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Composition Forum 22, Summer 2010
http://compositionforum.com/issue/22/

Unifying Program Goals: Developing and Implementing a Writing and Rhetoric Major at Oakland University

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Lori Ostergaard and Greg A. Giberson

Abstract: In this critical program profile, the authors provide an analysis of the historical, political, theoretical, and practical circumstances that influenced the development of Oakland University’s undergraduate major in writing and rhetoric. Through an analysis of the developmental process and the major itself, this article explores many separate, yet interconnected issues. These include the development and naming of a department of writing and rhetoric, the impact the major has had on the first-year writing program, the theoretical and practical structure of the three-track major, as well as the institutional impact the program has had.

In December 2007, three of the Rhetoric faculty at Oakland University (OU)—Greg, Lori, and Marshall Kitchens—began revising our program’s proposal for a major in writing and rhetoric, which had been initiated by our senior faculty some 10 years earlier. As we reconceptualized the proposal and consulted the available scholarly materials on the topic of undergraduate writing majors, we recognized that while there was a good deal of work on the major, there was still much work to be done in terms of breadth, depth, and consistency in the scholarly conversation. We were lucky to have access to early drafts of the now published collection What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors, as Greg was lead editor on that project, and we found that Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum provided valuable insights into developing our upper-level writing courses and core curriculum. But for the purposes of proposing and designing our own major, the three of us felt there was much more we needed to know about designing, proposing, and implementing B.A. programs.

As we rewrote the proposal for our own major, we also decided to begin contributing to the small, but growing, corpus of material about the writing major, to offer our own advice to composition-rhetoric faculty who are interested in developing these degree programs. This program profile grew out of that initial desire to share what we have learned, as we believe program profiles like this one are useful for three reasons. First, local descriptions can be helpful to others when those descriptions focus not only on praxis, but also on gnosis, which is what we have tried to do in what follows. Second, we believe undergraduate writing degrees have the potential to impact the field in significant ways, so we want to encourage the purposeful, intellectual, and scholarly development of those degrees. And last, we wish to share our model for what undergraduate degrees in writing studies can be by describing the choices we made during the proposal process and by discussing why we made those choices. Ultimately, we are offering this program profile because we agree with Deb Balzhiser and Sue McLeod, members of the CCCC’s Committee on the Major in Writing and Rhetoric, that “as a field we could and should discuss the general outlines of what our major should be, and … a national conversation on this topic is in order” (416).

As we describe in the following section, Oakland University’s writing program has a unique history that has made it possible for us to develop a writing degree that has very few historical, institutional, or political strings attached. Our new degree program was developed within a Department of Rhetoric, Communication, and Journalism, rather than a department of English; was approved in May 2008; and is currently housed in a new Department of Writing and Rhetoric. {1} But while the conditions surrounding the development of OU’s undergraduate writing and rhetoric major were unique, we believe our experiences may help to fill in some of the gaps in the existing scholarship about writing majors. In this profile we briefly address the history of our Writing and Rhetoric department, describe the major we developed just two short years ago, examine the connections we have created between our first-year writing program and the major, and offer some advice for faculty who are considering developing their own writing major. We do not devote much space here to providing an argument supporting undergraduate degrees in writing, as several already exist (see Beard; Delli Carpini; Moore Howard; Baker and Henning; Yancey).

Departmental Values and Mission

The mission of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric is to develop students’ abilities to write independently and collaboratively, to become engaged participants in a democracy, and to be critical readers and thinkers in academic, community, national, and global environments. Our faculty, predominantly trained in writing and rhetoric, view rhetoric and literacy as subjects that must be studied in the context of broader cultural and public interests, and we are committed to offering students opportunities to write and read diverse kinds of texts. Therefore, our courses integrate principles of academic inquiry and encourage students to become critical consumers and producers of texts. Because we view written language as a form of action, worthy of careful consideration by students, teachers, and citizens, we affirm its ability to create common interests and foster the understanding of differences. Our curriculum is ethically and intellectually grounded, requiring that students reflect on the forms and purposes of writing and on the ways written communication is shaped to suit particular rhetorical contexts inside and outside the university. In short, our department seeks to create “thoughtful, informed, technologically adept writing publics,” as Kathleen Blake Yancey put it in her call for a “new [writing] curriculum for the 21st century” (308).

