Writing Programs Worldwide - Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places, 2012a

Carlino
gogical assistance was provided, it tended to be sporadic and insufficient. I had
never heard of the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) or Writing in the
Disciplines (WID) movements. The universe of ideas proposed by WAC/WID
authors was simply out of my reach, since during my undergraduate studies in
Argentina or my graduate studies in Spain I never came across these readings.
However, my Psychology of Learning background had shown me that nobody
learns just by receiving information in a passive way. Nobody learns by being
a mere receiver of a given body of knowledge. Knowledge, in research and in
learning, is not there to be taken. Instead, it needs to be created and recreated:
the researcher creates knowledge and the students create their knowledge. None
of them, researcher or student, receives knowledge that has been preformed.
This is the epistemological essence of constructivism (Castorina, 2001; Ferreiro,
1999; Piaget & García, 1982).
According to this principle, it did not make sense to organize my classes
around lectures only. I had to plan class activities and assignments that would
get undergraduates to participate at both cognitive and social levels. I wanted
to do so not as an extension of my teaching but as a core activity. I would help
them work throughout the semester and not only during the week of the exam.
My graduate work on literacy was of great assistance to me in this task. The
socio-cognitive activities that would lead students to learn the subject involved
reading, writing, and exchanging ideas about the course concepts. Under certain
conditions, reading and writing can prompt an intense cognitive activity
(Bazerman et al., 2005; Langer & Applebee, 1987; Scardamalia & Bereiter,
1985; Wells, 1987) and I was attempting to recreate these conditions. But I
would not just require those tasks without offering further guidance. I knew
students needed to be oriented and receive feedback, since they were newcomers
to the field and therefore would be somewhat lost without this support. I
had often heard professors complain, “Students don’t know how to write. They
don’t understand what they read—they don’t read.” Instead, I was convinced
that many students did not do what teachers were expecting of them because
they did not know how.
As a result, I decided to organize activities in a way that would allow students
to participate. Thus, I guided students and provided feedback while they
completed such activities as discussing readings, making connections among
texts, and reviewing what they had written (Dysthe, 1996): all this, with the
aim of helping them gradually understand the ideas of the course. By reading
and writing about the subject, they could recreate the knowledge for themselves,
something that a teacher could not directly transmit to them.
In brief, these literate activities were integrated into the course to help students
understand and study its contents. Along the way, however, I discovered
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