Writing Across the Curriculum

Writing across the curriculum is a movement within composition studies concerned with the use of writing in classes beyond composition, literature and other English courses. A 2006 to 2007 survey found that roughly half of American institutions of higher learning had some program that could be identified as writing across the curriculum, and a widely used definition frames it as a program that helps teachers across disciplines use student writing as an instructional tool. It is a programmatic effort to introduce multiple instructional uses of writing beyond assessment and forms part of the broader student centered pedagogy movement seeking to replace one way transmission of knowledge with more interactive strategies. It is mainly discussed in the context of American colleges and universities, though it has also been influential in Britain, chiefly at the K-12 level.