The History of the Writing Program at Oakland University

The history of writing instruction at OU begins in the early 1970s with the creation of a department of Learning Skills. Prior to this time, our university was an honors college for Michigan State, and OU students were assumed to be adept writers with no need for early intervention in their writing practices. With the designation of OU as a separate state institution with its own, less strict admissions requirements, writing studies entered the university as the perceived need for it increased. Like in many writing programs around the country, writing and rhetoric faculty at OU have struggled to work against the assumption that our discipline deals with remedial, skills-based knowledge. For example, to counter the seemingly inevitable marginalization of writing in its “Learning Skills” department, rhetoric faculty were formed into their own Department of Rhetoric, which was later combined with programs in communication and journalism to form a third, more powerful, departmental configuration (Rhetoric, Communication, and Journalism or RCJ). To enhance the program’s legitimacy and provide a stable and equal platform for the growth of writing studies at OU, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences removed the rhetoric program from RCJ and created an independent Department of Writing and Rhetoric in 2008.

The formation of a separate department of writing and rhetoric accompanied a number of other significant changes within the last five years that support a culture of writing at OU, including the creation of our university’s first writing center, the transfer of OU’s business and technical writing classes from the English (literature and creative writing) Department to our new department, the implementation of writing-intensive requirements for general education, and the opening up of five new tenure-line positions in writing. And these changes were complemented by the University Board of Directors’ approval of our proposal for a new major in Writing and Rhetoric at the same time as the new department was formed.

While brief, this history is detailed enough to show how unique the circumstances were for the creation of our department and our major. Wallace May Andersen provides a much more detailed history of the program in her chapter “Outside the English Department: Oakland University’s Writing Program and the Writing and Rhetoric Major” in What We Are Becoming.

On Naming the New Department and the New Major

On the national level, departments similar to ours tend to call themselves departments of writing, composition, professional/technical writing, or rhetoric. In developing both a new department and a new major simultaneously, our faculty were acutely aware of the importance of choosing a name that would serve our purposes as both a department providing liberal arts and general education in writing as well as a rigorous disciplinary program leading to a bachelor of arts degree. After much discussion, we chose “Writing and Rhetoric” as the key terms for our department and degree program. While most of us agreed that “rhetoric” was a more appropriate term to describe the work of the department, we also felt that the term “writing” would be more student and employer friendly than composition or rhetoric, as it is commonly identified by both groups as a valuable and desirable skill. While we spent a good deal of time debating the historical significance of the term writing and its institutional connection with remediation, we concluded that the combination of writing and rhetoric provided us several opportunities and benefits. First, while writing might have remedial connotations within academic institutions, it is recognized in the professional world as a very desirable asset. Second, we hoped that by embracing and emphasizing “writing,” we might begin the process of reviving the term institutionally. Third, given that OU’s general education program requires all students to take one “writing intensive” course outside of their major, we believed that by having our courses listed under “Writing and Rhetoric” in the course catalog, we might attract more students to our upper-level courses as they looked to the catalog for “Writing” courses. Based on anecdotal evidence, we feel that this choice has worked out quite well.

As is the case for most writing programs, rhetoric provides the theoretical base by emphasizing communication and argumentation within the context of specific discourse communities. Thus, by joining Writing and Rhetoric, we hoped to portray both an easily understandable and theoretically sophisticated branding of our department and our degree program. Our decision to place “writing” before “rhetoric” in both our department name and in the title of our major was purely strategic: our major now occupies the very last place in the college catalog, making it easier for students to find us and our classes.

The Major in Writing and Rhetoric

We believe that the major in Writing and Rhetoric prepares our graduates to perform the kinds of collaborative work in written communication that will be required of them for full participation in an increasingly global and high-tech society, whether they go on to professional writing in business, industry, and non-profits; production work in new media; or continue on to graduate studies in composition-rhetoric. All Writing and Rhetoric majors at OU study rhetorical theories and gain experience composing a variety of texts for multiple audiences, media, and contexts. Individual students also pursue one of three tracks that permit them to choose courses that fit with their unique academic and professional goals.The three tracks consist of writing for the professions, writing for new media, and writing as a discipline. Students who pursue the professional track take classes in business and technical writing and in writing for diverse disciplines; those who choose to follow the new media track take classes that require their critical engagement with and production of digital texts; and those who pursue writing as an academic discipline take classes ranging from classical rhetoric to peer tutoring in preparation for graduate study in composition-rhetoric.

