About CWAC

CWAC pedagogy is founded upon collaboration, readerly dialogue, and service-learning. We use post-outlining as our primary revision strategy.

Mission Statement

At the Center for Writing Across the Curriculum (CWAC), we offer guidance and resources to enhance writing eloquence throughout Saint Mary's College of California. Pursuing the construction and expression of knowledge through shared inquiry, we are guided by the Burkean Parlor model of collaborative dialogue. Inspired by the Lasallian tradition of service through education, we nurture writers in a safe and productive space, welcoming to all, and we actively work against discrimination and silencing. We advise peer students through 1-1 sessions, small-group Writing Circles, and collaborative workshops for diverse disciplines. We award and publish excellent student art and writing. We offer faculty development workshops to guide the sharing of ideas among peers who are teaching Writing in the Disciplines or Collegiate Seminar courses, helping professors mentor students to use writing to learn disciplinary content. By supporting faculty and students, we help all writers enter more fully into scholarly dialogue, sharpening their skills, building their confidence, and connecting writing strategies across contexts.

Civic Engagement

We help others while learning about their disciplines, we grow as writers alongside our peers, and we continually reflect on issues impacting our Saint Mary’s community.

Readerly Dialogue

Advisers ask open-ended questions, responding as readers, in order to guide writers to deeply explore what they are learning and what they are trying to communicate.

Collaboration

Everyone brings knowledge to the table – the writer brings disciplinary expertise, and the adviser brings writing strategies. Advisers guide writers to read aloud and post-outline their drafts – to highlight main ideas or specific features, in order to compare what’s on the page with what the writer is trying to accomplish. Advisers also guide writers to diagnose and revise for grammar and style.

Inclusivity

Inclusive dialogue is a non-negotiable imperative. To that end, we affirm these “Principles of Community,” by Virginia Tech University:

We affirm the inherent dignity and value of every person and strive to maintain a climate for work and learning based on mutual respect and understanding.
We affirm the right of each person to express thoughts and opinions freely. We encourage open expression within a climate of civility, sensitivity, and mutual respect.
We affirm the value of human diversity because it enriches our lives and the University. We acknowledge and respect our differences while affirming our common humanity.
We reject all forms of prejudice and discrimination, including those based on age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, and veteran status.
We take individual and collective responsibility for helping to eliminate bias and discrimination and for increasing our own understanding of these issues through education, training, and interaction with others.

We are aware that collaboration, multiple viewpoints, and empathic listening are hallmarks of effective dialogue. Everyone is a leader, with the right and the obligation to steer discussion in a productive direction.

More about CWAC

Why our pedagogy is "Collaborative Dialogue"

In CWAC, we never tell anyone what to write, and we never correct papers. We do teach mini-lessons, guiding writers to learn how to analyze their work and how to apply particular strategies.

Different disciplines place unique demands on writing. As Michael Pemberton argues, Writing In the Disciplines (WID) sessions should be characterized by “parity, a balance of power”: not an absence of power but rather a harmonious balance of students’ authority over disciplinary knowledge and advisers’ authority about writing. This allows writers to enter sessions as the “experts” of their texts and also prevents them from passively taking in the suggestions of the advisers.

Readerly, collaborative response is a particularly good fit for Saint Mary’s because students are accustomed to seminar-style dialogue. Writers tend to walk in to CWAC ready to discuss. They tend to walk away with more clarity about their own ideas, more strategies for improving their writing, and more confidence in themselves as contributors to the scholarly dialogue.

Better Writers, Better Grades

CWAC is a welcoming, friendly environment that is student-operated and student-oriented. Our advising strategies have tangible results on the quality of student writing across the curriculum. Our goal is to make writing accessible and manageable for all students.

Our most recent available data from 2012 reveal a quantitative increase in course grades for students who use our services. As the number of sessions for a particular class go up, so does that particular course grade: for students who came in once, their average course grade was 3.1; for students who came in twice, the average grade rose to 3.29; and so on. Comparing the course grades of students who use CWAC to those who don’t, we see an even more significant difference.

Students who use CWAC are not inherently smarter: their average high school GPAs and SAT scores are similar to the average of all Saint Mary’s students' high school GPAs and SAT scores. Clearly, one-to-one sessions have a strong correlation to higher course grades.

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Center for Writing Across the Curriculum (CWAC)