It’s the night before the paper is due. A drowsy UW student glances at his notes and turns to the blank computer screen. Then—almost magically—ideas form, words tumble out, and the paper is written.

If only it were that easy. Writing well is hard work. It takes practice and careful guidance. But instructors across the College are rarely able to dedicate substantial time to assisting students with their writing. That’s where the Interdisciplinary Writing Program (IWP) comes in.

IWP, based in the Department of English, is a program that links writing classes to lecture courses in disciplines ranging from music to geography to psychology. The writing class is a separate five-credit course, with its own readings and assignments, but its content is closely tied to the lecture course.

The program is the brainchild of Joan Graham, IWP director, who believes that writing assignments are more effective when students are immersed in the subject they are writing about. “Bringing writing instruction into the context of a lecture course dramatizes the intimate connection between writing and thinking,” she says. “Students find this experience both practical and intellectually stimulating.”

Designing a New Approach

It wasn’t always this way. As a UW graduate student in the late 60s, Graham remembers teaching expository writing courses in which students wrote eight to ten short papers—on topics unrelated to their other work— and revised none of them. “I knew that the gap between what students were learning in the writing course and what they were expected to write in their own disciplines was huge,” Graham recalls.

She tried to change that by offering a writing course through the Office of Minority Affairs, in which students focused on writing assigned in one of their other courses. “Of course, the major problem was trying to unify the class,” says Graham. “It was challenging to have students read and discuss each others’ work, since they were all working with different disciplines.”

During a peer review session, students in an IWP course share their comments. Photo by Kathy Sauber.

A conversation with Jon Bridgman, professor emeritus of history, led to a more effective approach. “He was concerned about students being underprepared in his Western Civilization class,” says Graham, “but the department didn’t have anyone with the expertise, time, or desire to focus on the writing. Meanwhile, writing teachers in the English Department were working like mad to create contexts for their students’ writing that would be specific and meaningful enough that students would invest in them. We saw that a history course could provide all the components for a really good writing situation: texts, problems, conceptual frameworks, and—most crucial—clearly defined purposes for writing.”

Graham was soon teaching an experimental writing course linked to history lecture course (taught by Otis Pease, since Bridgman was on leave). She planned assignments like those regularly used in English composition courses at the time—eight essays, no rewrites—but quickly rethought her approach.

“Within a week, it became crashingly obvious that I could do so much more with writing assignments,” says Graham. “I decided to assign fewer papers with several drafts. It was exciting to focus on a draft of a paper that had somewhere to go.”

Other linked courses followed in history, political science, and sociology. Then Graham was awarded a FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education) grant, which funded four graduate students to teach IWP courses full time. In 1983, IWP became an official UW program, based in the Department of English.

A Labor-Intensive Effort

The basic structure of the IWP has not changed substantially since those early years, but the scope has. The program now reaches about 1,200 students each year, in 10 to 12 departments. Courses are taught by the 5-person IWP staff, plus more than a dozen teaching assistants (TAs). About one third of the TAs come from the English Department; the rest are graduate students in linked departments. All participate in a week-long IWP training session prior to teaching and attend weekly mentoring sessions thereafter.

Response from departments has been enthusiastic, and the IWP program recently won a coveted Brotman Award for Instructional Excellence in recognition of its efforts to improve the quality of undergraduate education at the University.

“I’ve been teaching a history course with a writing link for ten years, and I think it’s hands-down the best writing course we have at the University,” says Robert Stacey, chair of the Department of History. “It takes students from the kind of writing they do in high school, which is mainly descriptive, and moves them into writing analytical essays. That’s a huge transformation. They have to learn how to make an argument, support it, and figure out how to extract evidence from a primary source.”

	Interdisciplinary Writing Program staff include faculty members Bob McNamara, Elizabeth Simmons-O'Neill, Norman Wacker, Joan Graham, John O'Neill, and program coordinator Karena Reiten. Photo by Cheryl Mathisen.

So why not blanket the College with IWP courses? The fact is, the courses remain a labor-intensive effort. To be effective, IWP instructors must sit in on the linked lecture course and immerse themselves in its content. They need to stay in contact with the professor throughout the quarter to ensure that their course complements the lecture class.

“You have to be very flexible as an IWP teacher, trying to respond to what’s going on in the lecture class,” says Paula Tharp, an art history graduate student who is in her second year of teaching IWP links with her department. “I try to set assignments following the same time frame as the lecture class, so we are not focusing on things that have not yet been covered in that course. It’s a huge amount of work. But you get to make your own decisions, and I enjoy that autonomy.”

IWP instructors also have individual conferences with their students—20 students per class—three or more times during the quarter. That requires a major time commitment. It also happens to be key to the program’s success.

