For many professors, portfolios are flexible enough to serve their own purposes
as well as the purposes of the curriculum. Portfolios also meet the current
call for authentic assessment of students' skills and performance.
There are many lessons to learn about faculty development from writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs, for when they really began to grow in the 1980s, directors of the initiatives were often the first to undertake largescale faculty development in their institutions. WAC directors had much to offer teaching and learning enterprises then, and many have much to offer now as a result of their experiences with faculty across the disciplines. As teachers of writing who study rhetorical contexts, they quickly learned that only dispensing guidelines and resources -university requirements for taking writing-intensive courses, Web sites on writing in biology or textbooks on writing for film, the top-ten informal writing strategies -does not make a successful WAC program. Unfortunately, there are several WAC programs in the United States today that do exist only as discrete series of rules with little or no effort placed into teaching faculty how writing can be used to teach critical and disciplinary thinking, how writing both shapes and defines a field, and therefore, how students can use writing to read and enter these fields as well as others. Based on nineteenth-century notions of the gentleman scholar, these template-bound programs operate teaching and learning initiatives under the assumption that if faculty are merely given techniques and methods, they will be able to apply them effectively in their classrooms. This strategy flies in the face of both research and experience as they apply not only to faculty development, but also to learning.
PedagogyPublished by Duke University Press
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