Mission Statement

Writing Across the Curriculum’s mission is to provide faculty development to BSU faculty related to student writing.  This mission is carried out through three objectives: 

 

1.      Support faculty as they develop writing curriculum for courses across the curriculum and for writing-intensive courses such as First Year Seminar, Second Year Seminar, writing-intensive Core distribution courses, and writing-intensive upper-level courses in the majors.

2.      Work with other groups and initiatives on campus, to better understand areas of need and to showcase approaches to teaching with writing being used on the campus.

3.      Foster a culture of writing at BSC.  This culture includes a heightened awareness of the ways that writing can be used as a mode for learning and critically thinking, as well as a way to communicate within academic and professional arenas.  This culture also includes a heightened sense of community among faculty around the teaching of writing, so that faculty can turn to colleagues as they continue developing writing curricula, for both mentorship and the exchange of ideas.

WAC’s mission and objectives relate directly to BSU’s mission, which states that “BSU has a responsibility to educate the residents of Southeastern Massachusetts and the commonwealth.”  Writing lies at the heart of education in two salient ways.  First, writing is itself a means of learning, as, through the act of writing, writers interpret, reflect, connect new knowledge to known knowledge, explore memories, engage in the process of discovery, and better remember what they have written about.  Writing is also an important means of communication, allowing the writer to interact with readers both within and outside of school, in the community, in the workplace, in digital spaces, and across the globe.  For instructors, writing also provides a valuable means of assessment, as writing makes visible a student’s thought process, allowing an instructor insight into how a student is thinking through a problem, making connections between areas of knowledge, and becoming immersed in disciplinary discourse and ways of knowing.  Classrooms that employ writing as a means for teaching and learning are engaging in interactive pedagogy, fostering meaningful exchanges between the instructor and the students as well as between students, creating an atmosphere of collaborative learning.  When instructors scaffold writing projects by providing feedback to writing in progress, they enter into a mentorship role with the student, guiding thinking, the discovery process, and the uptake of disciplinary discourse and genres.  Thus, WAC supports what the BSU mission statement describes as “the intensity, diversity and richness of teaching and learning relationships forged between faculty [and] students.” 

 

Last Modified: November 15, 2010