13. Common Learning Requirements

Writing across the curriculum focuses on essential academic writing skills that are highly transferable: locating and using credible information sources, making arguments supported by evidence, reading rhetorical situations and issuing fitting responses, adapting to different writing conventions, and applying digital literacy skills to writing tasks. Students are introduced to academic writing in the general education written communication course, and then students complete the following learning objectives through courses in the academic major.

Writing in the Major Course Learning Objectives

• Ethically locate, evaluate, and manage credible, effective, diverse information sources in one’s field of study. (Critical and Creative Thinking)
• Make an argument in writing by incorporating, analyzing, and engaging evidence. (Critical and Creative Thinking)
• Demonstrate rhetorical flexibility, including awareness of context, audience, purpose, genre, and conventions across diverse writing situations. (Communication)
• Write in ways that attend to the conventions of one’s field of study and its related media and genres. (Communication)
• Apply digital literacy skills to produce content that could be disseminated in a variety of media. (Communication)

Structural Parameters for the Major Writing Objectives

• Each major designates the course(s) in which its students will fulfill the Major Writing Objectives.
• It is the responsibility of the department to ensure that the requirements of the Major Writing Objectives are fulfilled (just as it is the department's responsibility to oversee the fulfillment of any other required course in the major). These can be fulfilled in any number of courses across the major but with the understanding that each objective will appear at least once in a required course in the major. While objectives may appear in more than one course, each CLO should be assessed in a minimum of one course and the CLO must be met in full in that course. (In other words, the requirements to meet a Writing in the Major Objective should not be split between two separate courses). In the event that a CLO is offered in more than one course, the CLO should be assessed in the course that is most likely to occur at the furthest point in a student’s academic progression, but prior to the Senior Capstone course. 
• As the Major Writing Objectives are designed to promote and monitor developmental writing skills that demonstrate student writing progression outside the introductory level general education course and prior to the Capstone course, each CLO should be assessed in a course other than the Capstone course.
• A course that is designated to fill the Major Writing course learning objectives may be an actual writing course existing within the requirements of the major (for example, CLA 302 "Writing for Classicists"); more likely, it will be an already existing content course adapted to meet Major Writing Objective parameters. Although the subject content of the Major Writing course may remain the course's primary objective, the writing process surrounding that objective should be an integral part of the intellectual and pedagogical fabric of the course.
• A trained faculty member should dedicate at least 3-5 instructional hours per Writing Across the Curriculum Major Writing Objective. (See definition of “instructional hours” in COE handbook). If multiple objectives appear in the same course, it is permissible that some of these instructional hours may overlap.
• A trained faculty member will incorporate at least two helpful interventions (conferencing, librarian visit, tutoring, peer collaboration, professor comments on ungraded drafts, etc.) in the writing processes in at least one assignment that meets the requirements of the objective being addressed.
• Students should complete ENGL 110, the general education written communication requirement, in their first year, and departments should design intentional scaffolding of the Major Writing CLOs across required courses in the major to ensure sufficient development of this essential skill. 
• Departments should design writing in the major requirements in ways that ensure all students have sufficient opportunities to develop these essential writing skills. Therefore, departments should avoid embedding writing CLOs in courses that students frequently transfer in.