Students majoring in Writing and Rhetoric learn to analyze the processes by which print and digital texts are produced in diverse contexts and communities. Through a group of four core courses, majors gain an understanding of the practices, conventions, theories, and ethics of written and visual communication and use that understanding to produce their own works for multiple audiences and contexts. Central to this understanding is an ability to think critically about emerging forms of literacy and to adapt to the rhetorical demands of new media. Consequently, coursework in the major involves immersion in online and digital forms of communication and consensus building. Required coursework in the major is comprised of three common core courses that emphasize the practical, theoretical, historical, and disciplinary place of writing and rhetoric studies in the university, in business, and in society: WRT 160 Composition II, WRT 340 Issues in Writing and Rhetoric, and WRT 394 Literacy, Technology, and Civic Engagement.{2} Students also complete a single core course introducing them to one of the three tracks in the major: WRT 331 Introduction to Professional Writing, WRT 330 Digital Cultures, or WRT 320 Peer Tutoring in Composition.

During the proposal revision process, we thought as much about the common experiences we wished our majors to have as we did about the unique experiences they should be offered in each of the three tracks in the major. Thus, our common core courses were developed to provide students with a solid foundation in disciplinary history, theory, and practice. WRT 340 Issues in Writing and Rhetoric, for example, is described in the course catalog as “An introduction to important past and current issues in the field of Writing and Rhetoric.” Designed as “an introduction to the discipline, the course will provide a theoretical and historical foundation for understanding current issues and challenges for the discipline.” Students in this course engage with current issues in the field by considering the underlying historial, ideological, and disciplinary implications of those issues. For example, in his Issues in Writing and Rhetoric course, which functions as a gateway course, Greg’s students are introduced to the discipline by reading several different foundational works by past and current scholars in the field to provide a general academic and scholarly base upon which the rest of the courses in the major can build. Because all of our majors will need to deal effectively and critically with evolving technologies, WRT 394 Literacy, Technology, and Civic Engagement engages students in the critical “exploration and application of technology in the discipline of Writing and Rhetoric.” The course catalog further describes this course as one in which students examine “the uneven shifts from oral to print to digital literacy and how those shifts affect the production of knowledge, social relationships, and opportunities for civic engagement. ”{3} This course unites our Writing and Rhetoric Department’s dual focus on new media technologies and civic engagement, helping students to recognize, theorize, and make sense of these two strands in all of their other course work for the degree.

Each of the three tracks also requires a track-specific core course to introduce students to that track and guarantee some consistency in students’ understanding of and experiences with that track. The required course for the Professional Writing track is WRT 331 Introduction to Professional Writing. Grounded in rhetorical theory, this required course prepares students to write effectively in a variety of contexts, examines the professional identity of professional and technical writers, and prepares students to consider the social and ethical responsibilities of professional writing in practice. Students pursuing the New Media track are introduced to the theories, technologies and practices of writing in, with, and for new media through WRT 330 Digital Culture. This course focuses on the rhetoric and ethics of Internet technology and culture by introducing students to theories of digital culture and its effects on both online and actual identities and communities. Students in this class begin their work composing for new media by completing audio and video projects, composing web sites, developing wikis, and participating in a number of web-development projects. Finally, students pursuing our graduate-school track in writing and rhetoric as a discipline begin their study with WRT 320 Peer Tutoring in Composition. The Peer Tutoring in Composition course was chosen as the introductory course for the disciplinary track because it provides students with an opportunity to apply the theories they encounter in WRT 340 Issues in Writing. While they study current theory and best practices in writing center studies, students in Peer Tutoring in Composition also engage in a number of practical experiences (observations, interviews, co-tutoring, and tutoring sessions), working with developing writers in both our department’s WRT 160 Composition II classes and in the Writing Center. The electives offered for each track occasionally overlap, but students are encouraged to focus their coursework on those classes that relate the most to their chosen field of study. A breakdown of the core and elective offerings for each track is provided in the Appendix.

After completing their core and elective coursework, our students take part in either a semester-long internship that synthesizes the knowledge and skills they have gained from their specific tracks in the major or a senior thesis project. The internship requires that students put what they have learned into practice by working in some capacity in the local community, in web development projects on campus, or in research, tutoring, or co-teaching positions. The department was in agreement over the importance of providing our majors with the practical, yet guided, experience of an internship; nevetheless, OU’s student body, comprised of students who work an average of seventeen hours a week, meant that we needed to consider alternative experiences for our majors who are already working in their chosen fields while pursuing their degrees. Thus, our students who elect not to complete an internship for their capstone experience compose a senior thesis that synthesizes the work they have done in the major or addresses some issue related to their elective work in one of the three academic tracks in the major. The core (including the first-year writing course), elective tracks, and internship/thesis all reflect this program’s dual commitment to theory and practice—to helping students use theory to be critical consumers and producers of text.

