Cornell's John S. Knight Writing Program Director Jonathan Monroe speaks at a session of the Institute for Writing in the Disciplines in the Princeton/Yale conference room of the Statler Hotel June 24. Charles Harrington/University Photography
Cornell's John S. Knight Writing Program held its first annual Summer Institute for Writing in the Disciplines last month on campus, introducing teams of faculty members and administrators from six other academic institutions to the program's conviction that writing enhances learning within and across all academic disciplines.
Program Director Jonathan Monroe, professor of comparative literature and the George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, explained what distinguishes Cornell's model from others. "Our approach to teaching writing isn't the traditional composition-oriented one, which keeps it centered solely within the English department. We believe writing is a content-based activity, which therefore grounds it in all the disciplines."
The Knight Writing Program supports writing courses at all levels of undergraduate education at Cornell. It administers writing seminars for first-year and upper-division students, tutorial writing classes and seminars in the teaching of writing. More than 30 academic departments and programs at the university participate.
"The primary indicator of the success of the writing in the majors program at Cornell has been the amount of student demand," said Keith Hjortshoj, the John S. Knight Director of Writing in the Majors. "Last year," he said, "we had to have a lottery because 100 students signed up for a writing-intensive biology class that only had room for 20."
Holding to its tenet that writing always occurs within specific contexts, the program based its June 22 to 26 Institute for Writing in the Disciplines on presentations by more than a dozen Cornell faculty members on a wide range of topics such, as cognitive studies, feminism and the state, and genetics, and on three-to-five-page narratives provided in advance by each of the participating institutions -- Arizona State University West, California State University at Monterey Bay, Duke University, Dull Knife Memorial College in Montana, SUNY College at Oswego, Temple University and the University of Michigan.
"The institute's emphasis on close, sustained collaboration," said Monroe, "is a vital part of the Knight Program's efforts to encourage the development of field-specific approaches to the teaching of writing at a broad range of institutions around the country. Each participating school helped generate and shape the discussions by bringing to the table its particular concerns about how this philosophy of teaching writing might influence curriculum development."
Cornell's Monroe, Hjortshoj, Katherine Gottschalk, the W.C. Teagle Director of the Freshman Writing Seminars, and Joseph Martin, director of the Writing Workshop, led discussions on various aspects of the Cornell program. Three visiting scholars on the teaching of writing, James Slevin of Georgetown University, David Bartholomae of the University of Pittsburgh, and Nancy Sommers of Harvard University, also participated. Slevin led a faculty workshop in writing instruction, Bartholomae spoke of the national politics of writing instruction, and Sommers shared the results of a longitudinal assessment study of student writing at Harvard.
"Trying to assess the improvement of student writing is a difficult thing, " Hjortshoj explained, but he pointed out that at Cornell students routinely say in evaluations that they feel they are learning more.
"Basically we feel that if the professors are happy, the teaching assistants are happy and the students report that intensive writing in their discipline enhances the substance of what they are studying, then the project is successful and worth continuing," he said.
The Knight Writing Program's ability to offer itself as a national resource has largely been facilitated by two things: First, although there are now about 450, out of more than 2,000, colleges and universities in the United States that use writing across the disciplines, Cornell was one of the first to move in this direction and now has more than 30 years of experience to share. And due to endowments from the John S. Knight and Park foundations, the Knight Writing Program has been able not only to host the summer institute (providing airfare, accommodations and honorariums to the participating universities), but also to sponsor the fourth biennial National Writing Across the Curriculum Conference from June 2 to 5, 1999, at Cornell. Hosted in Charleston, S.C., in previous years by Clemson University, the College of Charleston and The Citadel, the event is expected to draw 500 to 1,000 people to Ithaca.
"The Cornell Summer Institute for Writing in the Disciplines," said Monroe, "is the centerpiece of a three-year pilot project that is intended to establish Cornell as a national center for the study and development of writing in the disciplines. Next year, three more schools will join the mix and benefit, like the others already participating, from follow-up visits after the conference."
In conjunction with this national outreach effort, the three-year pilot grant also has enabled the Knight Program to expand its writing in the majors program from 20 to 30 course offerings a year. The grant includes funding as well for two visiting professorships over the next two years -- to be held by professors Charles Bazerman (University of California at Santa Barbara) and David Russell (Iowa State University), co-editors of Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum -- and six postdoctoral fellowships, the first two of which will involve teaching writing in the areas of psychology and sociology.
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