Research on Activity/Initiatives Worldwide Devoted to Student Writing in Disciplines
Begun in 2006, this project aims to identify, compile, analyze, and facilitate activity and interest in writing in the disciplines in higher education around the world. We are interested both in first-language and English-language initiatives. We are also interested in graduate-level initiatives, but we pay primary attention to undergraduate, college-university activities focused in disciplines, as well as academic writing centers or similar services devoted to working with students and faculty/staff in and across disciplines.
The Project is sponsored in part by the International Network of WAC Programs (INWAC).
Project Links
- Objectives
- Preliminary Survey (for those responding from institutions outside the US); this survey is also available in French, German, Russian, and Spanish, for those who would prefer to respond in those languages.
Our thanks to the following scholars, who have contributed the translations:
Céline Beaudet, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada, et Sylvie Plane, Université Paris-Sorbonne, France (French)
Paula Carlino, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (Spanish)
Nina Shevchuk-Murray, University of Nebraska, US (Russian)
Annette Verhein, Hochschule für Technik, Rapperswil, Switzerland (German).
- The US/Canada survey is no longer available online. For more information and for the first set of statistical results, click here.
Please forward this information to anyone in any country whom you think might be interested. We would like to hear about any activities relevant to writing in disciplines, such as:
- teacher/staff development or discussions with staff/faculty across disciplines
- actual or contemplated courses, programs, centers, or writing-support services
- individual teachers or small groups of teachers/staff who have made the improvement of student writing or the use of writing as a tool for learning an explicit priority in their disciplinary courses.
Confidentiality: At this stage of the research, all survey responses are confidential, for data-gathering purposes only. Once the project moves to identifying specific scholars and sites for further research, each respondent will be asked for permission to be included in the network. Similarly, if researchers wish to use names of institutions or names of specific respondents in reporting any data from the survey responses at conferences or in publications, permission will be asked and received from the particular respondents before the names may be used.
Further Note on Confidentiality: As of March 6, 2008, the Preliminary Survey for respondents from outside the U.S. and Canada includes the following question: "Would you be willing to have your name and institutional affiliation be made public in reports of this research?" If you answer "yes" to this question, you are giving us permission to publish your name and institution in any reports we make on this research. If you have questions about confidentiality, please write to us.
For those less familiar with the acronyms:
*WAC refers to "writing across the curriculum" and usually implies an initiative in an institution to assist teachers across disciplines in using student writing as an instructional tool in their teaching
*WID refers to "writing in disciplines" and usually implies that writing is occurring in some form as assignments in subjects or courses in one or more disciplines in an institution; it also refers to research that studies the theory, structure, and rhetorical properties of writing that occurs in disciplines, whether in teaching the discipline or in disciplinary scholarship.