Building sustainable WAC programs: A whole systems approach
Related Publications
This article explores the whole systems approach (WSA) (Cox, Galin, & Melzer, 2018) by following the launch of a Writing across the Curriculum program at Texas A&M-San Antonio (TAMUSA), a university at which one of the authors, Jeffrey Galin, was consulting and mentoring the WAC director, Katherine Bridgeman. This article provides a concise overview of the WSA, as well as examples that show how this approach works in context, including an image of a whiteboard that displays a mapping of WAC in relation to writing activities on campus completed by the TAMUSA WAC committee (p. 70), a network map of TAMUSA’s WAC program (p. 72), sample sustainability indicators that show TAMUSAs WAC program in distress (p. 78), and an email from Jeff as WAC consultant that prompted Katherine to think of WAC as “the introduction of transformative change for the curriculum on your campus” (p. 83), an email that ultimately persuaded the WAC Committee to implement a four-course WI curriculum (p. 83). This article complements Sustainable WAC by showing how the WSA may be applied on one campus.