops create opportunities for increased collaboration among faculty—building coalitions.
- The training requirement helps faculty better support student writing across the university.
The WAC Director works with departments across the university to ensure that a realistic support schedule is available to faculty prior to teaching WAC courses. The WAC Committee realizes special circumstances will arise occasionally. In these cases, department heads are asked to request in writing an exception from the WAC Committee by submitting a request to the WAC Committee chair or the Director of WAC. Once an exception is granted, the WAC Director will work with the department to provide the necessary support in a timely manner. In these special cases, faculty members teaching WAC courses for the first time may do so without training but only for a single semester. Those faculty members must participate in a WAC training seminar before teaching another WAC course.
GENERAL CRITERIA:A. Information about the Course and Assignments
1. Assignments should promote critical thinking, reading of sustained and challenging texts, and analytical writing.
The purpose of writing across the curriculum is to help students better engage the content of the course in thoughtful and reflective ways. WAC pedagogy assumes that:
- Engaged reading, writing, and learning are closely tied.
- Courses should incorporate frequent writing assignments that help students learn the subject matter of the course as well as discipline-specific ways of thinking and writing.
- Short, often ungraded, writing assignments can help students reflect on and engage course content that lectures and exams cannot (writing to learn activities).
- Writing assignments should be sequenced so that the readings inform each other and provide opportunities for reinterpretation and revisions across the term.
- Knowledge acquired in the disciplines within the context of analytical writing is more likely to transfer to other courses than memorized facts.
2. The course should encourage students to recognize and examine intellectual and/or cultural assumptions that emerge in the readings and in their own writing.
When writing assignments require thoughtful reflection, students can learn to gauge how their writing is perceived by others. They can rethink problematic assumptions and/or claims. Typically, then, writing assignments should promote:
- Critical thinking that engages students in discipline-specific problems
- Analytical writing that enables students to recognize the limitations of their arguments
- Revision that includes justification of claims
- Analysis of academic discourse rather than uncritically rehearsing of gathered information.
3. WAC syllabi should require students to prepare three or more writing assignments, each of which must be revised at least once. (A revision is a substantial reworking of a draft as distinct from editing and correction of surface errors.)
Because disciplinary-based 1000-level WAC courses serve as substitutes for College Writing II, they must offer an equivalent number of assignments, and writing instruction must be the primary focus. Revision is a central tenet of WAC pedagogy that allows students to:
- Work through logic
- Generate, reflect on, and clarify ideas
- Recognize when further justification/support/evidence is needed
- Learn from their experiences
- Focus on organization and structure
- Write initial drafts without the pressure of conforming to conventions or managing rigid time constraints
4. The course should include both finished and unfinished writing and preparatory writing such as drafts, revisions, journal writing, written responses to texts, etc.
The WAC Committee recommends using a variety of assignments to help students develop their "writing to learn," abilities, i.e., writing to examine, critique, and master material in the discipline. However, not all writing needs to be graded, and not all writing or grading must take the same amount of effort and time. Ideally, students in WAC courses will write both formal papers that require polished prose and informal (often un-graded) papers that allow students to explore ideas and to experiment with writing strategies. Informal writing can help students reflect on and synthesize course material and provide opportunities for them to discover promising ideas for formal papers. Examples of informal and/or non-graded writing include:
- Proposals
- Drafts
- Journal entries
- Reading logs
- Free writing
- Written responses to assigned readings, lectures and activities
- Group writing or oral presentations
5. Class time should be devoted to discussions about how to improve students' writing and helping students understand how to complete and revise their responses to the writing assignments.
Schedules may be full, daily calendars of writing assignments or weekly summaries. Faculty are encouraged to review a few examples of schedules found in current WAC syllabi.
Typically, when faculty allocate relatively small blocks of time to discussions of student writing, substantial amounts of evaluation and grading time can be saved.
