UCLA Writing Program: Overview

OVERVIEW: PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY

Writing Programs courses examine written discourse, not merely as a means of expression but as a way of making meaning as well. Our premise is that reading and writing are interrelated activities and that effective written communication occurs as a consequence of writing, reading, and rewriting in specific intellectual and social contexts: writing is not merely an isolated and isolating activity. In line with these premises, the program stresses collaborative work, modeling of academic and real world rhetorical situations and tasks, experimentation with alternative methods of evaluation, for instance, portfolio grading, and a high level of responsiveness to individual students, particularly as expressed through detailed oral and written feedback on students' work.

We strive to help our students to develop critical thinking, creativity, adaptability and intellectual flexibility; to understand and use language to comprehend, connect, and forge ideas; and to join the university's conversations and academic discourse communities as active agents of inquiry, not as passive recipients of information. We also work to familiarize students with the surface conventions of standard English, to enhance their ability to respond successfully to the analytical reading/writing tasks expected at a research university, and to help them speak and write with authority on problems of the kinds posed in academic contexts.

UCLA Writing Programs has been seen as a flagship writing program since its inception in 1980. It has also been seen as the most successful writing program in the UC system; several campuses, including Berkeley, Riverside, and Santa Cruz, have sought our advice about expanding and improving their own programs. During its early years, Writing Programs was well funded because Vice-Chancellor William Schaefer strongly supported the concept of a campus-wide writing program. For eight years the program's funding remained dependable. With administrative support and funding, program lecturers developed an innovative and varied curriculum which has been seen as an early form of what is now called writing-across-the-curriculum. The intellectual commitment of program members to creating a campus-wide program in a relatively new field, and the shared vision that resulted from that work seems, in retrospect, the heyday of the program, although structural and logistical problems did arise.

With the severe budget cuts of the early 1990s and an increase in the teaching load, the program spent most of its energy outside the classroom fighting further cuts and revising the curriculum and structure of the program to accommodate increasing student demand with fewer courses. Program development became damage control: devising ways to teach writing with fewer dollars and fewer instructors but more students. Budget cuts affected not only the number of students we could teach but also program development and morale. Coincidentally, at the time of the deepest recession in California, the program entered a phase of self-governance with rotating but longer term internal director and assistant director. (English department faculty had begun to sign on for only one year as acting directors.) The timing seemed ironic: as the program assumed fuller responsibility for self-governance, we were faced with the deprofessionalization of forced part-time appointments. Fortunately, this threat was averted, and the program seems to have attained steady-state funding, as has the College.

Even under these constrained circumstances, we work hard to effectuate positive change in the program's curriculum and use of resources. With program faculty as academic administrators, we have achieved a greater depth of internal administrative continuity, establishing a Writing Programs Executive Committee and instituting new internal review mechanisms for both faculty personnel cases and academic administrators. Additionally, we have representation on two important senate committees, Undergraduate Council and the Committee on Educational Preparedness, as well as on the GE Writing Committee and various Task Forces involved with writing across the campus. With guidance from the Curriculum Committee we recently achieved the most widely transformative curricular revision done in Writing Programs in the last decade: we created a broader and more coherent program of academic writing, the 129 series, which serves a greater range of disciplines and students than in its previous form; re-defined the focus of the 131 courses to make them less narrowly pre-professional and more clearly analytical studies of professional discourses and fields; and most importantly, we created an entirely new set of courses, the 132 series, that address particular topics in rhetoric rather than the discourse of a specific field or profession. This change allows us to bring writing not associated with traditional arenas of power, such as the professions, into the center of the curriculum and to include underrepresented ideas, genres, and writers in our curriculum, thereby defining "writing" in a broader rhetorical and cultural context. Reshaping our curriculum in these ways allows us to meet student need and major requirements through more broadly conceived curricular strands which are closely aligned with the College's liberal arts and research missions.

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