In the article, “Improving Success, Increasing Access: Bringing HIPs to
Open Enrollment Institutions through WAC/WID”, Kester and co-authors discuss how different institutional environments can contribute significantly to the employment of HIP. Considering the concerns of the UNE environment that I brought up in last week’s article, I found the subject matter for this week especially pertinent. Additionally, I found it especially interesting to consider the environment of the community college. Perhaps the community college environment seemed specifically interesting because of its correlation with on of recent tutoring experiences.
During this tutoring session, I consulted with a student who had spent the prior two years at a community college. One of the concerns they brought up was the difference in standards between their former college and UNE; they felt as though UNE was far more rigorous when grading writing. Perhaps this relates to what Kester and Co-Author’s identified about the academic curriculum of community colleges, which is that “Much of the curriculum at open enrollment institutions like community colleges is in fact “unavoidable curriculum” (i.e., general education requirements)…”. This intrigued a series of thoughts about how writing standards of practice can vary from on institution to another, and how my own experience with this had shaped my perception of the writing standards at UNE. I had the opposite experience with writing expectations coming to UNE; however, I found myself in a similar place when I returned to college at Lesley University after my gap year.
After my year off and Upon returning to academics, I discovered my loss of writing knowledge. Every english paper was proposed with a different citation style, my political science class took on a monstrous form when the syllabus demanded I write a “They Say, I Say” paper responding to the entirety of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty, and I found myself lost in thought about the cultural implications of translating my citations from Spanish to English for my Latin American literature course. By October, I had a weekly appointment in place during my English professor’s office hours, during which I would answer scathing questions about whether my sentences were showing or telling; and I would be forced to confess my lack of knowledge on subjects, past participles, junctions, and independent clauses. Ultimately— despite the emotionality associated with finding out I really wasn’t as good of a writer as I thought I was— I entered UNE with confidence in my newfound writing ability.
Yet, at UNE, I found myself amidst a very different population of students, and I assumed that because of this, I found a much less demanding set of writing expectations. Of course, this is/was a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, as I cannot determine that the population of either school guides the academic expectations demanded of them. However, I think this is an important component of Kester et al’s research into the subject about why, “Despite WAC/WID’s potential, WAC/WID programs have failed to thrive in the two-year college context”.
Ultimately, the findings reported by Kester and their co-authors discerned that the application of WAC/WID programs at an open-enrollment school improved the average grades of student’s across demographics by at least half a letter grade. Additionally, the results indicated an overall improvement in number of students completing the courses they were taking (from 84.3% to 92.21%). The majority of the qualitative information about the WAC/WID integration reported a more positive outlook towards writing itself, and furthermore, how it would influence their competency in their later coursework.
This information indicates that it is not the population of the institution that leads to the detriment of writing standards/ failure of WAC/WID writing programs, but rather the implementation of them. The article reports that a perspective that can commonly intervene in the percieved efficacy of these programs is that “…increasing, or even incorporating, writing assignments might take the focus away from content.”. Kester and their co-authors state that “Instead, student responses support one of the longstanding premises of WAC/WID pedagogy: Using these principles does not detract from content mastery, but, rather, deepens it.”
So perhaps, my experience between colleges and my tutee’s experience between colleges is reliant on a similar basis: a difference in implementation of WAC/WID writing practices. This difference suggests a quality of the programs across-institutions that Kester and their co-authors don’t discuss in their article: that the implementation of WAC/WID writing practices can occur on a spectrum. Using the example of the institutions listed, this spectrum would place the local community college at the lowest end of implementation, UNE would be placed in the middle, and Lesley would be placed at the end. Additionally, I think there is an implied connection between perceived value/importance of writing efficacy, WAC/WID programs (HIP), and perceived writing expectations. I believe the clarification of this gradient will help me to create more effective resources for the students of UNE, as it considers one of the fundamental aspects of writing pedagogy (and especially my own): meeting students where they’re at.