“This was the most valuable part of the whole class,” wrote one student in her evaluation. “I made a lot of progress as a writer because of the individual conferences.”

Tharp agrees that the conferences are particularly meaningful to students. “There’s something very personal about talking to students about their writing,” she says. “I’ll quote their words to them, and they love it. They love that someone is paying careful attention to their writing.”

Learning from Peers

The students also receive classmates’ comments on their writing—regularly. Peer review is central to the IWP approach. Sometimes the review involves class discussion of one student’s work; more often students are assigned to prepare thoughtful, written comments on several classmates’ papers.

Peer review does have its challenges, particularly when students’ abilities vary widely. “Not all peer reviewers are equal,” says Tharp. “Do you only pair strong writers together and weak ones together? That’s not a great solution. But if I split it the other way, the stronger writers are not getting the feedback they really want. The reality is, you can’t always get as much as you give.”

Tharp does pair strong writers with each other for the final peer review “as a reward for all their hard work” but also explains to them that peer review is useful even if a peer’s writing is not as strong. “It gets you to look at questions of organization that give you a different view of your own writing,” she says. “As a TA, I’ve read so many student papers, and that has helped me become a much better writer.”

Graham, who has reviewed student writing for more than three decades, couldn’t agree more. “My greatest reason for having students do peer review—repeatedly—is that I think it helps the reviewer most,” says Graham. “They can see the range of ways people may approach a question and can gain a clearer perception of structure. I know that I can see more in my own writing and in others’ writing than I did five years ago. It’s an endless process. I still learn from students’ work.”

The Secrets to their Success

Although the Interdisciplinary Writing Program is primarily about writing, its benefits extend far beyond the written word. Faculty notice it again and again: the students in IWP courses also excel in the linked lecture course.

“They are better prepared than other students coming into the discussions,” says Stacey of the IWP students in his introductory medieval history courses. “Their writing is not necessarily better—there may be other good writers in the lecture course—but they almost always show more progress over the quarter.”

Philosophy professor Ann Baker has observed this in her introductory course as well. “The students who have the benefit of the writing link have done so much better,” she says. “In fact, when I realized this, it convinced me I had to find a way to add more writing into my regular lecture class as well, without overloading the TAs.”

Faculty and TAs suggest several reasons for IWP students’ success. First, there is the benefit of delving into a subject more deeply.

	Constructive comments from IWP classmates cover a student's paper. Photo by Kathy Sauber.

“They get to think about philosophy in two courses at once,” says Baker of her philosophy students. “Philosophy is the kind of thing you can get superficially, but you’re not understanding it deeply without spending more time on it. The extra time really makes a difference.”

George-Julius Papadopoulos, who recently taught the first IWP link with the School of Music, viewed it as an opportunity to introduce more complex ideas than could be covered in a large lecture class. He designed his IWP course around the theme of semantic vs. asemantic music (music with words vs. music without words) and selected readings by musicians and philosophers through the centuries, beginning with Plato.

"You can imagine that for a person coming out of high school, it was a rather demanding course,” says Papadopoulos. “I felt it was my job to teach students to read critically as well as write critically. In the end, this course really supported their learning and knowledge in the lecture course.”

The other likely reason IWP students succeed in their linked course? Instructors credit the very act of writing as a powerful learning tool.

“People think of writing as mechanical,” says Stacey. “As long as you know grammar and syntax, you’ll be able to write. But that’s not true at all. Writing is a very high order analytical challenge. You can think you understand something, but until you have to write an organized, coherent account, you don’t really understand it. Suddenly you see the holes in your argument. You see what you haven’t thought through completely.”

It sometimes takes a while for students to recognize and appreciate writing’s critical role in learning. But by the end of an IWP course, most are convinced. That message comes through repeatedly in students’ course evaluations.

“The most important lesson I learned,” wrote a junior in a political science writing link, “...was that a central argument and a coherent line of thought were more important to writing quality papers than flowery words. This class aided my ability to approach writing as a process of thought.”

A physics major in an IWP course with international studies went further. “In the course of the last three months,” he wrote, “I have read more, written more, and thought more than any one quarter in my three year existence at the U. It seems I have an entire year of work squeezed into a quarter of the time.

“I have also seen my writing get better.... My critical thinking has sharpened through reading material that matters to me, and then writing about it in a manner that forced me to think. And I think that is what this course is all about.”

IWP director Joan Graham could not have crafted a more convincing argument for the writing program herself.

[Related Stories]

A Writing Resource: Departmental Writing Centers
The College has nearly a dozen departmental writing centers--based in departments--that offer writing guidance through one-on-one sessions, focusing on writing assigned within the department.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Are the Slacker
One student describes his experience in an Interdisciplinary Writing Course linked with an introductory course in the School of Music.

[Winter/Sping 2002 - Table of Contents]