References

This program profile describes how program director Crystal Fodrey used activity to redesign the Writing at Moravian (WAM). In the conclusion, the authors acknowledge that they started their study before Sustainable WAC (2018) was published but see fruitable overlap in the two approaches, as both warned caution new directors from mimicking other programs and instead pay attention to the local context, find ways to develop a systematic process, and take use a slow and steady process to program development.

In this ambitious study, Brad Peters adapts the whole systems approach (Cox, Galin, & Melzer, 2018) to review twenty plus years of history of a WAC program’s development at a Midwestern high-research university, one that he directs and has been leading for these years. Peters first succinctly summarizes the whole systems approach, showing how it fills a gap left by Condon & Rutz’s taxonomy and builds on Walvoord’s social movement theory for WAC. He then articulates sustainability indicators (SIs), translating them into a six-degree rubric ranging from “minimum” to “substantial” (p. 12), a schema that will likely be appealing to readers. He then draws on program and institutional records and data to assess SIs for the following areas of his WAC program: student support, faculty support, degree programs, budget capacity, control of class size, equitable number of faculty to teach, capacity to assess, committee oversight, coordinator’s course-management, and program visibility. For each SI, he established a baseline, using data from year one of the program (pp. 14-15), captured data again in the next four years (when the program was well funded, the next six (when it wasn’t, and was in decline), and then the next nine (dubbed, the turn-around). For each, he provides an SI table and radar chart (e.g. pp. 28, 29, 31), as well as a narrative, in which the story is told visually, as well as grounded in evidence, and framed with the WSA. This article is the first not authored by Cox, Galin, and/or Melzer to most fully take up the WSA, and the first to adapt it for a use not intended by its authors. Peters ends his article with this: “Twenty-some years is a daunting span of time to reconstruct WAC’s presence on a university campus. But using whole-systems theory has helped me (and will help others) gain a much clearer picture of what the program has been, what it is, and what it can be” (p. 33). This article would be fruitful to read alongside Cox and Galin (2019) and Galins (2021).

In this article, Tricia Serviss and Julia Voss apply the framework and methodology of “new disciplinarity” (Parker, 2002) to analyze transdisciplinary interactions in the Writing in the Disciplines (WID) program at Santa Clara University. Serviss and Voss draw on Cox, Galin, & Melzer (2018) by showing the “the process of involving stakeholders and engaging with outside systems” in action (pp. 458-459). Their article details how they included staff and faculty from different appointment types and disciplines when setting up a multidisciplinary team, as well as considered diverse professional expertise.

In this article, Jenna Pack Sheffield puts forth design thinking as a useful framework for “addressing structural or curricular problems in WAC programs” (p. 168). She sees this framework as distinct from and complementary to systems thinking, as presented by Cox, Galin & Melzer (2018). Sheffield notes that design thinking and systems thinking both developed as ways to analyze and solve problems, but originated from different fields, with design thinking emerging from architecture and art/design disciplines (p. 168) and systems thinking from fields like engineering and biology (p. 171). She sees the two approaches as complementary, arguing that “systems thinking may be more valuable for initial program development, but design thinking can be rather quickly (depending on the context and goals) and cheaply applied for innovation at any stage of a WAC program’s lifespan” (p. 171). This useful article is a useful extension of the whole systems approach that bears closer examination.