Writing Across the Curriculum

About 

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is housed in University College and works with the Composition Program in English and the University Writing Center to support writing at Appalachian.  Beth Carroll directs the program, and Sarah Zurhellen is the Assistant Director. Sheryl Mohn is the WAC program associate.  WAC consultants offer support to the program by advising faculty in teaching writing.  They also frequently present at conferences and are involved in various areas of WAC scholarship.  

Each year WAC works with WID consultants, who are a group of faculty in the disciplines who advice the program. 

The WAC Committee advises the program and recommends course proposals to the General Education Council.

The WAC Program offers individual and program consultations to support writing instruction.  If you would like to discuss possibilities for your course development or support or for your program, please contact Beth at carrollel@appstate.edu.  We can offer workshops designed for program needs, including writing assignment design, handling the paper load, plagiarism, and/or editing concerns, and specific lessons in writing project support.

The Writing Across the Curriculum Program sustains  Appalachian State's Vertical Writing Curriculum, 2011-2012 recipient of the CCCC's Writing Program Certificate of Excellence and 2024 recipient of the Association of Writing Across the Curriculum's Exemplary WAC Program award, by offering support for faculty teaching writing and using writing as a learning tool at all levels of education at Appalachian. The Program was recently featured in Kathleen Blake Yancey's "Follow the Sources: Notes Toward WEC's Contribution to Disciplinary Writing" in the Writing-Enriched Curricula: Models of Faculty-Driven and Departmental  Transformation collection (2021). Yancey highlights the breadth of our disciplinary and genre resources, including the Writing About Guidelines, the Who Writes What list, and the Glossary of Terms.

Housed in University College, WAC works closely with General Education, the Composition and Rhetoric Program, the Writing Center, and the First Year Seminar Program to offer consultations in course and assignment design and response and evaluation to writing in all classrooms. We also offer writing workshops and consultations with all departments, programs, and units across campus as well as with other schools and North Carolina Community Colleges.  For a workshop or consultation with your program, please contact Director Elizabeth Carroll at carrollel@appstate.edu.

Founding Director Georgia Rhoades has offered workshops and consultations to universities and community colleges in North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, California, Indiana, Connecticut, U.K, and Lebanon.  In 2021, Rhoades was recognized as a Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum for making significant contributions to the field of WAC through scholarship, service, and/or achievement. She currently serves on the AWAC Board of Consultants. Please contact her at rhoadesgd@appstate.edu.

Mission

The Writing Across the Curriculum Program (WAC) offers support to the vertical writing model of the General Education curriculum at Appalachian and for writing instruction at other institutions as well as writing outreach.  WAC offers faculty development for the Composition Program, First Year Seminar, and Writing in the Disciplines at the junior and capstone level and through “Don’t Cancel That Class.” WAC also encourages dialogue between writing teachers at universities and community colleges as well as community groups that foster literacy. WAC offers faculty in all disciplines opportunities to talk about writing instruction in their fields and to develop pedagogical strategies for reaching their goals in writing instruction and assessment. These opportunities include individual consultations with the directors or WAC consultants, workshops, special institutes, and the WID consultant program. WAC also conducts assessment for the vertical writing model. WAC supports writing faculty in NC Community Colleges in their development of WAC courses through a variety of outreach projects, including the Writing Across Institutions Conference, established in 2009. The WAC directors and staff are active scholars who participate in national and international conversations about the teaching of writing. Outreach programs include Writers’ Café and Women’s Writing Pilgrimage.

Vision

WAC is a space to bring together faculty from all levels, from other institutions, and from the greater community in conversation about writing and teaching writing. Investing in the premise of the vertical writing curriculum, WAC fosters in faculty and students a greater awareness of the need to transfer skills and knowledge across levels, disciplines, and experiences.

History

We began Appalachian's WAC Program in 2008 in University College, with Georgia Rhoades as half-time director and Sherry Alusow Hart as the first WAC consultant at one-quarter time. Erin Zimmerman, now WPA at American University Beirut, was our first graduate student RA. Rhoades invited Chris Anson to campus to conduct the first R & C/WID faculty workshops to introduce WAC and proposed a vertical writing curriculum to the Gen Ed Task Force. The new Gen Ed reforms called for all disciplines to create WID (or third-year) and capstone writing courses to meet the requirements of the vertical curriculum. In fall 2009, an interdisciplinary WAC Committee reviewed course proposals and recommended actions to the Gen Ed Council, as they do today.

