Aligning Existing WE Courses with Current WE Standards
Prior to 2020, WE course approval was based primarily on the number of pages of writing a student was being asked to write. The current WE standards are more qualitative. It is entirely possible that a pre-2020 WE course meets the 2020 standards. During the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) committee’s WE program assessment, carried out over 2019-2020, the committee evaluated 165 WE courses. Most of the 165 were in alignment with the current standards to a certain extent. A handful were completely aligned. A handful didn’t meet the current standards at all (or the old standards, for that matter). We suspect that many of the 165 did not meet the new standards because the committee did not receive requested additional materials that would help clarify the WE design.
From now through the end of 2025, WAC will be working through each of those 165 courses and notifying, through Chairs, faculty who teach the courses that their course is (or is not) out of alignment, and that the course may need to be brought into alignment before it is offered again. Again, this simply may be a matter of sharing further information with the committee. However, minor or major course redesign is also a possibility. In many cases, we may simply ask that the syllabus be more explicit about what WE is and how it is expressed in the course.
The committee will help with the process of alignment as much as we can, through consultation and workshop opportunities. Please contact us (write@truman.edu) if you have questions.
The current standards are here. However, a different path to those standards is here, through the explication of the current New/Updated WE Course Approval Form.