The WAC-driven Writing Center: The Future of Writing Instruction in Australasia?

Abstract

While a national agenda seeks to make Australian higher education more inclusive for an increasingly diverse student population, the contribution that writing instruction can make to achieving these goals has been overlooked. This article outlines the rationale, development, and growth of the Writing Hub at the University of Sydney to advocate for writing center/WAC collaborations as the future of literacy and writing instruction in a culture where writing instruction is still largely viewed as product-based and remedial. If thought is internalized public and social talk, then writing is internalized talk made public and social again. Kenneth Bruffee, 1984 And with our knowledge comes responsibility, for writing, yes, but more for writers. And so it is that we singly and we together must own and own up to writing, not as colonists or profiteers, but as stewards. Doug Hesse, 2005 This is the story of a writing center that housed a writing program that became a writing department that housed a writing center – and then didn’t. Well, sort of. The complicated history of the Writing Hub at the University of Sydney and its various twists and turns have left me contemplating anew the future of writing instruction in the Antipodes. In his 2005 CCCC Chair’s address “Who Owns Writing?,” Doug Hesse juxtaposes the terms “responsibility” and “ownership” to demonstrate that this is not a question of claiming intellectual property but rather one of determining "the conditions under which writing is taught" (p. 337). As to who should serve as “stewards” of the discipline, Hesse argues that compositionists, who are knowledgeable about "the whole of” writing, are responsible for writing and writers (355). However, in my experience as the sole compositionist at an Australian “sandstone” (comparable to a U.S. “ivy league”), it is evident that this responsibility must be shared by a variety of stakeholders, lest “stewards” be perceived as “colonists,” as Hesse warns. This is particularly true in a British institutional model, with no general education sequence or “core” writing requirement, and where English departments teach mainly literature. In such an environment, writing centers and WAC programs (preferably working together) are far better placed than individual departments to share institutional responsibility for writing and writers. But beyond questions of who owns writing or who should be responsible for writing instruction, I am more concerned with how writing in Australian universities can shake its remedial stigma and be accepted as a discipline unto itself. The WAC-driven Writing Center 81 While my theoretical convictions have, admittedly, been shaped by my North American training in rhetoric and composition, my pedagogical and administrative choices as a WPA, Writing Center Director, and de facto WAC coordinator have been influenced every bit as much by what I have learned on the job through my exposure to diverse disciplinary cultures, theories, and approaches to writing instruction. Steering clear of the “advice narrative” that Caswell, McKinney, and Jackson (2016) warn against, this article makes no attempt to convince others to adopt a particular institutional model or theoretical framework for a writing center or WAC program. Rather, it offers the development and history of the Writing Hub at the University of Sydney as but one example of the significant potential of writing centers, in conjunction with WAC, to transform outdated writing cultures and promote writing as a discipline (WaD) as a 21st century alternative to writing as a remedial, product-focused enterprise.