The Need For Writing Across the Curriculum

A phrase that has been in use since the 1980s in both British and American academia is “Writing Across the Curriculum”. This is the movement that seeks to introduce writing in all academic disciplines, including sciences, computers, and arts, not just limiting writing to English or the social sciences. It is done mostly by incorporating writing exercises, such as keeping journals and completing writing exercises and assignments in all classes, whether at the secondary school or college or university level. Writing across the curriculum would have great results in Pakistan if educators in the country decided to adopt the movement into their schools and universities, producing students who have greater facility and confidence with the written word.

But why is there a need to integrate writing into all areas of learning? Why should educators emphasize writing in disciplines that do not traditionally seem to need it at first glance? According to Brenda Sully of the Writing Across the Curriculum project at Malaspina College in British Columbia, Canada, communication skills, which include writing, are critical in the workplace. A student who is proficient in writing is more likely to get and retain a job than one who is not.

Furthermore, think of all the writing that is necessary in most jobs these days: reports need to be written, memos circulated, ideas brainstormed and then captured onto paper to be disseminated to colleagues and superiors. The skill of writing is necessary whether you are an engineer, an architect, a social worker, or a businessperson, and if a young graduate does not know how to write well, he or she will be at a great disadvantage compared to his or her competitors. For Pakistanis this is an even more crucial skill as they prepare to enter workforces that involve communication with internationally-based counterparts and colleagues, presenting papers at international forums and conferences, and reporting in written format (e-mails, memos, papers, etc.) to heads of corporations that may be situated in English-speaking countries.

Students need to develop critical thinking abilities – the ability to “solve problems, examine ideas carefully… (and) the ability to incorporate and synthesize information”, as Brenda Sully puts it in her excellent Web article on Writing Across the Curriculum. Whether a student is strong in mathematics, biology, languages, or history, critical thinking is key to the student being able to be an active, rather than passive, participant in his or her own education. We all agree that in Pakistan rote learning, or the memorization of myriad facts and dates and numbers, is the way to produce a generation of parrots who cannot think beyond what is taught to them in the textbooks. What Pakistani educators need to do is nurture and develop critical thinking skills in their students in order to break out of the trap of rote memorization, which is about as useful to students these days as learning Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Critical thinking skills allow students to take what they have learned and go several steps further with that information, manipulating it in their minds and applying it to situations that they will encounter in further education and later on in their careers. Writing is just such a way to develop these critical thinking skills, because when you have to put your ideas down on paper and support them with evidence and argument, you sharpen your ability to reason, to extrapolate, and to draw conclusions from the information presented to you. Writing exercises challenge students to go beyond what is presented to them, and encourage them to come back with their own ideas and thoughts, which they will then develop into well thought out and well reasoned arguments. No student comes into school knowing how to write perfectly. Talk to teachers across the board and they will all agree that most students have problems with their writing that need to be addressed in the classroom. These problems, as outlined by Art Young and Toby Fulwiler in their book Writing Across the Disciplines: Research Into Practice, include:
Attitude (the motivation and interest of students) Mechanical Skills (spelling, punctuation) Organizational skills (how to piece it together) Style (conventions appropriate to task and audience) Reasoning ability (thinking, logic) Knowledge (something to write about)

According to Virginia Cooke, author of Writing Across the Curriculum: A Faculty Handbook, students at the secondary school level also exhibit a lack of understanding what is expected of them in college or university, poor vocabulary skills, and an inability to grasp questions or analyze problems.

But writing across the curriculum can help with all these problems. A miracle cure? Of course not. A Writing Across the Curriculum program will simply give all students the opportunity to practice their writing at a deeper and more intensive level than the simple forty-five minute period and related homework assignments of an average English class. When students must write in a variety of settings and about a variety of topics, they are doing the writing equivalent of training for a sports event: they are exercising their muscles, practicing their techniques, drilling their skills over and over again. As they become used to writing, this discipline will start to become second nature to them, and with most other disciplines, including learning to play a musical instrument, learn the perfect serve in tennis, or perform quadratic equations, “practice makes perfect”.

