NSU's Quality Enhancement Plan April 2017

14 | NSU QEP Literature Review curriculum (Craig, 2016). They also complement campus diversity initiatives. As Grimm (2009) noted, in the 21st-century writing center, the core value is productive and flexible engagement with linguistic, social, racial, and cultural diversity. Communication problems are understood as arising from competing (and often confusing) contexts rather than by negligent or lazy or underprepared students. Multilingualism and bidialecticalism are understood as norms rather than aberrations. Literacy learning is recognized as a profoundly social and transformative undertaking in which learners shuttle among discourses. (p. 15) Writing center staff members have the ability to work with students across the university curriculum in an effort to enhance students’ written communication skills, which is one of the most important skills they need for academic and professional success. Writing centers provide individualized writing assistance that many students need to become more effective communicators, and centers can provide programming tailored to meet the needs of diverse student bodies. In sum, they can have powerful impacts on student learning and the educational environment in which they are located. Writing in the Disciplines Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs have been an integral part of academic efforts to improve student writing since the 1970s. WAC recognizes that writing occurs in all academic disciplines and that practicing writing often can help students both learn about the content they are studying and improve their writing acumen. As noted by McLeod and Miraglia (2001), WAC, broadly conceived, focuses on writing as an essential component of critical thinking and problem solving, key elements in a liberal arts education. If writing is a mode of learning, if it is a way of constructing knowledge, then the integration of writing with learning will continue, in one way or another, to be seen as a central feature of the learning process. (p. 3) To implement WAC initiatives, universities can focus on Writing in the Disciplines (WID), which is a focused WAC program designed to introduce or give students practice with the language conventions of a discipline as well as with specific formats typical of a given discipline. For example, the engineering lab report includes much different information in a quite different format from the annual business report (The WAC Clearinghouse, “What is Writing in the Disciplines?”). Two common pedagogical approaches to WAC/WID, Writing to Learn and Writing to Communicate (Thaiss & McLeod, 2013), can help distinguish the differences between a general WAC approach and a more focused WID initiative. As Thaiss and McLeod stated, “Writing to Learn pedagogy encourages teachers to use frequent writing exercises, often informal and ungraded, to help learners probe what they know, what they need to learn, and ways to think about what they study” (p. 284). These exercises can include journals, response papers, freewrites, and annotations. General WAC programs can use these types of assignments across the curriculum. WID initiatives are more likely to use Writing to Communicate pedagogy, which, according to Thaiss and McLeod (2013), “focuses on writing to an audience outside the self, usually for a formal purpose … [It] uses the styles and vocabulary of a particular discourse