ABSTRACT
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is a generative movement that has fundamentally transformed the way we think about both writing and curriculum, and I am proud to be considered one of its founders. Before WAC, linear thinking dominated curriculum planning, exemplified by the impossible expectation that the English department would teach writing once and for all in a first-year course, freeing the rest of the faculty to teach pure content—whatever that is. This linear model also applied to constructing major academic programs by the accumulation of courses and to developing new curricular plans by adding courses— no transformation required, physical change, not chemical change. The underlying assumption is that anything important to student learning deserves a new, distinctive course, or several courses, titled and constructed to cover that subject area. Critical thinking, problem-solving, citizenship, numeracy, artistic sensibility, anything significant, it was thought, deserved to be covered in separate syllabi. Covering material is related to the epistemology of information exchange. “Uncovering material,” a phrase coined by Berkeley professor Donald McQuade (personal communication, n.d.), is characteristic of the infusion model and transformational change. WAC was the first major example of infusion and integration—hallmarks of twenty-first-century instruction and scholarship.
