WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM COMMITTEE
MINUTES OF THE 3/1/06 MEETING
Present: Maria Carrig, Leonard Schulze, Mark Snavely, David Steege, Alan Wallace
Mark Snavely reported that he has set up a blog for WAC (http://www.carthage.edu/campuslife/committees/wac). Minutes and other relevant information may be sent to him by email to be uploaded.
The committee discussed the potential problem that departments may designate primarily first-year courses as WI. It is not in the spirit of WAC to have freshmen take more than one WI course at once. Rather, WI courses should be distributed throughout a student’s four years at Carthage. It was suggested that the committee should meet individually with department chairs and interested faculty, to discuss how to distribute WI courses in that department. The committee agreed to invite the Business Department to the March 27 meeting.
The committee discussed the fact that assessment of the program needs to conducted at the same time as the program is being implemented; this should include tracking when students take their WI courses.
Leonard Schulze went over his conversation with Heritage Oversight Committee. He explained that the ongoing assessment of writing in the college needs to be coordinated with the assessment of oral communication, especially as there seems to be some dissonance between the approaches to teaching these two forms of communication.
Catalog copy for WAC is now on the web. The committee needs to go over the final WAC criteria to be distributed to faculty. Alan Wallace prepared a slightly longer document to go along with the basic criteria, that expresses the spirit of WAC and gives fuller guidelines. Both documents can be distributed at the same time to departments and faculty.
The committee agreed that the Heritage program will be the first class to implement Writing Intensive, and will need to submit a formal proposal. The committee will create an application form, and also will give HOC the WAC criteria they need to set up their courses as WI. Separate application forms will be submitted for Heritage I and Heritage II.
Some questions arose as to whether a particular course, such as senior seminar, will need to submit a new application each time the course is taught. It was agreed that a renewal form would be needed for such a course.
The committee will gather model application forms for the next meeting, and set target dates to have the forms ready.
The meeting adjourned at 4:25.