Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum (WRAC) promotes the ideology that students can become better writers, communicators and overall learners by writing consistently and repeatedly throughout their academic journey. Students become better communicators and thinkers, which supports their overall success when they have increased opportunities to take writing courses at all levels of education and across disciplines. Additionally, WRAC strives to transition out of traditional lecture-based teaching methods to models of learning that advocate student engagement. The WRAC program at SF State supports faculty teaching writing-intensive courses across all disciplines by cultivating a community dedicated to improving student learning at all educational levels. By providing resources and professional development opportunities for faculty, the WRAC program strives to develop quality writing courses.
Support of Student Success
In support of student success, the WRAC program integrates principles from Writing in the Disciplines (WID) that focus on designing and teaching writing courses with the goal of enhancing a student’s ability to write for a specific discipline or genre. To better prepare students to communicate professionally within their field of study, faculty within specific disciplines provide the necessary expertise to design assignments tailored to teach students to meet the writing conventions and standards of a discipline or genre.
Students learn to develop a richer and more professional writing process as exemplified through the heterogeneity of discipline-specific writing assignments including proposals, sharing and revising drafts, working with data, scheduling and sequencing work to meet deadlines and conducting literary research. The WRAC program provides the necessary space for interdisciplinary dialogue surrounding best practices for teaching and assessing student writing, faculty can learn from one another and adopt best practices, where as individual consultations with the WRAC team will help faculty customize course design to meet the learning goals of their specific discipline.