The Major and the First-Year Writing Course

Our new degree program has simultaneously necessitated an increase in our upper-level offerings and a reconsideration of the ways our required first-year course, WRT 160 Composition II, operates in conjunction with those upper-level courses. In many ways, including the introductory writing course in the collection of required courses for our major has helped us to view first-year-composition as wholly “our own course,” rather than as a service course we provide for the best interest of faculty around the university. As writing has gained a legitimate place in the university curriculum through the implementation of our new major, so too has our first-year course improved its status. In this section we address the changes to our first-year writing course that we were able to make largely as a result of including this introductory writing course in the core curriculum for the major.

While the opportunity to propose and implement a writing major had a great appeal for all of our faculty, we were also interested in enacting a redesign of our first-year writing program that we hoped would bring the required composition course more in line with social constructivist teaching philosophies and rhetorical principles. We looked forward to working with our own majors, in other words, but the department also remained committed to strengthening our first-year writing program. In fact, at OU, all full-time faculty teach a first-year course every year, and this is a practice we are determined to continue. Thus, it made a lot of sense for us to make our required introductory writing class, WRT 160, one of the core courses for our new writing major.

Tying this first-year course to the major has also helped us to achieve a couple of important goals that might have been otherwise out of reach. First, by making this course a part of our own major, we illustrated to faculty across campus that first-year writing is only the introductory part of a much longer sequence of writing instruction that students may pursue throughout their college careers.Second, making WRT 160 a part of our core curriculum for the major has helped us to emphasize the importance of this course to the other departments and the administration by elevating its status on campus, much like we did by embracing the term “writing” and its institutional history when naming the department.

As evidence of the changing status of “writing” on campus and FYC in particular, the administration has provided significant funds over the last two years to revamp our required first-year writing course to bring it in line with the values of the First-Year Experience and to offer a variety of professional development opportunities for our faculty. For example, in summer 2009, we offered $500 stipends to faculty to attend a series of two-day syllabus revision workshops. During this successful series of workshops, more than half (close to 30) of our faculty revised their syllabi to fit with the new program goals.We have also begun offering our graduate course, WRT 615 Teaching of Writing, and a newly-developed graduate course, WRT 525 Teaching Writing with New Media, to our own part-time faculty. Part-time (Special Lecturer) faculty may take these semester-long, fully-online courses for free as a part of the university’s tuition waiver benefit, and they receive graduate credit for the courses. In the years to come, we hope to have all of our first-year classes staffed by only full-time faculty or Special Lecturers who have completed this two-semester graduate course sequence.

The development of a separate Writing and Rhetoric Department and a new Writing and Rhetoric major has energized faculty on all levels, and we now find ourselves blessed with a large, professionally engaged, cohort of part-time faculty Special Lecturers who, in addition to enrolling in graduate study in the field, have begun enrolling in our writing project’s Invitational Summer Institute, attending national conferences like NCTE and CCCC, presenting at state and local conferences, participating in Michigan State’s Writing in Digital Environments summer workshop (WIDE Paths) and Ohio State’s Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) institute, partnering with the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives project, creating an online archive of local oral histories, leading professional development workshops for our faculty, hosting bi-weekly brown-bag lunches, serving on the committee to evaluate our Writing Excellence Awards, and coordinating our fall and winter Festival of Writers. Marshall Kitchens, who worked with us to revise the major proposal, is now department chair, and he has been the driving force behind most of our department’s curricular changes and has found ways to support our most significant professional development initiatives. By tying the first-year course together with our major, we have been able to unite the two strands of our departmental mission, and the result has been, we believe, the strengthening of both the first-year course and the degree program. Bringing part-time and full-time faculty together for professional development events, brown-bag lunches, conferences, committees, and graduate classes has also strengthened the Writing and Rhetoric Department’s sense of community and shared goals.

What We Wished We Knew Then

There are, of course, a number of things we wished we knew when we began re-envisioning our major proposal a little over two years ago.

