Making WAC Accessible: Reimagining the WAC Faculty Workshop as an Online Asynchronous Course

Abstract

As universities increasingly expand online education offerings, WAC directors are compelled to rethink how to make WAC training more available and accessible to a wider range of teaching personnel. In this article, we describe our unique institutional context as a liberal arts university heavily reliant on online education, and the features that can make implementing WAC at “unusual” institutions such as ours difficult—in particular, the training/support of geographically dispersed faculty teaching WAC courses in a variety of instructional modalities. We share the design of our four-week online asynchronous WAC faculty training course and present outcomes data from five cohorts that completed the course. The WAC faculty workshop has long been a cornerstone of WAC programs across the United States. Thaiss and Porter’s 2010 article summarizing the results of the national WAC/WID mapping project reported that the faculty workshop was the most common feature in WAC programs across the U.S. Their study showed that 78% of institutions with a WAC initiative reported having a WAC workshop and 87% of longstanding programs (those with 10 years or more under their belt) reported the same, suggesting that the faculty WAC workshop is an integral and crucial feature of established WAC programs. Guides for developing WAC programs point to the workshop as a critical space for developing “WAC values, encourag[ing] reflexive pedagogy, and foster[ing] faculty dialogue” (Magnotto & Stout, 2000, p. 33). However, many of the guides for developing WAC workshops do not address training in digital modes (though they may address teaching digitally), or do not address how to develop programs and workshops in institutions that vary significantly from the traditional, face-to-face teaching-focused institutions that are best represented in WAC literature. According to the WAC/WID project, in 2010, WAC programs tended to be most common in large PhD and MA granting institutions and least common in community colleges (Thaiss and Porter, 2010). The 2020 update to the WAC/WID survey data generally confirms the 2010 findings, though community colleges gained some ground. Interestingly, online institutions still report very little WAC activity (Thaiss & Zugnoni, 2020). While the WAC/WID project did not make any finer distinction between types of institutions, Kurzer, Murphy, O’Meara, and Russo (2019) have compellingly argued that literature about WAC programs has largely bypassed “unusual” institutions, such as graduate-only universities, community colleges, technical schools, and others. This is not necessarily an intentional oversight on the part of WAC scholars, as WAC programs somewhat necessarily grew up in more traditional institutions (large state and/or or well-funded liberal arts colleges), which are more likely to have the faculty trained in rhetoric/composition and/or WAC, institutional structure, and funding needed to develop and sustain WAC programs. Furthermore, as Gardner (2010) argues in his introduction to a special issue of Across the Making WAC Accessible 245 ATD, VOL18(ISSUE3/4) Disciplines devoted to WAC in community colleges, beyond the problem of lesser representation in the WAC literature is the fact that WAC initiatives at less represented institutional types may not resemble more publicized types of programs, and thus may not be counted as WAC in national surveys (Gardner, 2010). However, given the emergence of WAC initiatives at community colleges and smaller or more tuitiondependent universities, it is important to ensure that the literature reflects the diversity of institutional types within the WAC community. WAC models that can be translated to these kinds of institutions are important because such institutions often have administrative, budgeting, or other unique institutional features that may make implementation of WAC programs based on models drawn from large state universities very difficult. Kurzer et al. (2019) argue that we need examples of WAC implementation at more diverse or “unusual” institutions to help new WAC programs and directors find models suitable for their own institutions. This point seems especially salient for universities like our own. A private liberal arts university with a residential flagship campus in the Midwest, along with multiple satellite campuses across the country offering degree completion programs for adult learners and a large online program, our institution relies upon a geographically dispersed network of adjunct or otherwise contingent faculty. Considering the growth of online education, the reliance on geographically proximal faculty may also be changing for many institutions, even those without satellite campuses. The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) reported in 2016 that the “number of students taking online courses grew to 5.8 million nationally, continuing a growth trend that has been consistent for 13 years. More than a quarter of higher education students (28 percent) are enrolled in at least one online course.” That trend has further accelerated given the massive shift to online education during the COVID-19 crisis. While WAC scholars have written about how WAC programs could work with emerging digital technologies and networked environments, they largely have focused on how this affects WAC teaching, rather than WAC faculty training and attendant institutional dynamics related to faculty support. Cox, Galin and Melzer (2018) observe that “[i]n WAC literature, theory tends not to focus on the complexities of higher education, but, rather, on the writing pedagogies that are at the heart of WAC programs” (p. 8). By not addressing the underrepresented “complexities of higher education” present in institutions like ours, theoretical work in WAC risks sidestepping a worthy question of whether WAC pedagogy is inherently institutionally neutral. Furthermore, very little information exists on how to translate what is usually understood to be an intimate, voluntary, in-person faculty workshop into a standardized online, asynchronous experience that is able to reach a broad, geographically distant audience of instructors. Important and potentially relevant work is being done among online writing instruction (OWI) scholars to address faculty training in writing courses because many OWI instructors are not available for on-campus training, including practices that might be usefully adapted for expanding access to WAC faculty training. In her paper “Faculty Preparation for OWI,” Kastman Breuch (2019) discusses how best to train faculty to teach writing online. She observes, “[i]mmersion is an educational principle that suggests there is no better way to learn something than to be placed within its milieu” (p. 356). She argues that those instructors who will be teaching online benefit from professional development that takes place online and that models online teaching strategies that instructors can use in their own online classrooms. If we can safely assume that courses of all disciplines are increasingly being offered online, then Kastman Breuch’s argument supports the importance of aligning the type of training faculty receive to the modality in which they will be teaching. As universities move increasingly toward online education, particularly in light of COVID-19, WAC directors need to rethink how to make WAC training more available and accessible for a wider range of teaching personnel and institution types. Even prior to COVID-19, many institutions were making the move to online education as a way of increasing student access (and thereby enrollment), arguably with little attention to how to make Mecklenburg-Faenger, Handley, & Sallee 246 ATD, VOL18(ISSUE3/4) professional development, particularly in WAC, more accessible to faculty. Indeed, for many of us, our institution’s decision to offer foundational courses within our writing programs—first-year writing seminars, for instance, and WID courses—was not part of a coordinated and intentional strategy to take the writing program online, yet the result is the same: a rapidly expanded, often accelerated, and most certainly complex context in which to perform work that we all believe is place-based, high-touch, and formative for both writing teacher and WPA. As Susan McLeod (2007) reminds us, for WAC directors and WAC programs, “context is all” (p. 8). What happens, then, to a WAC program when that context expands to include virtual and/or otherwise geographically dispersed writing instructors?