Pratt Institute on WAC

Apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, men cannot
be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through
invention and reinvention, through the restless,
impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue
in the world, with the world, and with each other.
— Paulo Freire,
from The Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) began in the 1970s as an educational reform movement committed to innovations in curriculum development and movements between disciplinary boundaries. Its organizers recognized that thinking and learning are life-long projects that often move between academic majors and disciplines. WAC hopes to foster creative collaboration between the curricula through writing.

The goal of the project ...was to reflect on the ways that writing can complement the teaching and learning process.


Lol Fow and J. Paul Narkunas expanded the program under the premise...good writing and thinking are inseparable.


As a creative form of expression and a forum for exchanging ideas, writing can foster complex thinking among students, allowing them to act in the larger world.


The practice of critical thinking allows students... to develop more focused and thoughtful
approaches to their creative projects and endeavors.


The practice of critical thinking allows students...to develop more focused and thoughtful
approaches to their creative projects and endeavors.

...(art) students generally tend to be quite skeptical and critical of conventions and norms. Although they sometimes tell their writing professors that they do not write well because they are “visual people,” students also understand that they need language to help them discuss
and analyze the endless stream of images in visual media.


We need to create new approaches that work across curricula to help improve
student writing and critical thinking abilities. As “televisual” and telecommunications
technologies become more pervasive, visually and textually literate students will have a distinct advantage.

Focus on strategies that...enable (teachers) to bring writing into their studio curricula. These services emphasize the relationship between words and images, and the exercises complement each specific curriculum.

Approaches


Artist’s Statements
These workshops help students create their artist’s statements and prepare the
groundwork for their senior projects, their applications for graduate school and
the workforce. They also increase students’ overall ability to discuss their work
with others.

Poets in the Studio

Poetry allows students to think about the relationship between form and content, image and
montage, and figurative and abstract representations. By creating poems and by
working with the connections between word and image, students can see how the
process of composing them is directly related to their work as artists.

"The relationship of painters and poets is an ancient one. In Plato’s Republic,
Socrates recommends that all poets and painters be cast out of his utopian republic
because these “imitator[s] and maker[s] of the image know nothing of true existence.”
For Plato’s Socrates, poets and painters evade truth because they imitate
reality and create imaginary (re)presentations of the world. Thankfully, painters
and poets shatter Plato’s illusion that a perfectly rationalized and organized
world—in other words, a world without artists—is desirable or possible."

Critics in the Studio

Effective ways for your students to present the integrity of their ideas and
artistic projects to those from other creative backgrounds...or the public

Revision and the Creative Process

Writing can be a useful tool in helping your students with the creative process.
Indeed, through writing, students can develop their critical thinking and public
speaking abilities, and learn the importance of revision in all forms of textual and
visual creation.


Jen Bervin, poet and visual artist, is the author of Nets (Ugly Duckling,
2004) and Under What Is Not Under (Potes & Poets, 2001). Her work has
been published in Aufgabe, Chain, Denver Quarterly, and Poets & Poems (a collaboration with Alystyre Julian), among others. Bervin received a B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, an M.A. in Poetry from the University of Denver, and an Edward M. Lannan Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches an Advanced Poetry Workshop at NYU,
co-curates Pratt’s Friday Forum Reading Series, and directs the writing internships for Writing for Publication, Performance and Media at Pratt Institute.

Michael Eng is adjunct assistant professor of Philosophy and Architecture in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies and in Undergraduate Architecture. He is also co-director of Pratt’s International Summer Seminar in Architecture and Urban Planning. Eng’s most recent publications include the essay “‘Every name in history is I’: Bachmann’s Anti-archive” in If We Had the Word: Ingeborg Bachmann, Views and Reviews (Ariadne, 2004). He also
contributed a text on artist Sancho Silva’s work Film Machine (2003) for the series 1A + 1P + 1A (one artist + one piece of work + one author) to the Anamnese project (www.anamnese.pt).

Lol Fow is an author, painter, and musician whose plays and fiction have been performed and published in the U.S., Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. Most recently, her short story
“Amelia Too” was included in Juncture, a non-realism anthology of stories and drawings edited by Lara Stapleton (2004). Originally from New Zealand, she has a B.A. in Philosophy and an
M.F.A. in Playwriting from Brooklyn College. She has been teaching creative writing,composition, and literature for eight years at Pratt, and was the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum from 2000–2002.

Marlene Friis has taught academic and content-based ESL in the Intensive English Program for three years. She is currently finishing her M.A. in TESOL at Hunter College. Prior to teaching, she worked in film curation, exhibition and distribution in London, Burkina Faso and San Francisco. Marlene holds an M.A. in Image Studies from the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Nada Gordon has been teaching ESL since 1987. She spent eleven years in Tokyo, where she taught and wrote materials for a curriculum renewal project at a junior college. She has published textbooks with Pearson and Heinle & Heinle, and worked as an editor at Cambridge University Press. An active member of the New York literary community, she has published
three books of poetry and one epistolary non-fiction novel.

