Wendy (and others):
Good luck to you. Having looked at the WI model pretty extensively early in
our program at UT, I abandoned it as unworkable in our engineering context.
Speaking for the U of T folk you mention. My group is based in Engineering. I
am a Sr. Lecturer of Engineering; my colleagues, lecturers and sessional
lecturers. We have no affiliation with English or other department (or other
writing program on campus, though there are a number). While I have a PhD in
English, my colleagues have degrees in such fields as linguistics, theatre,
science and technology studies, education. We do not have any physicists
teaching writing or such thing, but most of our new initiatives involve
integrated team teaching of communication and some technical subject. We are
piloting two new courses, one with 150 1st yrs in a Engineering Strategies and
practice course which broadens the definition of communication to include
significant teamwork etc. in a context of design. That course is expected to
roll out to 900 students next year! Yikes. In addition, we are in the first
year of a new Design and Communication course in the 2nd yr of Electrical and
Computer engineering (375 students). This course integrates lab work,
communication seminars, lectures that are team-taught by me and a Computer
engineer. It's quite wild, I can tell you, but it is very exciting to situate
writing/speaking so close to where the students live (intellectually
speaking). My co-teacher and I share the lecture duties, including my
lecturing on computer architectures (still to come -- with much fear and
trembling [and a big dose of imposter syndrome]) and his lecturing on sentence
level revision (he's trembling too).
I would say, in principle, everyone should constitute writing faculty. One of
the best faculty models that I've looked at for the kind of thing you're
thinking about comes from the John S.Knight program at Cornell (director was
Katie Gottschalk). Also look at the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Writing at Minnesota (under Lillian Bridwell-Bowles). Both of those
institutions put an emphasis on training disciplinary specialists to teach
writing within their disciplinary context.
Hope that helps,
Rob Irish
Quoting Wendy Strach <[log in to unmask]>:
> Greetings all!
>
> I'm seeking information from you about the academic homes of faculty who
> teach writing and particularly who teach writing in the disciplines.
> We are wondering what proportion of people who are teaching writing come
> from disciplines other than English or Education.
>
> Could you please let me know if you have a unit/centre or courses taught
> by,
> say a physicist, who is teaching writing in physics? I'm wondering about
> the academic backgrounds of people who are in those active programs in
> engineering and business at U of T and elsewhere; what about medical
> schools?
>
> SFU is still in the developmental stage of implementing the new
> W-requirement and we are looking at who should constitute the faculty who
> either assist others in their disciplines or otherwise teach
> discipline-specific writing courses.
>
> Any hints or links or numbers very welcome! Many thanks!
>
> Wendy
>
>
> Wendy Strachan, Ph.D.
> Director, Centre for Writing-Intensive Learning
> Simon Fraser University
> Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6
>
> Telephone: 604-291-3122
> Fax: 604-268-6915
> Website: http://www.sfu.ca/cwil
> email: [log in to unmask]
>
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