Evolving Paradigms: WAC and the Rhetoric of Inquiry

Abstract

university campuses gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a conference we organized to discuss the pedagogy and politics of in the disciplines. Some teams were comprised of writing program lecturers at University of California campuses; teams from other universities consisted of tenure-track faculty in composition and other fields who were developing and teaching in WAC programs at their campuses. Discussion centered around the politics of WAC, institutional constraints, collegial networking, faculty development, and teaching models and objectives. Though participants welcomed such discussion, when group members began to name what they did and to define their goals, a level of conflict emerged that surprised us. Some participants spoke long and heatedly about the primacy of writing to learn, while others argued with equal heat for the power of discourse conventions in specific fields. A gap soon opened between the two groups that seemed almost unbridgeable. Upon reflection, we realized that the conference was playing out in microcosm one of the major conflicts in our field-a conflict variously expressed as voice versus discourse, learning versus performance, process versus form. In this article we explore the theoretical and pedagogical implications of this conflict for writing across the curriculum. We argue that the conflict itself is based on a false dichotomy and that work in the social construction of knowledge-particularly the concept of rhetoric of