Stephanie Van Horn

Oregon Writing Project

Report 4

Tchudi, Stephen N. Teaching Writing in the Content Areas: College Level.

Reading this publication should have inspired me, and it troubles me that it didn't. I found myself saying, "but that won't work for us." My colleague Sally Harrold, also an OWP grad, has been working with Writing Across the Curriculum in our college for the last two years. She has succeeded in bringing students into the Writing Center for help on papers for all their classes, incorporating content area tutors. She has found some success in getting faculty to work with her in supporting the tutoring.

However, what I hear is a commitment from the institution when Tchudi discusses the changes made in his setting. That seems lacking for us. I'd be interested in ways that that commitment could be brought about. I can only see that commitment being made at the Division Director level or through our Title III grant; our president and Dean of Instruction have very little commitment to academic concerns, particularly writing. I wish Tchudi had talked more about the process of putting Writing Across the Curriculum in place, what he or other institutions did to raise consciousness to the point of perceiving a need.

I did decide that one step I could take would be to conduct a survey across the campus community about how much writing is required in courses and how much interest faculty have in improving writing in their content areas. With Sally's partnership, we might be able to demonstrate concern and interest from content area faculty and get support from administration to free up release time to develop a stronger, more consistent program.

Aside from the issue of how to, I found some other areas of interest in Tchudi's discussion. Tchudi pays attention to the final stage of writing, the presentation, and suggests means of varying presentations and bringing more value to the completion of work. Our college has discussed an in-house publication of best student work to use as a supplementary text. Several of his suggestions would allow students to plagiarize. We've encountered that when speech outlines, for example, were put on reserve for students to see as models. Because most of my student writing is monitored during the stages of the writing process, I seldom encounter plagiarism problems. But I wondered how he would suggest that content area specialists who may not monitor writing because of a need for labs and lecture could support students' turning in original work.

I found one suggestion of particular value for my own content area, literature. Tchudi suggests the use of dialogues as a means of discovery, especially for the student having difficulty unpacking meaning from a text. The student engages a character, a narrator, a poet, or a poem in a question and answer or dialogue style discussion. It seems to me that a journal in this mode could really bring students toward reading more carefully and reading at several levels. My experience with the Gestalt/Fritz Perls method of counseling has supported reflective listening; this dialogue model seems to me to almost work like that. In addition, I suspect that the instructor's voice actually is the other voice functioning in the dialogue, much in the way that a therapist begins to be the voice in the client's mind. The dialogue process would seem to foster listening in class and recall as a means of approaching reading problems with the text, rather than having the class session be in some compartment separate from later study, as so often seems to happen for weaker students.