Amy Guggenheim is a writer, teacher, and director. Her plays and films have been presented internationally, most recently at Anthology Film Archives, Batofar Paris, Trampoline-Berlin,
Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, La MaMa in NYC, Nottingham Festival in England, and the International Festival of Havana in Cuba, with support from The Banff Center in Canada, the Mellon Fund, and the Pratt Faculty Development Fund, among others. Her work has
been published in American Letters, Commentary, and Stories Magazine. She is on the faculty of Pratt Institute and NYU, and teaches writing workshops privately.

Jeffrey Hogrefe is a writer and instructor in English and Humanities and works on WAC projects in the undergraduate department of the School of Architecture. He designed and teaches a freshman English course to architecture students. Hogrefe also has developed a workshop series for fifth-year senior thesis students, and regularly serves as an invited critic
for student reviews at Pratt and Cooper Union.

Nathan Keene has taught English and ESL for 17 years. After graduating from college in Portland, Oregon, he lived and taught for six years in Tokyo, Japan. He completed his master’s
degree in Education at the University of California in 1999. He now lives in New York City, where he develops and teaches ESL courses at Pratt Institute, for various corporations, and online. He has published book and music reviews in *Punk Planet* magazine
and online at Bad Subjects. In 2002, he received Mellon Foundation funding through Pratt SLAS to research and present methods of teaching poetry to non-native-speaking undergraduates.

Sean Kelly has taught at Pratt in Writing for Publication, Performance, and Media, along with Freshman English, for the past three years. He has also been a radio actor, newspaper
reporter, and advertising copywriter. In 1974, he migrated to NYC to co-write and co-direct the infamous off-Broadway mock-rock musical Lemmings. He has written extensively for television, and was an editor of the National Lampoon magazine from 1970 until 1978. In 1977, he was
the founding editor of Heavy Metal, “the illustrated fantasy magazine.” His byline has appeared in Bazaar, Interview, Playboy, SPY, US, and The Village Voice, among others. For 20 years, he has been guilty of one book per annum.

Cecilia Muhlstein is a writer and printmaker. Currently on the editorial committee of Downtown Brooklyn, she has articles forthcoming which include an article/interview on Los Angeles based artist Jody Zellen’s ongoing web-site project Ghost City for How2, as well as an excerpt and image from her forthcoming novel for the London based, The Wag.

Ethan Spigland is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, and an associate professor of English and Humanities at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He has also taught media theory and production at the New School, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Bauhaus
University in Weimar, Germany. His series of short films, Elevator Moods, won a Webby Award this year and was featured in the Sundance Film Festival last year. His short film The Strange
Case of Balthazar Hyppolite won the Gold Medal in the Student Academy Awards and was a finalist for the Best Short Subject Oscar.

Phal Vaughter is assistant director of the Intensive English Program at Pratt, and has taught for six years in the program. She has been a visiting instructor of Freshman English at Pratt
since 1999, and has helped to develop the curriculum for the international students’ track of English 101 and 103. She has taught native and non-native English speakers in remedial reading and writing classes in the CUNY system. Her overseas work experience includes English language scholarship essay evaluation for the American Council of Teachers of Russian in
Moscow, and she was the recipient of a U.S. Department of Education fellowship for study at Fudan University, Shanghai, People's Republic of China. Suzanne Verderber is an assistant professor of English and Humanities, and member of the Critical and Visual Studies faculty. She has been the academic coordinator for freshman English at Pratt Institute, and has helped revise the freshman English curriculum to highlight the connections of critical thinking and writing. She designs and offers seminars for teachers of writing. She has published work on the intersections of emerging forms of subjectivity in the medieval period, using Gilles Deleuze’s theories of subjectivity.

Liza Williams teaches freshman English and a thesis-writing class in the graduate Art Education Department. She has long been a champion of student writing, editing for a number
of years the annual collection of writing from Pratt English classes, Thought Lines, and advising the student literary and art magazine Ubiquitous. Her classes each produce an informal
anthology of poems or short stories. She is currently working on her own
collection of poems for young readers. WAC at Pratt Director

Richard Loranger is an adjunct instructor who has taught composition, literature, creative writing, and critical thought to both American and international students at Pratt as well as
several CUNY colleges for the past six years. He is a poet, performer, and visual artist, and the author of The Orange Book, Poems for Teeth, and nine chapbooks. At Pratt, he has also
instructed writing labs for undergraduate architecture students, has developed several pedagogical workshops, and has served for three years as a tutor in the Writing and Tutorial Center, where he curates an ongoing exhibition of text-image art.