Assignments Across The Curriculum

Assignments across the Curriculum

In Assignments across the Curriculum, Dan Melzer analyzes the rhetorical features and genres of writing assignments through the writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Presenting the results of his study of 2,101 writing assignments from undergraduate courses in the natural sciences, social sciences, business, and humanities in 100 postsecondary institutions in the United States, Assignments across the Curriculum is unique in its cross-institutional breadth and its focus on writing assignments. The results provide a panoramic view of college writing in the United States. Melzer's framework begins with the rhetorical situations of the assignments—the purposes and audiences—and broadens to include the assignments' genres and discourse community contexts. Among his conclusions is that courses connected to a writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative ask students to write more often, in a greater variety of genres, and for a greater variety of purposes and audiences than non-WAC courses do, making a compelling case for the influence of the WAC movement. Melzer's work also reveals patterns in the rhetorical situations, genres, and discourse communities of college writing in the United States. These larger patterns are of interest to WAC practitioners working with faculty across disciplines, to writing center coordinators and tutors working with students who bring assignments from a variety of fields, to composition program administrators, to first-year writing instructors interested in preparing students for college writing, and to high school teachers attempting to bridge the gap between high school and college writing.

Writing Assignments Across University Disciplines

Writing Assignments Across the University Curriculum as a whole asks and answers these questions: What kinds of documents do students write in a wide range of university degree programs in Canada? How do instructors structure those writing assignments? That is, who is the audience for the assignments? Do students get formative feedback as they develop their documents? Do the patterns we found in a small liberal arts college (Graves, Hyland, and Samuels 2010) occur in other kinds of universities? We took our cue from an article by Anson and Dannels (2009) who pointed us toward the idea that students experience a curriculum through their degree progress in an academic program. Consequently, we needed to map the writing assignments according to how different departments organized these degree programs. Results that were organized by curricular unit (departments, faculties or colleges, or programs/units) were more significant than general statistics because students would progress through these courses to a degree. Several chapters in the book describe how this kind of curricular mapping provided a spark for curricular reform in Engineering, Education, and an entire small university. The last two chapters report on the instructors perspective on their assignments: what they were intending to do, and why they both resisted and engaged in curricular discussions.

Assignments Across the Curriculum