Writing Enriched Curriculum

Smith adopted the Writing Enriched Curriculum (WEC) program in fall of 2019 as part of a grant funded by the Davis Educational Foundation.  That semester, individual departments started the task of rethinking and redesigning their curricula to better support students within their fields. 

The Writing Committee revised the WEC process in 2024 to adapt it to Smith’s smaller departments and busy faculty.  In 2026, the process was expanded to include critical conversations about writing and AI.  At Smith, WEC now encompasses a single year of four meetings facilitated by the WEC specialist and a departmental liaison.  The specialist conducts a survey of student-majors and faculty (including questions about students’ use of AI), leads a departmental assessment of student writing, helps the department create a map of writing in its curriculum, helps the department define AI’s role in the curriculum, and guides the liaison in creating a writing plan that the department can use to implement future changes to its writing pedagogy.  Plans already produced by Smith departments are presented below.

The WEC model offers a faculty-driven approach to supporting effective and relevant writing and writing instruction within an undergraduate curriculum. The model is founded on the following principles, gleaned from three decades of research and experience:

• Writing can be flexibly defined as an articulation of thinking and an act of choosing among an array of modes or forms, only some of which involve words.  Simply put, writing comprises marks on a page or screen intended to convey meaningful information to an audience. 
• Writing ability is continually developed rather than mastered.
• Because writing is instrumental to learning, it follows that writing instruction is the shared responsibility of content experts in all academic disciplines.
• Faculty are best poised to help students understand and navigate GenAI as a writing tool.
• The incorporation of writing into content instruction can be most meaningfully achieved when faculty are provided multiple opportunities to articulate, interrogate, and communicate their assumptions and expectations.
• Faculty need support when infusing writing instruction into their teaching.

In a nutshell, WEC engages undergraduate departments in a faculty-driven process of self-reflection around the infusion of writing in their curricula and pedagogy.

Ongoing assessments indicate that implementing the WEC model can trigger positive shifts in writing instruction and in the rate at which student writing meets local faculty expectations.  Faculty in departments that have completed the WEC process report greater intentionality and reflection in their teaching and in their departments’ curricula; stronger writing assignments and more purposeful feedback; and more deliberate curricular planning.

The WEC process dovetails well with midterm departmental reviews, public-facing writing initiatives, conversations about departmental policy on AI use, and inclusive teaching.

WEC can productively dovetail with the midterm review in two ways:

• WEC can act as preparation for the midterm review, by allowing faculty to begin the conversations about curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy that are part of the review process.
• WEC can broaden faculty discussions during the review process, enriching the experience for members of the department and making the process more collaborative and less the work of a single individual (e.g. the chair).  Additionally, it provides support for envisioning curricular change during the midterm review and can help departments answer question #6 of the review process (“Does your assessment plan still reflect your student learning goals? Is your assessment plan informing your curricular decision? Please explain”) with targeted, comprehensive focus.

Writing plans are developed in a series of lively meetings with departmental faculty and a specialist in writing pedagogy and assessment. These meetings allow faculty opportunities to think collaboratively about the roles played by writing in their fields, attributes they look for in student writing, and ways that writing instruction can be optimally situated in their curricula. Toward the end of the process, faculty plan for locally relevant instructional interventions and make requests for support.

The writing plans that result from these meetings articulate relevant writing expectations and outline plans for curricular integration of writing instruction, departmental practices pertaining to writing and AI use, writing assessment, and instructional support. Plan drafts are vetted by department chairs and subsequently approved by the Writing Committee.