{"id":7439,"date":"2017-03-06T22:30:41","date_gmt":"2017-03-07T03:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/?p=7439"},"modified":"2018-04-13T14:06:43","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T19:06:43","slug":"waterloo-journal-building-wac-support-where-there-is-no-wac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/waterloo-journal-building-wac-support-where-there-is-no-wac\/","title":{"rendered":"Waterloo Journal: Building WAC Support Where There Is No WAC"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Stephanie White –<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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Stephanie White is an Instructional Developer at the University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence. She consults with instructors about teaching writing and communication and\u00a0assists with teaching development programs for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Stephanie holds a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison, where she taught composition,\u00a0tutored in\u00a0the Writing Center, and served as TA Assistant Director of Writing Across the Curriculum. Stephanie White, back when she would spend hours writing and\u00a0taking selfies to procrastinate<\/del>\u00a0in the Wisconsin Historical Society library. <\/i><\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik’s ageless Paris to the Moon<\/em> off and on over the last year, savouring it in small portions like a bottle of\u00a0good Scotch. Gopnik’s descriptions of life in Paris for a non-Parisian family, originally published as a series of New Yorker<\/em> essays called “Paris Journals,” are warm and acute. They’ve made me think again about the “outsider” perspective, about why travel writing is so powerful and why anthropologists rarely study their home cultures. And they’ve made me consider my own perspective as a Canadian returning home to Ontario after spending twelve years in the U.S. So I thought I’d invite you to read my own journal entry here about life as a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) consultant in a university culture where WAC is rarely mentioned.<\/p>\n

Going Alt-Ac<\/strong><\/p>\n

I just celebrated my one-year anniversary as “Instructional Developer, TA Training and Writing Support<\/a>” at the Centre for Teaching Excellence<\/a> at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. My manager\u00a0took me to lunch to celebrate, and we marveled that it had only been and had already been a year since I left a te\"\"aching position in the English department here at UWaterloo to take on this role. The shift to an alt-ac career wasn\u2019t something I saw coming, but when I read the job description for a newly created position with a focus on writing instruction, I couldn\u2019t resist applying and was thrilled to be offered the job.<\/p>\n

I now spend my days helping run two different\u00a0graduate student teaching development programs, supervising graduate-student workshop facilitators, and facilitating TA training in departments across campus. At the same time, I teach workshops and consult with instructors, departments, and even whole faculties (what you\u2019d call colleges in the U.S.) about designing, teaching, and responding to written assignments.<\/p>\n

A New Initiative<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an exciting time to be the designated resource when it comes to writing instruction here because UWaterloo, which has about 30,000 undergraduates, has recently begun implementing required small-section communication courses for the first time. At universities in Canada, there are often few distribution requirements for students, and communication courses aren\u2019t typically required. But at UWaterloo, each of the six faculties (Arts, Applied Health Sciences, Engineering, Environment, Math, and Science) must now decide in the next year how they will use designated\u00a0funding to provide\u00a0communication instruction to all of their students, with specific communication outcomes<\/a> in mind. My current position was created to support this shift.<\/p>\n

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Starting from scratch to create\u00a0UWaterloo-specific online WAC resources.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In response to this initiative, some faculties are working with the English and Speech Communication departments and the non-disciplinary English for Multilingual Speakers suite of courses to offer\u00a0more sections of existing courses designated for students from those\u00a0faculties. Some are designing new faculty-specific courses that highlight communication instruction. One faculty, after analyzing their existing courses, found that they were already offering courses that meet the required communication outcomes and are simply shifting requirements for students. Other faculties are still deciding, and some are leaving the details up to individual departments within the faculty. It gets complicated, but this is the typical decentralized Canadian way.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019ve been spending a lot of time networking with people on campus, getting my name out there, letting folks know I\u2019m available to help with the implementation of this new communication initiative as well as with any writing and communication assignments. As a result, I\u2019ve consulted with individuals, offered workshops, and begun creating online resources. I\u2019ve also attended department- and faculty-wide meetings about communication courses and consulted with the steering committee for this initiative.<\/p>\n

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Yes, I too still consistently rely on John Bean’s Engaging Ideas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Everything I Know About WAC…<\/h3>\n

Sometimes my role seems overwhelming, and the impostor phenomenon rears its head. But I\u2019ve been encouraged\u00a0by\u00a0how well my experiences in graduate school prepared me for this challenging position. I almost titled this post \u201cEverything I know about WAC, I learned from Brad Hughes,\u201d but I knew the always-humble Brad wouldn\u2019t appreciate the flattery. Still, there\u2019s no escaping the fact that the approaches I take when consulting with faculty across the UWaterloo campus find their roots in my work with Brad in the Writing Across the Curriculum program and the Writing Centre at UW\u2013Madison.<\/p>\n

While co-consulting along with Brad with faculty members and committees and in our many hours of conversations about writing in the disciplines, I learned to see the rich connections between disciplinary content and writing (highlighted so well on this very blog last week<\/a> by Kathleen Daly), and I learned fruitful ways of responding to instructors’ struggles with student writing (check out my CTE blog post<\/a> on this topic from earlier this year).<\/p>\n

Of most importance to my current work, I learned what kinds of questions to ask to draw out instructors\u2019 own writing expertise and experiences. Here are some of the questions I often ask when talking\u00a0with disciplinary instructors:<\/p>\n