Writing Across the Curriculum is an everyday practice of incorporating writing to learn/discover and learning to write within a discipline-specific context and with a focus on the process. Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID), developed in the 1980s and 1990s in US colleges and universities with the goal of improving students’ writing abilities and engagement. An important starting point for WAC was the research by David Britton in the UK in the 1970s, which found that expressive writing (writing for the self, including journal writing) fostered a deeper understanding in grade school students. This idea of writing to learn has been developed by many researchers and the early work by Janet Emig (1977), in her article, “Writing as a Mode of Learning,” provides the groundwork for understanding the unique value that writing offers for learning as process and product. Successful learning, for Dewey and Piaget, is connective, selective, active, engaged and personal. Writing can enable all of these aspects of successful learning and can be part of every class. When writing is incorporated regularly, students can develop a writing practice that can be used in all learning situations.

From the research conducted by Richard Light (2004) at Harvard, in his book Making the Most of College, he found that students preferred courses that were highly structured, and had a high number of quizzes and many short writing assignments. Students indicated that they preferred this to large, high-value final projects and papers because students value quick feedback so that they have the opportunity to revise their work before the final grades. It is important to note that students actually found that the more writing that they had to produce for a course made students’ more interested and engaged in the course. Even though, as instructors, we might think that students want courses with the lowest amount of work, what students value in a course is the amount of constructive feedback and multiple opportunities for assessment. Writing, from formal assignments to informal and low-stakes writing, can all be embedded in a course to support students’ engagement and provide them with the opportunity to think more deeply about the material they are learning.

As Emig points out, writing is slow. As a process and as a pedagogical practice, writing slows down our thinking, the connection we are making and allows us to synthesize new information. I like to think of WAC pedagogy as similar to the slow food movement, which savors the process of making food, WAC pedagogy has a focus on writing to learn and learning to write that invites learners to slow down and engage their hands, eyes, and brain, and to enjoy the process of making knowledge.