Education

WAC

Perhaps the most notable reference to the word “across” in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies scholarship is in the context of the writing across the curriculum (WAC) movement that gained momentum in US higher education during the 1980s and which has become, according to Cox et al. (2018), “the longest-standing curricular reform movement in the history of higher education in the United States” (p. 1). In a “state of the field” essay published at the beginning of the 21st century, Thaiss (2001) briefly contemplates the significance of the preposition “across” to the WAC movement: “‘Across’ connotes movement from place to place, time to time. It implies coverage, but not necessarily depth” (p. 312) “Across” casts the curriculum as a topography, divided by borders and boundaries that must be traversed. “Without the ‘in’ [of “writing in the disciplines”] there is little argument for the ‘across,’” writes Thaiss. “Or, to give a different answer to the old question, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ — because there really was another side” (p. 313). The idea that writing conventions and epistemologies differ between disciplinary communities—in ways that are both dramatic and yet often unnoticed—is perhaps the core insight of WAC research and theory. Rhetorically, the term writing across the curriculum signals that even though “the curriculum” implies cohesion, there are still fault lines that must be bridged.

And yet, even though “across” makes divisions visible, it is also a term that connotes benevolence.

Why then does ‘writing across the curriculum’ have staying power even though ‘across’ is not a ‘stay-put’ kind of word? I think it’s because it sounds nonthreatening. Unlike ‘writing throughout the curriculum,’ which implies 100 percent compliance, ‘writing across the curriculum’ implies an even presence, but not control.
(Thaiss, 2001, p. 312)

Like its use in phrases like “cross-cultural” or “reaching across the aisle,” crossing is usually perceived as a basically positive, unifying force. In some ways, perhaps, “across” may have begun to function in writing studies like the way Harris (1989) argues the word “community” has—potentially “an empty and sentimental word” (p. 13), both an “appealing and limiting concept” (p. 21).

Transfer

When people transfer knowledge, they “carry over” principles or techniques from one context to another, requiring “the crossing of a boundary, otherwise known as a transition” (Yancey et al., 2014, p. 9). Transfer has become a vexing issue for writing researchers as well as teachers and curriculum designers, since it calls into question the purpose and efficacy of teaching writing at all. Although most curricula have tended to assume that students can broadly apply or at least repurpose what they learn in writing classes to other contexts, the prevailing finding of most empirical research on writing transfer is that students successfully transfer what they learn much less often than we think (Donahue, 2012).

Transfer, like all crossing metaphors, is spatial. In a foundational article drawing attention to transfer in composition studies, McCarthy (1987) presents the case study of “Dave,” who McCarthy describes as a “stranger in strange lands,” unable to see the connections between multiple courses he is enrolled in simultaneously. Like the “across” of writing across the curriculum (above), the theme of strange lands positions the curriculum as a vast landscape writers must “cross” without much guidance. In a similar spatial metaphor, Dias et al. (1999) frame the disparate contexts of school and work writing as “worlds apart,” suggesting that rhetorical knowledge is unlikely to be able to cross this cosmic divide.

The action of transfer has been further articulated through additional crossing metaphors like roads (“high-road” and “low road”) bridging (Perkins & Salomon, 1992), or moving “from the periphery of not-knowing to the center of knowing” (Tuomi-Gröhn & Engeström, 2003, p. 26). Meanwhile, Reiff and Bawarshi (2011) have categorized people who transfer (or don’t) as “boundary crossers” and “boundary guarders,” evoking again the image of the traveler negotiating divisions of some kind.

Scholars have critiqued the way that transfer can tend to reduce writing to a portable and instrumental skill that can be “carried” around like a backpack and also how it can tend to create perhaps artificial binaries between one context and another, when it may be more accurate to say these contexts are overlapping, interwoven, or “laminated” (Prior & Shipka, 2003). But transfer directs our attention to the ways that writers themselves (their brains, their bodies, their social selves)—and not just writing as an artifact or activity—participate in various forms of crossing. Transfer research has shown us that although studying boundary crossing is problematic when it comes to writing knowledge, that’s also where learning happens.

