Getting Personal: The Influence of Direct Personal Experience on Disciplinary Instructors Designing WAC Assignments

This research study of a WAC learning community focuses on instructors’ behind-the-scenes decision making about assignment design. Specifically, we show how instructors use direct personal experience—as students, teachers and scholars—to approach writing assignment design, invoking these experiences to discuss the origin of their assignments and to respond to other instructors’ assignments. Accounting for both the positive and negative influence of instructors’ direct personal experience, we argue, pushes WAC scholars and practitioners to conceptualize disciplinary instructors more fully as learners and to create strategies for instructor development that prioritize the personal experiences that instructors bring with them to designing assignments. Despite their variety, all writing across the curriculum (WAC) initiatives share an underlying goal of influencing what disciplinary instructors believe about writing and consequently what they do in their teaching. To help disciplinary instructors deepen their understanding of writing and to develop their pedagogy, WAC programs have long used workshops, seminars, and learning communities as staples of WAC instructor development. The influence of these kinds of instructor development, however, seems to be one of many areas in WAC where lore drives the conversation more than does research. With only a few exceptions (e.g., Hughes & Miller, 2018; Walvoord, 1997), relatively little research has illuminated what instructors across disciplines believe about writing at the conclusion of a WAC seminar and, more specifically, how these beliefs shape the decisions they make when they teach with writing. The research we present here aims to deepen our understanding of what instructors learn from WAC initiatives. We focus on one crucial manifestation of WAC teaching and beliefs: what disciplinary instructors are talking about as they share and workshop their writing assignments after having participated in a semester-long WAC seminar. A recent focus within WAC research suggests that assignment design (e.g., Eodice et al., 2016; 2020; Melzer, 2014; Polk, 2019; Thaiss & Zawacki, 2006) offers a promising means for building our understanding of what instructors believe and do as they teach in their disciplines with writing. The interviews that Thaiss and Zawacki, Eodice et al., and Polk conducted with disciplinary faculty about their assignments give us valuable insights into what instructors believe and their goals and the challenges they face. But there is still much more to learn about how WAC instructor beliefs are realized in assignment design. Just as with any kind of learning, it would be a mistake to conceptualize disciplinary instructors as blank slates. Recognizing the impossibility of isolating just the learning that came directly from participating in a WAC seminar, we conceptualize these instructors instead through a constructivist Miller, Hughes, & Weisse 222 ATD, VOL18(ISSUE3/4) lens: they are blending new knowledge with prior knowledge and experiences. Accordingly, in this research, we are not asking solely about the influence of WAC instructor development but also about what more broadly influences disciplinary instructors as they design assignments. Our study lets us peer into some of the decision processes as disciplinary instructors—including graduate teaching assistants—design assignments, to see what influences are in play and what they prioritize. Through their workshop group conversations, we can see whether they are thinking about learning goals and about the WAC pedagogy they discussed in the instructor development program. We can analyze how they conceptualize their students: do they think about them primarily as fulfilling an assignment or do they see them as learners more broadly? We can also think critically about these workshop conversations, observing what instructors ignore or what limits their perspectives. Additionally, we can see influences that shape how instructors interpret and respond to each other’s assignment drafts. As Tarabochia (2017) argues, “talk about writing among faculty from different disciplines is the cornerstone of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)/Writing in the Disciplines (WID) initiatives” (p. 1). These interactions around writing are epistemic, Tarabochia asserts, as “participants collaboratively construct new subject matter [about WAC] across disciplines” (p. 9). This method—closely analyzing unstructured workshop discussions among disciplinary instructors as they revise and improve their assignments—lets us dig deeply into what instructors considered in the design process. From our analysis, we found both expected and unexpected results. First, we found plenty of evidence, just as anyone leading a WAC seminar would hope to see, that participants understood and applied core WAC concepts from various components of our seminar. What surprised us—and what we focus on in this article—was how frequently disciplinary instructors invoked and discussed their own direct personal experience with writing and literacy practices that stem from their backgrounds as students, teachers, and scholars. We use the term “direct personal experience” in a popular sense, defining it as lived firsthand experience with commonplace writing and literacy practices and events such as reading, writing, talking about writing in progress, and teaching about writing. Direct personal experience is significant, we argue, not necessarily because the experiences themselves are always remarkable, but rather because it is from these experiences that instructors derive knowledge, ideas, values, principles, beliefs, and preferences that, in some way, inform and shape their unique pedagogical identities and approaches to teaching with writing. Accounting for instructors’ direct personal experiences, we contend, pushes WAC scholars and practitioners to conceptualize disciplinary instructors more fully as learners. We view this learning through constructivist learning theory because direct personal experience both lays the groundwork for and facilitates instructors’ learning. Specifically, we show how disciplinary instructors draw on direct personal experience in at least two ways: (a) to discuss the origin of their assignments (including to signal attachments and claim expertise and to determine learning goals); and (b) to respond to other instructors’ assignment designs (including to clarify terms or pedagogical choices across disciplines and to navigate variation in participants’ levels of teaching experience). We argue that WAC specialists need to recognize just how powerful and pervasive personal experience is for instructors as they design and workshop their writing assignments. Additionally, we posit that direct personal experience has the potential to shape instructor learning in both positive and negative ways. Direct personal experience often generates exciting ideas and drives enthusiasm for particular assignments. Left unquestioned, however, instructors’ direct personal experience can also, as we explain, reinscribe institutional power dynamics and traditions that have historically privileged dominant discourses and literacy practices.