Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places

PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING SERIES, EDITED BY SUSAN H. MCLEOD | Emerging from the International WAC/WID Mapping Project, WRITING PROGRAMS WORLDWIDE: PROFILES OF ACADEMIC WRITING IN MANY PLACES is meant to inform decision-making by teachers, program managers, and college/university administrators considering how writing can most appropriately be defined, managed, funded, and taught in the places where they work. WRITING PROGRAMS WORLDWIDE offers an important global perspective to the growing research literature in the shaping of writing programs. The authors of its program profiles show how innovators at a diverse range of universities on six continents have dealt creatively over many years with day-to-day and long-range issues affecting how students across disciplines and languages grow as communicators and learners. In these profiles, we see teachers and researchers relying on colleagues and on transnational scholarship to build initiatives that are both well suited to their specific environments and can serve as regional and often global models. Their struggles and achievements offer insights to colleagues in similar locales and across borders who seek to establish, enhance, and assess their own work as designers of writing programs. An introduction and three section essays by the editors illuminate themes that inform this collection. Growing networks of initiators and scholars and survey results from the International WAC/WID Mapping Project exemplify the argument of this collection for transnational exchange and collaboration. CHRIS THAISS is Clark Kerr Presidential Chair and Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis. GERD BRÄUER directs the distance-learning program for teachers at the Writing Center at the University of Education in Freiburg, Germany. PAULA CARLINO is a researcher with the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research, CONICET, at the University of Buenos Aires. LISA GANOBCSIK-WILLIAMS is Head of the Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry University. APARNA SINHA is pursuing her PhD in Education at the University of California, Davis, with designated emphases in Writing Studies and in Second Language Acquisition.