Herrington and Stassen discuss the inherent vitality of writing in HIPs throughout a general education curriculum in their article Intersections of Writing, Reflection, and Integration. The article focuses on the inevitable utilization of writing as a tool to deploy reflection in HIPs, identifying that although, “… writing was not a focus of our design of the IE and… was not even mentioned in the criteria for developing IE courses. It does…reinforce what we know from early WAC work that points to the connection between writing and learning—specifically integration and reflection, both key features of HIPs.”. Overall, this article stands to reason that writing is an integral, multi-disciplinary task in higher education, one of the students interviewed by the authors was quoted stating, “I think it’s great to make connections among classes, across topics and readings; we should be
critical of if and how and why what we learn in our university classes applies to our lives in a deeper and larger way.”. This furthers the application of writing beyond understanding the material learned within college classrooms, and into understanding how one’s academic experience at college implicates their future career. In this way, writing has multi-faceted reflective qualities: allowing students to reflect on how their knowledge integrates into the theories of other disciplines, and globalizing this understanding into the problems we face in reality. Interestingly, Stassen and Herrington found that “…focusing on this objective [IE criterion] when they developed course assignments led faculty to think of
different types and purposes for writing, instead of focusing so much on disciplinary ‘content’ or ‘writing skills'”. I think this indicates an important factor in the deployment of HIPs within the academic curriculum, as well as utilizing them as a basis for writing assignments; HIPs allow integration and reflection to become the main point of writing, which emboldens the assignments to a format that assumes this broad purpose over the more narrow ones procured through class-specific criteria. When writing assignments take part in a larger educational frameworks, this transfers a larger purpose to their effective completion. Ultimately, I think Stassen and Herrington discern the ways in which writing can be made more effective as a learning tool, and not simply as a competency checkpoint.
