On Monday, November 17th I attended the Writing Symposium panel discussion in Benson along with what appeared to be 75-100 faculty, staff, and students. The symposium was sponsored by the Department of English, the Teaching and Learning Center, and the Offices of the Dean and Provost. Tom McGohey of the English department gave a background on how this symposium came to be, referring to the results of the 2008 Wake Forest Faculty Writing Survey that expressed a need to make writing more visible across the University. He also introduced the members of the panel, Nancy Sommers, Joseph Harris, David Smit and Elizabeth Wardle.
The message of panel was that a focus on writing should be curriculum-wide, not just in the English department. A message that came across clearly in the writing survey results. The importance of both content and method was discussed as well, citing the importance of different academic disciplines conveying the various writing methods of their discipline to their students in the major.
Elizabeth Wardle was a very colorful speaker on the panel, describing the challenges of managing a writing programs for 50,000 students at the University of Central Florida with 77 writing instructors and 33 adjuncts who are paid only $1800 per course. The writing class at the University of Central Florida has students writing about writing rather than writing about some other topic or issue that is covered in the course.
After the 45 minute panel discussion each panel member met with faculty and staff in breakout groups in Tribble Hall. I was not able to attend the breakout groups but Sharon Snow and i enjoyed the panel discussion before heading back to ZSR. (Sharon may also have taken better notes than me on the panel discussion!) It was a very worthwhile event and interesting to hear some of the feedback from the faculty in the audience. While most were very in favor of more writing in the major, one faculty member in particular was concerned about the idea of focusing students on discipline specific writing at the undergraduate level, saying that perhaps getting into the methods of writing in a specific discipline should not necessarily be applied to undergraduates, but only to those at the graduate and PhD levels. All in all it was a living, engaging discussion on writing across the University curriculum.
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