While we revised the existing major proposal, the three of us also wrote proposals for six new upper-level writing courses to complement and strengthen the major: Literacy, Technology, and Civic Engagement; Issues in Writing and Rhetoric; Advanced Writing; Introduction to Professional Writing; Composing Audio Essays; and Digital Storytelling. We believe that attaching these new course proposals to the major proposal strengthened our argument for the major by providing curricular context for the more conceptual arguments we constructed. Upon reflection, we also suspect that many of these courses may have been approved, in part, because of their connection to one another and to the major proposal. In other words, the individual courses made sense to our College’s Committee on Instruction because they were able to understand those courses within the context of the proposed program and vise versa. Another possibility for the seemingly easy passage of these courses is that there may be a honeymoon period associated with a new major during which time courses that might raise resistance from other departments can work their way through governance without much objection. For example, when we proposed a web design course the following year—a course that we had included in the original proposal as part of the New Media track but did not provide a full course proposal for—we met with resistance from Studio Art and the Department of Communication and Journalism. This resistance lasted nearly a year before our College Committee on Instruction finally settled matters and approved both a new Writing for New Media course and the original Rhetoric of Web Design course. While proposing those first six new courses as a part of the major proposal added a significant amount of work to the proposal process, we believe now that it would have been beneficial and time saving in the long run to include as many new course proposals as we believed were necessary for the program during the major proposal process to avoid as much political posturing over academic turf as possible.

We also wish that we would have taken time during the proposal revision to think specifically about program assessment. As with most colleges and universities, ours is pushing assessment. Had we considered the assessment piece of the proposal more during the proposal revision process, we would most likely be more prepared now to enact our assessment procedures, and this probably would have saved us from retracing many of the steps we initially took during the proposal process. Our first formal assessment of the degree will begin in August of this year, using the procedures we established in our major proposal just two short years ago. And while we recieved valuable feedback from the university senate’s assessment committee that helped us to refine our proposed assessment protocol during the proposal review process, we wish now that we had also met with Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (ORIA) to confirm the viability of our assessment plans. Over the last two years we have focused our efforts, in large part, on developing our new courses and recruiting majors, two time-consuming yet important occupations for any new degree program. But in retrospect, had we met with ORIA during the proposal process, we probably would have also immediately established a department committee charged with guiding us through our first assessment of this new degree.

We were also unprepared for the amount of student interest we received. In the original proposal, we predicted we would have five majors by the end of the first year and 10 after the second. Halfway through our second year, we have 50 declared majors with more signing up monthly. Had we been prepared for this, we might have set up our administrative structures a little differently to account for the added departmental and administrative work that accompanies a fast growing program. For example, we initially proposed separate independent studies courses for the thesis and internships, allowing students to choose one or the other. But as the number of majors increases, we have come to realize that administering independent studies for a dozen or more theses and internships every semester will put an undue burden on our already over-taxed faculty. So, just two short years into this new major, we’re revising our requirements to include, instead of separate independent studies for the thesis or internship, a single capstone course that will meet regularly while students pursue the thesis or internship option. This will transfer the work of mentoring these senior projects to a variety of faculty every semester and permit faculty who would have done this type of advising work as an added responsibility to do so as a part of their usual course load.

Maybe the final lesson we learned from this process is a lesson that is only now taking shape: in developing and implementing the writing major, it’s important to remain flexible and open to change. The more we work with majors, the more we learn about what they need. And the more we learn about majors around the country, the more critically we evaluate our own curriculum. Over the course of the next few years, we will begin to discuss changes to the core curriculum. For example, we are beginning to wonder if a required research methods course might help to focus the various methods students learn in their required and elective writing classes. We are also thinking about adding electives in technical editing, courses in the history of composition in the university, courses in classical rhetoric, and additional 300-level courses in new media.

Developing a new B.A. program provided our faculty with an opportunity to re-think every aspect of our program, from the ways we conceptualize first-year writing to the ways we interact with, support, and professionalize our part-time faculty. Working with majors has, in many ways, helped us to refigure how we work together, and the result has been a uniting of our department’s mission, goals, and values.

Appendix: Requirements for Major in Writing & Rhetoric

Requirements for a Liberal Arts Major in Writing and Rhetoric, B.A. degree program.
The major in writing and rhetoric requires a minimum of 40 credits. A maximum of 8 credits may come from areas other than the writing and rhetoric rubric with the permission of the department chair.{4}

Students who earned college credit for the AP writing course and those who have received credit for the equivalent of WRT 160 at other institutions are not required to take WRT 160. Students who have been exempted from WRT 160 for submitting a portfolio as described under the General Education Program in the Undergraduate Degree Requirements section of the Undergraduate Catalog do not need to take WRT 160 and can instead choose an additional elective course to complete their 40 credits of course work.