But not only will increased writing help students to write better, it will help them to learn better. By forcing students to verbalize their ideas consciously, instead of in a haphazard way (for example during classroom discussions which can easily become random and disorganized), they become adept at understanding more complex thoughts, and are able to operate at a “higher level of abstraction”, as outlined by Virginia Cooke. Brenda Sully notes that this is especially important in disciplines where students are required to think through and evaluate problems, such as physics and mathematics. According to Virginia Cooke, "when we ask our students to write ... [we] are encouraging them to engage actively with the subject matter in our disciplines: to see patterns, connect ideas, make meanings - in other words, to learn.”

If you want to start incorporating writing more into your classroom, you will have to think carefully about how you want to go about the process. A writing assignment should always satisfy the following objectives, says Sully:

1. Students learn something significant by doing it
2. They are interested in the writing
3. The assignment is within their reach, and they can complete it with the information, time, and instructions at their disposal
4. The teacher should enjoy reading the results, and grades the assignment using clear, consistent criteria

Let’s take a look at how writing can help students in science. In science classes, one of the main assignments in a science class is usually the preparation of a report after conducting an experiment in which writing is an obvious and necessary skill, but students are also often required to read biology articles in order to go into greater depth about the subject being taught than what is available in a textbook. A biology teacher can assign a sample biology article to students, who would be required to take notes, and then discuss the article – does the paper adequately meet the requirements that the scientific community has outlined; does it follow the scientific method; what are the different parts of the article and what are their functions; what is an abstract; and so on. Students can then submit their own laboratory reports to the same kind of peer critique. This type of exercise was outlined in Art Young and Toby Fulwiler’s Writing Across the Disciplines; in following this kind of exercise students learn how to perform a kind of writing technique required by the discipline of biology, both by examining a professional sample and then by writing their own reports.

Furthermore, the biology teacher can assign short writing exercises at different stages of the classroom biology experiment. Virginia Cookee gives us some samples of this:

• Paragraphs and short papers summarizing laboratory results, procedures and equipment descriptions; defining and or describing specimens; comparing and/or contrasting taxonomic groups.

• Short written exercises on Bio Abstracts, Science, Citation Index, ERIC, and/or Index Medicus all of which are indexes.

• Informative abstracts of scientific journal articles.

• Written text to accompany graphs, illustrations, micrographs, etc.

• Short evaluations of biology seminars, lectures, or texts to stimulate short position papers by scientists.

• Letter to the Editor for a scientific journal.

• A short library research paper designed to give the student experience in researching scientific literature, specifically Bio Abstracts and Science Citation Index, or a student proposal.

• An original scientific research report designed to give the student an opportunity to conduct and report original scientific research


Here are some examples of writing assignments in mathematics classes by Diane Miller, author of an article entitled “Begin Mathematics Class with Writing”:

General Mathematics. You have studied the commutative property for addition and multiplication of real numbers. Not all operators are commutative. If you were asked to explain to a friend why division is not commutative, what would you say?

Algebra. Suppose a friend asks you to check the answers to some homework problems. Would you mark the following problem correct or incorrect. Explain why...(a + b)² = a² + b²

Geometry. Suppose your younger sister or brother was working some problems that applied the Pythagorean theorem, that is, a² + b² = c². After working a few problems (s)he asked you, "How do we know that the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse?" What would you say? Although the space in this article is not sufficient enough to go into the full methodologies of writing across the curriculum, you can see that there is a lot of scope for including writing in all disciplines.

For more information, the Internet is an excellent resource, and you merely have to type “Writing Across the Curriculum” in an Internet search engine to find many resources on the movement, its practitioners, and their successes and failures with these methodologies.

Whether or not you agree, however, with the need to incorporate writing into all areas of education, it is clear that writing is communication, and in today’s world, communication is key. Pakistani students need to learn this area of communication if they are expected to compete with the global community both in the university and the workplace; why not give them all the skills they will need in order to measure up? In business terms, think of it as a sound investment in the workplace, and the workforce, of the future.

Sources

Cookee, Virginia. Writing Across the Curriculum: A Faculty Handbook. Victoria. Centre for Curriculum and Professional Development, 1991.

Miller, Diane L. "Begin Mathematics Class with Writing." The Mathematics Teacher. Vol. 85, June,1991, 129-36.

Sully, Brenda. Malaspina University-College’s Writing- Across-the-Curriculum Project (Web article), 1995.

Young, Art and Toby Fulwiler. Writing Across the Disciplines: Research Into Practice. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cooke Publishers, 1986.