Context-Rich Design and Designing a WAW Curriculum for Community Colleges

Introduction

The community college landscape is replete with students from diverse backgrounds, each with unique educational and career aspirations. In order to better serve these students and foster their academic and vocational success, we propose a writing curriculum based on the Writing-About-Writing (WAW) approach. This pedagogical framework, first introduced by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs in their 2007 article “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions,” emphasizes the importance of teaching writing as a tool that mediates various activities, each with its own rhetorical needs. Drawing on the works of Anne Beaufort, Wardle, and Linda Adler-Kassner, the WAW approach equips students with essential analytical skills and threshold concepts, enabling them to navigate diverse writing situations across academic disciplines and professional settings.

Community colleges stand to benefit significantly from adopting a WAW-based curriculum. By teaching students the intricacies of discourse communities, rhetoric, genre, and research, the WAW approach primes them to tackle unpredictable writing situations they may encounter in various fields. Moreover, this curriculum is well-suited for community college students seeking transfer to four-year institutions, as it ensures they are equipped with the necessary analytical skills to adapt to new writing contexts at their destination schools.

One of the major strengths of a WAW curriculum is its flexibility. Instead of prescribing rigid syllabi, WAW serves as a set of curricular guideposts that accommodate and complement the unique expertise of experienced community college instructors. Thematic approaches, such as those popularized during the cultural studies era, can be integrated into a WAW curriculum, provided they focus on introducing students to rhetorical concepts applicable across contexts.

Implementing a WAW curriculum involves incorporating assignments that address key knowledge domains, such as discourse community knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, genre knowledge, critical thinking and research knowledge, and metacognition. By embedding these domains in the curriculum, students will be better prepared to transfer their writing skills to various academic and non-academic settings. In sum, a context-rich writing curriculum, grounded in the WAW approach, holds significant potential for enhancing the educational experience and outcomes of community college students.