Only courses completed with a grade of 2.0 or higher will be counted for the major. Students must complete the following:

1. Core Courses (12 credits): Majors will complete the following Core Courses.

WRT 160 Composition II (or equivalent)

WRT 340 Issues in Writing and Rhetoric

WRT 394 Literacy, Technology, and Civic Engagement

2. Major Track (16 credits): Students will choose one of the following major tracks for their course work and complete both the required course and three of the elective courses from that track. One of the elective courses may be chosen from another track with the permission of the WRT department chair:

Writing for the Professions (16 credits)

Writing for New Media (16 credits)

Writing as a Discipline (16 credits)

3. Two Electives (8 credits): Electives are chosen from additional WRT courses numbered 200 or above. Students may substitute appropriate courses from other departments with permission of the WRT department chair.

4. Capstone Course (4 credits): The capstone includes either WRT 491 Internship or WRT 492 Senior Thesis. The internship should demonstrate grounding in the discipline and application of disciplinary theory. In addition to evaluation by the internship supervisor for the course grade, the student will produce a reflective research project on the experience to be presented in an annual public research forum (e.g., Meeting of the Minds or a special program colloquium) and evaluated by a committee of the tenured/tenure-track faculty using the evaluation criteria in the assessment plan.

As an alternative to the internship, a student may elect to complete a senior thesis project under the supervision of a Writing and Rhetoric faculty member (exceptions can be made for a mentor outside of the department) within whose professional discipline the subject of the project lies. The thesis project should bring together the student’s knowledge and skill in his or her specific track of the major/minor (writing for the professions, writing for new media, or writing as a discipline). The senior thesis, like the internship, should demonstrate grounding in the discipline and application of disciplinary theory. In addition to evaluation by the thesis supervisor for the course grade, the student will present the results of the project in an annual public research forum (e.g., Meeting of the Minds or a special program colloquium) to be evaluated by a committee of the tenured/tenure-track faculty using the evaluation criteria in the assessment plan.

Notes

  1. The complete proposal as submitted to college and university committees and eventually approved by the OU Board of Trustees is available online. Included with the proposal are memos documenting the objections, questions, and suggestions posed by each committee that reviewed the proposal and our memos in response to those objections, questions, and suggestions. To see these materials, go to http://www.oakland.edu/?id=7837&sid=230. (Return to text.)
  2. For course descriptions, visit: http://www2.oakland.edu/wrt/courses.cfm. (Return to text.)
  3. For course descriptions, visit: http://www2.oakland.edu/wrt/courses.cfm. (Return to text.)
  4. Oakland University uses a 4-credit course system. (Return to text.)

Works Cited

Andersen, Wallace May. “Outside the English Department: Oakland University’s Writing Program and the Writing and Rhetoric Major.” Giberson and Moriarty. 67-80. Print.

Balzhiser, Deborah and Susan H. McLeod. “The Undergraduate Writing Major: What Is It? What Should It Be?” College Composition and Communication 61 (2010): 415-33. Print.

Baker, Lori and Teresa Henning. “Writing Program Development and Disciplinary Integrity: What’s Rhetoric Got to Do with It?” Giberson and Moriarty. 153-73. Print.

Beard, David. “The Case for a Major in Writing Studies: The University of Minnesota Duluth.” Composition Forum 21 (2010). Web.

Delli Carpini, Dominic. “Re-writing the Humanities: The Writing Major’s Effect Upon Undergraduate Studies in English Departments.” Composition Studies 35 (2007): 15-36. Print.

Giberson, Greg A., and Thomas A. Moriarty, Ed. What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors. Logan: Utah State UP, 2010. Print.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Curricular Activism: The Writing Major as Counter Discourse.” Composition Studies 35 (2007): 41-52. Print

Shamoon, Linda K., Rebecca Moore Howard, and Sandra Jamieson, Ed. Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2000. Print.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” College Composition and Communication 56 (2004): 297-328. Print.

“Unifying Program Goals” from Composition Forum 22 (Summer 2010)
Online at: http://compositionforum.com/issue/22/oakland.php
© Copyright 2010 Lori Ostergaard and Greg A. Giberson.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.

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