Writing Across the Curriculum at BSC

In its mission statement, Bridgewater State College lists as its first priority a commitment to creating "an intellectual environment and campus culture that challenges all students to achieve academic excellence."  Writing is integral to this goal.

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is an educational reform movement that has been promoting writing as a mode of learning and as an activity central to critical thinking in institutions of higher education since the early 1980s. As WAC scholar Dr. Barbara Walvood has noted, "Writing is so complex an activity, so closely tied to a person's intellectual development, that it must be nurtured and practiced over all the years of a student's schooling and in every curricular area." One of the main tenets of WAC is that learning to write is a lifelong process, a process that cannot take place in a single course or a single semester but extends across a student's academic career and beyond.

At BSC, the WAC program was launched in 1999 as part of a collaborative effort among the nine Massachusetts state colleges to create a WAC network across the colleges, initiating programs at some of the colleges and strengthening programs at others. As stated in the original grant proposal, "WAC not only helps students improve their writing, but also provides opportunities to perpetuate and strengthen faculty conversations about teaching. In this way, such programs can have a genuine impact on the whole institutional quality of undergraduate teaching and learning."  Though the collaborative effort among the colleges has not been sustained, this vision continues to inform WAC at BSC.

Explore Our Website!

On this website, you will find information about WAC at BSC, the Faculty WAC Network, writing at BSC, teaching with writing, and WAC resources, as well as upcoming events.

Last Modified: March 14, 2008