False Dichotomies in WAC

Kirscht, Judy, Rhonda Levine, and John Reiff. “Evolving Paradigms: WAC and the Rhetoric of Inquiry.” College Composition and Communication 45.3 (1994): 369-80.

McLeod, Susan and Elaine Maimon. “Clearing the Air: WAC Myths and Realities.” College English 62.5 (2000): 573-83.

This week, I read two articles that overlapped so much that they merit a single, synthesizing post.  McLeod and Maimon’s 2000 article began with their discomfort during a WPA talk that misrepresented WAC in terms of false dichotomies that had been circulating for years.  “Clearing the Air” takes issue with four myths they see propagated even by prominent voices in the field: that WAC programs as “grammar across the curriculum”; that WAC and WID are opposing camps, with only the former valuing “writing to learn”; that writing to learn is superior to learning to write in the disciplines because of the latter’s excessive focus on “technical correctness”; and that WAC uncritically reifies higher education’s existing values (574).  They then offer two accurate defining characteristics of WAC: that it offers an alternative, more student-centered pedagogy to the sage on the stage method; and that it “is a programmatic entity made up of…faculty development, curricular components, student support, assessment, and an administrative structure and budget” (580).

Just after reading this article, I picked up Kirscht, Levine, and Reiff’s article from six years earlier.  In it, the authors decry the false dichotomy often made between writing to learn and learning to write in the disciplines.  They accept the reality of such a conflict to a greater degree than do McLeod and Maimon, but like those writers, they object to the generalizations and reductive descriptions circulating in the WAC discourse community.  After offering a theoretical grounding in Basseches’ social constructivist view, the authors suggest a new way of thinking about both WAC practices that allows them to layer, interact, coexist, and even converge.  They argue that the conventions of disciplines should be taught through practice to show how those conventions emerge from and support the ways of thinking and doing that characterize the discipline.  In other words, to practice the conventions is to practice the discourse, and, more importantly, to practice the discipline-specific ways of thinking is also to practice the discipline-specific conventions of writing. 

The authors offer a case study in which the form of the empirical study report results from the thinking practices—from hypothesizing to developing methods to analyzing data and discussing results—of the discipline of psychology.  The authors show that rhetorical concepts, especially the relationship between ethos and discipline-specific audience or discourse community, are best learned from the inside out as students write and think their way through a field’s distinctive processes before attempting to enact the conventions of a field.  Once students had wrestled with the ways of thinking in the field, the conventions had meaning and were not difficult to enact.

The authors offer these observations as a rhetoric-based bridge between writing to learn and learning to write in the disciplines.  While the claims they make on this front are a bit grand considering the limited evidence found in one case study, this article offered a useful answer to the “so what?” a practitioner might ask after reading the McLeod and Maimon piece.