Writing Across the Curriculum

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)

A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame.

Rabindranath Tagore

Mission

WAC at Berkshire Community College (BCC) supports divisions, departments, and individual faculty with the integration of and appreciation for meaningful reading and writing coursework. As an integral aspect of the learning process, writing empowers students to engage with complexity, reflect on significance, discover new avenues of agency, and communicate effectively. Within each classroom, for every field, and across all disciplines, writing fosters the comprehension, curiosity, and connections that deepen knowledge, on campus and beyond. All BCC WAC initiatives look to honor and to galvanize our community as readers and writers.

Principles

Committed to the philosophy and practices outlined by the International Network of WAC Programs (INWAC), WAC at BCC recognizes that:

• Effective writing is a shared goal and writing instruction is a shared responsibility;
• Sustained and ongoing opportunities for writing and receiving feedback deepen student engagement and writing proficiency;
• Writing is rhetorical, dependent on the context, purpose, and conventions expected within any specific situation and every academic discipline; and
• Individually and socially, reading, writing, and critical thinking foster reflection, imagination, self-awareness, and the exchange of ideas essential in nourishing a healthy, functional democracy.

Goals

WAC at BCC looks to strengthen collaboration and cooperation among different academic divisions and between faculty and students. Our goals include:

• To encourage, among faculty and students, the awareness of writing as a process, which is integral to all learning and which develops over an extended period of time (rather that in one course or over only one semester);
• To broaden and deepen student engagement;
• To support faculty with the integration of more writing, writing instruction, and supportive feedback within their courses;
• To facilitate faculty initiatives to explicitly teach the research, writing, and revision conventions within their own fields and for which they are experts of their respective rhetorical situations and knowledge;
• To create a culture of academic integrity and responsible academic citizenship; and
• To build a lifelong love of learning, at BCC and beyond.