Some class time scheduling options include:
- Discussion of assignments and of evaluation criteria
- Analysis and discussion of sample student papers, including writing-in-progress and formal drafts
- Peer group activities that prepare students to write a particular paper, such as sharing and discussion of plans, outlines, strategies, theses and drafts
- Discussion or presentations of students' research in progress
- Instruction about how to write a particular type of paper or solve a common writing problem
- Discussion of particular elements of a paper such as thesis statements, introductions, topic sentences, conclusions, etc.
Devoting class time to focus on understanding assignments and developing writing strategies helps students to:
- Submit essays that respond more effectively to assignments
- Develop writing and revision strategies
- Have sufficient time to draft their assignments
- Develop increased facility in managing discipline-specific writing and the conventions of academic writing
- Plan their time for the semester
- Receive substantive feedback
- Revise more effectively
6. Faculty will help students learn to read and comment on one another's papers, focusing primarily on substance, i.e., issues that would be addressed by global revision.
All first year writing courses use peer review to help students improve their writing and thinking:
- Students learn to identify conceptual and organizational concerns in disciplinary writing rather than primarily editing.
- Important questions arise in peer review sessions that would not otherwise emerge.
- Students are exposed to perspectives and interpretations other than their own.
- Students are more likely to understand the function and benefits of faculty critique/commentary when they develop these skills themselves.
- Faculty can gain insight for providing efficient and effective commentary.
- Collaborative work such as commenting helps cultivate a collaborative classroom environment.
7. The syllabus must make it clear that writing assignments will count for at least 80% of the course grade.
This criterion identifies writing as a tool for learning. When writing counts for the majority of the overall course grade, a student cannot successfully pass without demonstrating writing proficiency. "Graded writing" typically means formal writing assignments submitted for a grade. However, not all writing needs to be graded, and not all writing or grading has to take the same amount of effort and time. Informal writing may also contribute to the course grade. As a rule of thumb, students should not be allowed to pass an ENC 1102 substitute course unless their writing meets the standards for average college-level work. Most syllabi assign at least 80% of the course grade as formally graded writing assignments.
8. Each student is required to write a target of 5,000 words (+/- 1,000).
This target is intended to help professors gauge the minimum amount of writing that is typically considered appropriate for College Writing II substitute syllabi. The state no longer maintains a word count target that students must achieve to fulfill Gordon Rule credit. WAC syllabi need not make specific note of the word count. However, reviewers examine the page requirements listed in the assignment details to determine whether a syllabus satisfies the minimum University expectation of about 5,000 words.
B. The Syllabus 2 Should Include:
1. A schedule for writing assignments that allocates class time for discussion of assignments, revisions, and peer review;
The schedule of writing assignments shows how writing is integrated into the fabric of the course and helps students to:
- Plan their time for the semester
- Have sufficient time to draft their assignments
- Receive substantive feedback
- Revise more effectively
2. Expectations for participation:
Students must be made aware of their responsibility to be present and prepared for and engaged in class activities. Typically, students are much more successful when they see themselves as stakeholders in the intellectual activities of the class. Participation is a key element of that success because:
- Articulating responses and other communicative actions expose the strengths and limitations of various perspectives and practices;
- Students have the opportunity to see course concepts and values in action;
- Students are held accountable for their contributions to the knowledge generated in the classroom.
3. An explanation of grading policies and typical class routines;
This explanation should include a breakdown of grades by scores and/or percentages. Class routines (such as peer review sessions, class discussions, and use of course texts and materials) should be detailed so that students can be prepared and accountable.
4. An explanatory statement of WAC requirements and how they fulfill Florida's 'Gordon Rule' requirement;
To fulfill the State's Gordon Rule requirement, students must complete:
- Six (6) semester hours of English coursework
- Six (6) semester hours of additional coursework in which the student is required to demonstrate college-level writing skills through multiple assignments
- Complete successfully ENC 1101 with a grade of 'C' or better
- Complete ENC 1102 (or a WAC course that has been approved as a substitute for ENC 1102) with a grade of 'C' or better
- Complete successfully two additional 2000-4000 level WAC certified courses with a grade of 'C' or better
- Developing increased understanding and proficiency
- Acquiring course content
- Understanding accepted disciplinary forms, discourses, and values
5. A list of class policies including but not limited to attendance, late papers, format for written assignments and plagiarism;
Departments are encouraged to have a departmental policy on plagiarism. We recommend that you follow the same procedure as the Department of English and have students sign a statement stating that they have read (and consequently understand) your plagiarism policy. To help them avoid plagiarism, students will need guidance on how to document the sources they cite. Citing on-line sources can be a challenge.
