WEC Home Page


The University of Minnesota’s Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC) Project, launched in 2007 with generous support from the Bush Foundation, is a process for meaningfully infusing writing and writing instruction into all undergraduate curricula. During the pilot period (2007-2011), the project engaged academic units in developing and implementing customized Undergraduate Writing Plans. The WEC project is now a University supported program.

The WEC project is founded on the following principles, gleaned from three decades of research and experience:

  1. Writing can be flexibly defined as an articulation of thinking, an act of choosing among an array of modes or forms, only some of which involve words.
  2. Writing ability is continually developed rather than mastered.
  3. Because writing is instrumental to learning, it follows that writing instruction is the shared responsibility of content experts in all academic disciplines.
  4. The incorporation of writing into content instruction can be most meaningfully achieved when those who teach are provided multiple opportunities to articulate, interrogate, and communicate their assumptions and expectations.
  5. Those who infuse writing instruction into their teaching require support.

 

Duane Roen “What’s happening with writing at the University of Minnesota is as exciting as anything that’s happening in the country."

Duane Roen,
Professor of English, Head of Humanities & Arts
Arizona State University
Co-Managing Editor of WPA: Writing Program Administration, the official journal of the Council of Writing Program Administrators

 

Center for Writing  10 Nicholson Hall    216 Pillsbury Dr. SE    Minneapolis, MN 55455    Phone: 612-625-0791   Fax: 612-626-7580