When Consensus Fails: How Faculty Writing Seminars Limit the Possibility of Multiple Discourses in a College Community

This case study describes how faculty members at Grinnell College, a small, highly selective undergraduate liberal arts college, create and maintain what in many ways is an ideal Writing Across the Curriculum program. Curricular elements of this program have been in place for more than twenty years: the tutorial, where Grinnell students focus on writing intensively in a one-semester course taught by members of the faculty from all disciplines; designated writing courses with limited enrollments of twenty students focused on improving writing skill; and required writing in most courses in many departments. In addition to emphasizing writing in its curriculum, the college also devotes significant resources to support the faculty’s teaching of writing. The college staffs its writing lab with five full-time professional teachers of writing; it offers faculty writing workshops in the summer; and faculty members occasionally focus on and often discuss writing in colloquia and workshops. Clearly, Grinnell College devotes an enviable amount of resources to its writing program. Since its beginning, the writing program, although organized by the dean and the head of the Writing Lab, has been controlled by the faculty. At Grinnell, where faculty control over the curriculum is valued in all areas, the loose structure of the writing program allows faculty members freedom to teach in the way they want. This freedom gives them ownership of the program. Although we believe that faculty ownership of curriculum is a desirable characteristic of liberal arts colleges, our study suggests that faculty ownership of the writing program at Grinnell may constrain faculty members from examining complicating or alternative views of the way writing can function in a liberal arts curriculum. A site where this constraint is particularly evident is the faculty writing seminar. In the faculty writing seminar, new faculty members learn techniques for and encounter assumptions about the teaching of writing at Grinnell. These faculty writing seminars are of crucial importance as a way of passing on beliefs about writing and learning within the When Consensus Fails: How Faculty Writing Seminars Limit the Possibility of Multiple Discourses in a College Community