One place where you can find MLA, APA, Chicago, CBE and other styles for citing on-line sources is located at www.bedfordstmartins.com/online. Tell students about Turn-It-In, Safe-Assign, and how easy it is to detect plagiarism in general.
6. An explanation of how students will receive substantive feedback on graded assignments and drafts that students are required to revise;
Formative assessment typically provides comments that elicit:
- Re-examination of problems
- Restructuring of logic and/or ideas
- More appropriate or careful responses to the assignment
7. Major writing assignments and an overview of general criteria for evaluating assignments:
While most faculty provide written descriptions of assignments at the time they are assigned, an early explanation of writing assignments in the syllabus, along with general grading criteria, provides students and the WAC Committee with:
- A clear representation of the assignment expectations and objectives
- Insight into the relationship between reading and writing in the course
- An idea of how writing assignments are distributed across the term
- An advance understanding of how each assignment will be evaluated
8. A description of the error tracking mechanisms that will be used in the course:
Faculty must help students to employ correct and conventional English within the context of their own writing rather than by isolating patterns of error in surface conventions via drills/exercises/quizzes. Students need help developing systems for:
- Identifying and understanding the patterns of error recurrent in their own writing
- Taking responsibility for proofreading and correcting their patterns of error
For a strategy that we have found useful please see the Error Log on the side menu from the University Center for Excellence in Writing:
http://www.fau.edu/ucew/
9. All WAC Approved Syllabi must contain the following language informing Students about the University-wide WAC Assessment project:
If this class is selected to participate in the university-wide WAC assessment program, you will be required to access the online assessment server, complete the consent form and survey, and submit electronically a first and final draft of a near-end-of-term paper.
The Writing Across the Curriculum program has developed an assessment program to determine the impact that the WAC program is having on student writing. Approximately 10 classes each fall and spring and five over the summer will be randomly selected to participate in the assessment project, a total of about 500 students a year. To participate, students must log onto a specially designed web interface with their FAU ID, take a ten minute survey and submit a first and revised draft of a paper written close to the end of the term. All course and student information will be removed from the files. The assessment will not affect course grades in any way. No faculty members will be identifiable once the data is collected. Raters are normed with a campus-wide rubric. They rate the sets of papers, and then the data is downloaded into statistical software for examination. If students consent to have their data included in an IRB-approved study, the results from their surveys and rated papers will be pooled with additional data from the office of Institutional Effectiveness. Once gathered, all identifying information from the surveys will be removed, and the data will be analyzed. We plan to publish the results of the assessment, the web interface we have designed, and our procedures. We will use the data to improve the WAC program on campus.
On Dec 7th, 2007, the Faculty Senate approved a mandate that all students in selected classes must participate in the assessment process. Faculty whose classes are selected play an essential role in this process. They must introduce and enforce the mandate. Near the beginning of each term, the 5-12 randomly selected faculty members will be notified of the assessment procedures in a formal print mailing with directions to help their students participate. A reminder note will be sent over email near mid term. Students will also be notified individually via email and be given a bookmark by their course instructor with the necessary information. Upon completion of the consent form, survey, and paper uploads, students will receive an automated receipt of participation. A week before classes are over, faculty will receive an automated list of all students from their class who have submitted their materials. Faculty will need to remind students who have not yet participated to do so. Faculty receive another update on reading day, when all papers are required to be submitted. Students will have one additional chance to submit their work by the date of the final exam for the class. Faculty are encouraged to withhold grades on student papers from students for whom they have not received confirmation of participation. Faculty are discouraged from offering incentives to students for participation.
