Forty Years of Writing Embedded in Forestry at North Carolina

By design, the WEC approach works across an entire institution; a program is established and then, one by one, individual departments are enlisted to engage in the process of transforming their curriculum, faculty, and approaches to supporting student writing. In contrast, this chapter chronicles the development of a WEC program in a single department at North Carolina State many years before a campus-wide system was put in place. The success of the effort depended on the presence of a writing expert who served the role of a WEC coordinator embedded in the department and who eventually became one of its own faculty through the acquisition of a Ph.D. in the discipline. Development of the WEC approach in this single department subsequently contributed to the reformulation of the accreditation standards for the discipline and the creation of the first campus-wide WEC program in the U.S., the Campus Writing and Speaking Program.