The structure of the new WAC Program instituted in fall 2009 and still existing called for these personnel:

• A half-time WAC director
• Five 1/4 time WAC consultants, one to be assessment director
• A graduate student RA
• A program assistant (shared with Gen Ed)

Beginning that year, we also began the practice of inviting four or five faculty from the disciplines as WID consultants. These faculty advise the program and share their assignments and challenges with us, presenting this information to WAI, our community college conference, each spring.

The original WAC consultants were all NTT faculty in R & C, released for one class each semester according to an agreement between University College and R & C. In more recent practice, some of these consultants, still all R & C veterans, are assigned to WAC as part of their contracts in UC or work solely for WAC. If you have questions about our program structure, please email Georgia at rhoadesgd@appstate.edu.

The WAC Program has been engaged in various levels of assessment since its inception in 2008. We began with a baseline assessment of both RC 1000 and the piloted RC 2001. With the new General Education Curriculum and the Vertical Writing Model about to be launched, we wanted to know our students' strengths and weaknesses before the curriculum changed. Since that first assessment of student portfolios, we assessed them annually from 2008 until 2018, providing the first direct writing assessment to Gen Ed in at least 20 years. Our rubrics evolved to become more meaningful as well.

We also developed internal assessments for WAC staff, including follow-up evaluations for WID faculty consultations and class visits, participant evaluations of workshops and presentations, and annual reports by and evaluations of consultants by the director for the Vice-Provost for Academic Affairs.

To learn more about WAC Assessment, visit our assessment resources.

WAC Founders

Georgia Rhoades

Georgia Rhoades, rhoadesgd@appstate.edu, was the founding director of Writing Across the Curriculum of Appalachian State University in 2008. In 2011, the WAC program, along with the University Writing Center and the RC program, was awarded the CCCC Certificate of Excellence for its vertical writing curriculum and intensive faculty support. Appalachian’s Writing Across Institutions conference, established in 2009, is a free conference for community college faculty in North Carolina and is a model for establishing WAC practices and conversations between community college faculty and universities.

As a consultant to WAC and composition programs, Rhoades has offered workshop and consultations to universities and community colleges in North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, California, Indiana, Connecticut, U.K, and Lebanon. In 2021, Rhoades was recognized as a Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum for making significant contributions to the field of WAC through scholarship, service, and/or achievement. She currently serves on the AWAC Board of Consultants. 

Rhoades offers support for creating sustainable programs based on conversation between faculty, developing vertical writing curricula, designing faculty development across campuses, and collaboration between institutions. She has presented internationally at EATAW, WDHE, NFEAP, and Great Writing, and at CCCC, the Watson Conference, Quinnipiac, Feminist Rhetoric, and NWSA. She was recognized by the NC Board of Governors for excellence in teaching. Her work has been published in A Minefield of Dreams and Research in Writing, and her articles have appeared in Currents, Across the Disciplines, Academe, and Feminist Formations. She has regularly held artistic residencies at Annaghmakerrig, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, and The Playhouse in Derry, N. Ireland, since 1995.

Areas of specialization: vertical writing curricula, faculty development, community college support, non-tenure track faculty development and concerns

Dennis Bohr

Dennis Bohr taught high school English for 14 years before moving to Boone in 1993.  He taught composition, Theatre Appreciation, Speech, and British and American Literature at Caldwell Community College before becoming full time at Appalachian State, teaching in Rhetoric and Composition. He now teaches a Freshman Seminar course titled Theatre and Social Justice and works in the University Writing Center. Dennis was awarded the Sustainable Arts Grant Award from the ASU Sustainability Council in May 2013 and May 2016 to produce his plays, Jesus from Another Planet and The Disposable Man, both of which were performed on Appalachian’s campus. He is a founding member of Black Sheep Theatre, a theatre troupe dedicated to writing and performing original work. His plays have seen numerous productions in North Carolina and Kentucky as well as overseas in England and Northern Ireland. He is a recent recipient of an OIED grant to attend a week-long residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. 

Sherry Alusow Hart

Sherry Alusow Hart has been teaching composition for over 26 years.  She received her B.A. and M.A. from East Tennessee State University and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Maryland, College Park.  She has been at ASU since 2003.  In addition to being a WAC Consultant since 2008 specializing in assessment, she was a co-investigator for the Information Literacy Assessment in Fall 2009 and is providing assessment support for several other programs connected with writing. She also teaches British Literature for the English Department, has served as secretary for the Tennessee Philological Association for the past four years, and has been a Faculty Consultant for the ETS/College Board English Literature Exam since 1996.

