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On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Russ Hunt wrote much wonderful stuff, but then he said:

>  That [collaboration between faculty] will probably happen, but if you
start off
> advertising that collaboration is planned or expected my experience
> is that 80% of university faculty shy away like a horse from a
> sudden movement at their knees . . . It's easy enough simply to link
> the courses and ask the writing person to take that into account.
> Collaboration will follow.

Easy enough for who?  I don't think collaboration will follow, especially
not if you link first and tell the writing person later.  ("Oh, by the
way, we've linked your course with a particle physics course.  Can you
bone up on the literature and make it relevant in your class?")  Or you
could end up with a situation like we have here, where the Honors
Humanities classes are linked with writing courses . . . and the
humanities profs tend to think of the writing class as the place where
they (the humanities profs) can assign all the reading they didn't
manage to get to in *their* part of the link . . . almost irrespective
of what the writing person wants to do.

This is not to say that writing courses can't be profitably linked with
other courses.  It's just to say that the linkage needs to be a little
more intentional and a whole lot more equitable than asking the writing
person to take someone else's curriculum into account.  Collaboration
*doesn't* occur on a forced march -- at least no kind of collaboration
I'd want any part of . . .


Marcy


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                        Marcy Bauman
         Writing Program, University of Michigan-Dearborn
              4901 Evergreen Rd, Dearborn, MI 48128
                      fax: 313-593-5552
                 http://www.umd.umich.edu/~marcyb
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