Sustaining Institutional Memories

of Writing across the Curriculum

A Graduate Student Perspective

Stacy Nall, Purdue University

Animal Sciences 311

Decade-long partnership between Writing Lab and undergraduate course in animal breeding; coordinated by two graduate students in rhetoric and composition.

“The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) component of ANSC 311 is a semester-long process of guided writing and revision designed to enhance your lifelong communications skills. To help you develop your writing, you will compose and revise three genres of business writing (letters, memos, and annotations) and a report on the Beef Simulation project. To help you with this endeavor, two WAC coordinators from the English department will help you to develop strategies for writing, revising, and proofreading” (Spring 2015 WAC Syllabus)

WPA Archives• Fragmentary Narratives of Program Development

Brad Peters “inherited three file-folders whose contexts very fragmentarily recorded the rise

and fall of two previous WAC initiatives” (104, my emphasis)

• Lack of Student Writing and other Pedagogical Documents

“Teachers must necessarily clean house of accumulated student writing from time to time, and

college archives still have little interest in preserving boxes of student writing that will be

reproduced annually” (Moon 8)

• Need for WPA Documentation Strategies

“WPAs are most often inundated with the paper of their daily work, but which documents we create and collect, how we collect them, and our inquiry process that helps us decide how these documents might be used in the future have only recently begun to be seriously studied.”

- Karen Bishop (2002)

Interview Questions

• Based on my own experiences as an ANSC 311 coordinator, it seems that much of the "training" of ANSC 311 occurs through conversations with Terry and the previous coordinators. Describe the training you received for your position as an ANSC 311 coordinator. Who oriented you to the program? What did they tell you? What materials did you receive before starting?

• Currently, the ANSC 311 coordinators have a Dropbox folder with material from previous semesters. Did you access these materials during your time as a coordinator? How did you use them? Which were most helpful to you? Which were less helpful?

• Do you have any suggestions for 1) the training of future ANSC 311 coordinators? 2) the documentation of the course (through Dropbox or other means)?

WAC Coordinator Responses

Conversations (Oral) The coordinators were oriented to the course through conversations with the professor and previous coordinators. This communication also provided context for past changes to the partnership.

Archives (Written) The coordinators referred to the archives when adapting previous course presentations and deciding how to comment on student papers. One coordinator used them for a research paper.

WAC Coordinator Recommendations

• Archive workflow process (through screen capture or technical instructions)

“It might be nice to have ‘practices’ documented in a more lasting fashion, for example, a screen cap video with workflow or technical instructions.”

• Document decision-making (to provide context for current practices)

“Looking through those files is really difficult because they don’t provide a complete picture. I think I ended up getting much more context regarding the ways that coordinators justified changes to the curricula from actual interviews with them.”

Some Final Suggestions

• Require graduate student coordinators to complete an evaluation form at the end of the semester, asking them to share major successes and challenges, changes made to the curriculum during their tenure, and suggestions for future coordinators.

• Save a selection of student writing and save to shared digital file (such as Dropbox).

• Archive graduate student research in university repository.