Consequential transition is the conscious reflective struggle to reconstruct knowledge, skills, and identity in ways that are consequential to the individual becoming someone or something new, and in ways that contribute to the creation and metamorphosis of social activity and, ultimately, society.
(Beach, 1999, p. 130).

It is not only knowledge that moves—the entire human being moves, and in so doing reconstructs his or her relation to the context.… Surprising boundary-crossings can be very useful in creating new expertise.
(Tuomi-Gröhn & Engeström, 2003, pp. 28 and 35).

Thresholds

In recent years, writing studies has embraced Meyer and Land’s (2003) formulation of threshold concepts both as a way of building disciplinary identity and as a pedagogical tactic for developing metacognition that facilitates transfer (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015). Thresholds, of course, are another explicit crossing metaphor, in this case symbolizing the conceptual transitions involved in learning within a knowledge community. According to Meyer and Land (2003), threshold concepts are transformative and troublesome—that is, understanding and incorporating the concept changes the learner forever. If transfer emphasizes a kind of horizontal crossing between communities, threshold concepts highlight the vertical crossings that move learners “deeper” into a community.

There is another way that thresholds have made a critical contribution to writing studies’ crossing metaphors: Thresholds are access points. Writing instruction and assessment often serve as key access points in educational contexts, with literacy “thresholds” being the criterion for who is allowed entry. First-Year composition courses, in particular, have had to grapple with the tension of their dual role as “gatekeepers,” tasked with keeping students out, and “access providers,” responsible for supporting students in their transition to academic life (Dolmage, 2008; Fox, 1999; McBee Orzulak, 2013; Shor, 1997; Smith, 1997). In recent years, anti-racist and anti-ableist approaches to writing assessment and instruction have increasingly called attention to and critiqued writing’s gatekeeping functions, with translingual pedagogies, contract grading and ungrading, and Universal Design for Learning presenting promising frameworks that expand education’s access points.

Beyond the Curriculum

Despite the field’s tendency to focus on school contexts, a number of writing and literacy scholars have for some time argued that the curriculum is an unnecessarily limiting landscape to study writing development (e.g., Brandt, 2001; Cushman, 1998; Gere, 1994), advocating that researchers and educators instead turn their gaze outside the academy. A vibrant strand of this research has centered on partnerships that join universities and community projects through experiential learning curricula and service learning partnerships (Blancato et al., 2019; Deans, 2000; Flower, 2008; Goldblatt, 2007; Grabill, 2007; Lettner-Rust, et al., 2007; Mathieu, 2005; Parks & Goldblatt, 2000) in work that has been characterized as “writing across communities” (Kells, 2007) or “boundary spanning” (Weerts & Sandmann, 2010). This body of literature tends to use “worlds apart” metaphors (Alexander et al., 2020) to characterize the separation between communities and the academy, with writing, writers, or writing programs serving as the bridge between these spheres.

A recent wave of momentum has been coalescing behind a different kind of extracurricular literate “spanning”: writing across the lifespan (Bazerman et al., 2018). This research makes use of crossing metaphors to describe how writing develops in individual writers across contexts but also, significantly, across time, using various frameworks such as transliteracies (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), wayfinding (Alexander et al., 2020), or lamination (Smith & Prior, 2020). Lifespan writing research strives to take a comprehensive, zoomed-out view, occasionally tracing writers’ entire lives. Pahl (2020) and Smith (2020) both identify the preposition “across” as a research orientation that writing and writers “are in constant motion… not tethered or isolated to that context; rather, writing is a widely distributed, highly complex phenomenon” (Smith, 2020, p. 18). While researchers in this area often admit that the agile methods such an expansive research orientation necessitates “can never be fully successful” (Pahl, 2020, p. 3), it serves as a useful critique to “cleanly bounded, relatively stable… territorial interpretations of writing” (Prior & Smith, 2020, p. 1) that have remained dominant in literacy research.