Former WAC Consultants

Lauren Coldiron

Lauren Coldiron is currently pursuing a PhD in English from Old Dominion University. Her area of research involves how we integrate digital media into pedagogy, specifically with the outcome of increasing awareness of and advocacy for positive representations of diversity. She serves as coordinating editor for the MediaCommons Field Guide, a digital scholarly network dedicated to fostering discussion about issues concerning English, Communication, and the Humanities.

Holli Flanagan

Holli Flanagan is a second-year English graduate student at Appalachian State University, and she is thrilled to be WAC’s 2020-2021 Graduate Research Assistant. She graduated from ASU with a bachelor’s degree in English with a French minor in 2018. She is currently working on a graduate thesis on climate crisis identity in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and has plans to pursue a Ph.D. in 20th century literature. Holli has further interests in language, the connection between writing and the writer, and disability studies.

Chelsea Hatfield

Chelsea Hatfield, WAC's 2019-2020 Graduate Assistant, is a second-year graduate student at Appalachian State University pursuing a Masters in English. Her favorite saying is "Bloom Where You Are Planted." Her favorite book is Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Her favorite place that she has visited was London (and she can't wait to go back). 

Brendan Hawkins

Brendan Hawkins is a PhD student in Florida State University’s Rhetoric and Composition program, where he teaches Research, Genre, and Context classes in FSU’s College Composition program. In addition to his range of research interests—including writing across the curriculum, faculty development, and electronic portfolios—he studies the relationships among tacit knowledge, reflection, and composing. Before moving to Florida State, Brendan was a Writing Across the Curriculum faculty consultant and Rhetoric and Composition program adjunct instructor at Appalachian State University. He graduated from Appalachian with an MA in English and a Graduate Certificate in Rhetoric and Composition. 

Dr. CC Hendricks

C.C. Hendricks is currently a Doctoral candidate in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University. Since arriving at SU, she has served as a writing center consultant; an instructor of freshman, sophomore, and professional writing; Assistant Editor for the Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series; and Assistant Director of TA Education in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition. Her research interests include feminist rhetorics and historiography, affect in political rhetoric, Writing Across the Curriculum, and Writing Program Administration.

Dr. Travis Rountree

Dr. Travis A. Rountree earned his doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition from University of Louisville in May 2017.  He is currently the director of writing at Indiana University East in Richmond, IN and the treasurer for the Appalachian Studies Association.  His research focuses on place-based learning, public memory studies, and Appalachian Rhetorics.  He owes much of the success of his professional career to the profound professional development of the ASU WAC Program.

Katelyn Stark

Former Graduate Assistant for AppState's Writing Across the Curriculum Program, Katelyn Stark is currently a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition. Her dissertation, Writer Development Within and Outside the Composition Classroom: A Study of Concurrent Transfer, investigates the impact composition curricula have on students’ ability to draw upon, use, and repurpose their writing knowledge across multiple contexts. Her forthcoming publications will appear in English Studies Online, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Utah State University Press. Katelyn currently serves as the Assistant Director of FSU’s College Composition Program and is in the process of redesigning FSU’s first-year composition curriculum. In addition to her research and service, Katelyn is an avid teacher. She teaches upper-level writing courses in FSU's Editing, Writing, and Media major, including Writing and Editing in Print and Online (WEPO) and Rhetoric.

Dr. Erin Zimmerman

Dr. Erin Zimmerman, one of the original WAC Consultants, is currently the Director of the Writing Center and the Writing in the Disciplines Program and an assistant professor in the English Department at the American University of Beirut in Beirut, Lebanon. Her experience working with the WAC Program from 2008-2011 has influenced her research and teaching ever since. Both center on Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines, and composition pedagogy, with a focus on supporting students’ transfer of learning across disciplines and using writing as a method for learning disciplinary course content. In 2016 she completed her PhD in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University where her dissertation examined 

1. how researchers in the composition and the biological sciences programs at ISU compose with and read visuals in scholarly documents and
2. how that knowledge is then transmitted to students in composition and biology classes.

Awareness of these practices provides understanding of discipline specific communication expectations, which in turn enhances instructors’ guidance of students’ learning in each discipline and abilities to support students’ transfer of learning across these two disciplines. 

Her recent research projects include a redesign of pedagogical approaches for a graduate-level Writing in the Disciplines course for ESL students, and an examination of group size in collaborative projects for enhancing student learning and managing the teaching loads of multidisciplinary faculty.

Mary Neal Meador

Mary Neal Meador is a graduate of Middlebury College, where she studied French, German, and art history. She has been a production manager for the The New York Observer, a freelance book editor and designer for academic publishers including Oxford UP and Routledge, a production manager at a K-12 textbook publishing studio, and a professional consultant in the University Writing Center here at Appalachian State.