Archived Weblog Entry - 06/14/2004: "WAC"

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06/14/2004 Archived Entry: "WAC"

In a not-entirely new entry (but I'm just seeing it) Alex has some good things to say about WAC:

"WAC seems theoretically unachievable (and has been practically so as well), expect as an incarnation of the worst possible writing pedagogy: a product-oriented approach hinged on correctness. Unless, I think, one can convince scientists and social scientists of the rhetoricity of knowledge."

And towards the end:

"So in short I think the project of WAC must be founded on making connections between writing process as knowledge production and specific disciplinary developments that articulate the contingent and processural qualities of knowledge. This opens the doorway into the epistemological questions rhetoric raises and the means by which the writing process articulates a practice designed to complement a certain, rhetorical perspective on knowledge production."

WAC interests me for a couple of reasons:

My paper at Watson this Fall will critique WAC as not suitable to digital culture and network logic.

I recall an early meeting during my stint as WPA at UDM. The meeting was meant to bring together folks from across campus to address writing concerns, and I was to deal with various issues on the table - since I was the writing director. After my own critique of previous university work in first year writing and my policy for improvement was laid out, the dean wanted to know why we couldn't just do a WAC program. Why, indeed. No infrastructure to support it? No real logic behind it? No sense of rhetoric? No "connections" as Alex notes.
WAC is a flawed concept that is WACK, as I will talk at Watson. It makes odd assumptions about disciplinarity, adheres to a structure which doesn't seem to open up connections at all, and poses the "write to learn" model in a very limited manner. It makes assumptions about form (over content) and doesn’t seem to put much out there but abstract advice for WPAs which has nothing to do with pedagogy (“make sure you establish good working relations with other campus teachers”). WAC, like other writing instruction issues, searches out professional writing over rhetorical production, and forgets (or doesn’t know) how professions work across imposed boundaries anyway. It's WACK, dude.

Replies: 4 comments

Hi Bonnie
Yes, I guess the humor in the title can make it sound trivial, but I'm not convinced WAC ever went beyond English (or any signle entity model of expertise) but has instead used the ambiguous "write to learn" idea in a very limited fashion. To be "across" means more than positioning displines opposite one another. It means finding connections.

Posted by j @ 06/18/2004 02:49 PM EST

okay. all very theoretically nuanced and, well, "true." but even if WAC gets people to do writing to learn stuff, doesn't that at the very, very least make some dent in the product/correctness orietnation, normalizing writing as disciplinary work?

it's just too easy and possibly fun to call WAC "WACK". sorry. i think, as w/ our thinking about rhet/comp as a field, that very, very intelligent people need to complexify WAC as they localize broad concepts in specific ways. critique is a part of this work. but i hope you aren't planning to dismiss WAC altogether but to attempt to progress our conversations about what it is/might be.

because, well, writing as an English Only project is just not working, imho.

Posted by bonnie @ 06/18/2004 02:04 PM EST

Thanks, B. I'll need that reference.

Posted by j @ 06/15/2004 06:54 AM EST

Here's a link to the WAC page I put up on my mystory. It mentions that one "whack" article I told you about. (Note the hawk, whak anagram :)

http://mason.gmu.edu/~bhawk/bystory/wac.html

Posted by B. @ 06/14/2004 10:07 PM EST