The Interdisciplinary Writing Program at Saint Vincent College spans to 1987, when faculty from a number of disciplines held informal discussions of issues and problems related to student writing. Once the program received support from the college, and then from external and internal grants, we gained a core of faculty who were interested in turning problems into opportunities, dialogue into projects. Group enterprises mixed persons from 2 or 3 different disciplines, and the English Department played a marginal role. Thus it is fair to say that the faculty at-large created the basis for Interdisciplinary Writing, and that the English Department turned its expertise to following the lead of the faculty. It is also fair to say the the relationship between the English Department, the freshman writing program and the rest of the faculty is reciprocal.
The overarching strategy in our writing program is to give students thoughtful writing assignments to be graded with an eye on developing student fluency in writing in the discipline. To this end, the Six Principles of Good Writing have comprised a system of checks and balances for making assignments, performing assignments, and grading assignments. This support structure works as a network which enhances communication between teacher and student as well as between teacher and teacher.
For this reason, we distinguish our program from Writing Across the Curriculum programs, which typically draw faculty toward a pre-existing center which tells them how to carry out the program. We call our enterprise, instead, the Interdisciplinary Writing Program, to emphasize the fact that the goals and habits of disciplines are represented equitably in all program pursuits. The Saint Vincent program is writing from within the curriculum, because it welcomes individuals who are interested in and practicing a discipline to share the problems they encounter as well as their experience and expertise--with students, as well as with other faculty. We are agreed that writing is not an academic monolith guarded over by an English Department. We emphasize audience, the Six Principles of Good Writing, and a process approach. Thus, the student learns to appreciate that writing lab reports, claim letters, abstracts, case studies, process analyses, journals and the freshman composition essay demand the application of different strategies and skills.
The program includes two tiers: a freshman composition course, and Writing-Designated courses in a discipline.
A freshman coming to the required Language and Rhetoric class encounters:
the Freshman Writing Lab-Classroom. Each student has access to a computer station, to an account, and to an electronic version of the course through BlackBoard, a web-based
the Six Principles, printed on a large poster, so that as students write they can have a quick, ready reference, which is also included in the department's writing textbook;
Tutors who keep hours in the lab during afternoon and evening. Tutors are students who have been successful in freshman English, and likely, in WD courses. They are upperclassmen who receive training in monthly meetings during the semester.
Thus, because Language and Rhetoric is a "core" requirement for all students, all Saint Vincent upperclass students (except transfers) will have been introduced not only to "Six Principles of Good Writing," but also to the learning styles--such as group work, peer-editing, clustering and mapping, drafting and dialoguing--which teachers of Writing-Designated courses are apprised of in the summer seminars, with a plan to employ those applications which best fit disciplinary substance.
When freshmen become upperclassmen and move on to courses in their majors, they
may enroll in the "Writing-Designated" courses in their fields as well as other fields. They learn the modes of expression in their chosen disciplines--which freshman English instructors have neither the time nor the training to teach. In our program, then, a student taking Business, Biology, History and Psychology as Writing-Designated courses would learn how to write letters of inquiry, lab reports, essay exams and abstracts--diverse forms of expression--but linked to the Six Principles, which provide a central reference as the student applies them to the various tasks.
re-encounter the "Six Principles of Good Writing," but in the WD course the teacher provides a transliteration, amplifying each principle, with the purpose of illustrating a particular cast of meaning a principle may take on as writing is done in that discipline or sub-discipline.
are familiar with the process approach to doing writing assignments.
are introduced to the style guides and rubrics associated with the discipline.
Because a teacher of a WD course can assume that students have had introduction to and practice in the Six Principles as general values in the writing and revising process in Language and Rhetoric, that teacher can rely on the students' having a rudimentary vocabulary of criticism, editing, and evaluation as he or she considers the operation of the Six Principles in the discipline-specific course.