CHAPARRAL

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Research Across the Curriculum

The Senate agreed last spring that we needed to create two task forces to address the issues of research and writing and to look for ways of making our teaching experience and students' learning experiences more worthwhile. I mentioned these task forces on Institute Day and now would like to elaborate more on the purposes and goals of these task forces. It is very important that the faculty knows about this work on the Senate agenda, and I promise to keep everyone posted as discussions and plans proceed.

WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM
Writing—we all do it, and we expect our students to do it. It is a skill that has been incorporated into just about every course offered on our campus. Most of us think about writing as a way of evaluating our students' ability, and it is. We give tests and/or assign papers and use these as tools to evaluate our students. We also know that writing does not stand alone as a method of evaluation. We ask them to bubble scantron forms or to make oral presentations. We watch video presentations they do or respond to emails they write. However, writing is not just a mechanism we use to evaluate and this task force was not created to see if we could or would standardize grading policies. Writing is a tool we all use to learn. This task force will engage us in a discussion of how we, the faculty, can use writing as a learning tool in our teaching and research. We need faculty from all the disciplines to engage in this discussion of writing as a mechanism for engaging students in active learning. Modern research reveals that the processes of analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating, and critical thinking are strengthened when we put our thoughts on paper. We live in a world that makes ever-increasing demands on us to think critically about what we have learned and then to make reasoned judgments based on those lessons. Writing to learn is the first, but only the first of the tasks this task force will address. How we all help students to write more clearly and concisely, how we help them to evaluate their own work and that of others, how students can learn to enjoy the writing experience will also to be considered. Each of us is familiar with the way our own discipline uses the written word to convey information. And we may be familiar with more than one approach/style/orientation, but we need to aid students to become familiar with the various approaches. Just as you would not want your lab report to look like an essay for my history class, I need my assignment in essay form. We can help our students to develop these skills so that they are comfortable writing in all areas.

RESEARCH ACROSS THE CURRICULUM
In a similar fashion, the Research Across the Curriculum Task Force was created to engage faculty from all of our disciplines in the skills of research in the modern world. "E-literacy" was the name of the video that we saw last year, which brought home the issues of technology-based information and its impact on education. Yes, the printed word remains a critical vehicle for transmitting information, but we cannot ignore technology and how it has transformed the sources and the ways in which we can gain knowledge. Just as a small, educated elite recognized the value of reading the book five hundred years ago, we need to see technologies such as the Internet and research databases as the equivalent of the book in our world.

Our students need to learn how to access these new information resources efficiently and effectively. They need to learn how to evaluate whether the information they access is trustworthy and adds to their skills and knowledge base. One task before this task force will be to explore how to best prepare our students to meet these expectations. What do we need to teach and what avenues will be used to accomplish this end are vital work of the task force.

To be honest, some of us also need to expand our knowledge base. Thus the task force has a dual responsibility of establishing ways of helping the faculty to retool and educating students to be literate on-line. We need to develop a curriculum and a means by which we can come up to speed, if we are not there yet.

Initially these task forces will be limited in size so that we can maximize communication and facilitate the work. Ultimately, however, the Senate hopes to see everyone involved. So I promise to keep you posted.