Mission

Since its founding in 1980, Writing Programs has played an important role in UCLA’s undergraduate mission. According to the General Catalog, “programs in the Humanities teach students to interpret texts with an informed sensitivity, to evaluate ideas critically, to write clearly and effectively about them, and to be able to question and discuss them with their peers.” Because we are UCLA’s chief resource for writing instruction, all Writing Programs courses help the university achieve these goals.

The strong teaching culture within the program has often been recognized: fourteen Writing Programs lecturers have won Distinguished Teaching Awards—eleven on the current faculty—and we consistently rank above the campus norm on student evaluations. We serve an essential intellectual and pedagogical role within the university, and we offer inventive, rigorous courses that are responsive to the demographic and curricular challenges of undergraduate education. UCLA Writing Programs encourages students to use language as a means of discovery, understanding, analysis, inspiration, community building, and diplomacy. We support our students in their efforts to engage in critical and creative thinking—and to see the classroom as a place to challenge and be challenged, to investigate, problem-solve, reflect, imagine, think and rethink: to learn.

Faculty

Writing Programs is a unique academic unit at UCLA because it has no Academic Senate faculty. It is staffed entirely by lecturers, most Ph.D.s hired from national searches, who have developed unusually deep institutional knowledge and experience; approximately half of our 32 Lecturers have been with Writing Programs for over twenty years. We represent varying academic and professional disciplines including English, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Folklore and Mythology, Education, Applied Linguistics, and, of course, Composition and Rhetoric. Though we are, institutionally speaking, under the auspices of the English Department, Writing Programs lecturers operate independently in that we create our curriculum, manage our own budget, conduct faculty searches and reviews, direct and execute our program’s administration, and arrange colloquia that nourish collegiality and professional growth. We have also played an instrumental role in helping the university establish and implement the undergraduate Writing II requirement.

In addition to their classroom practice and their contributions to curricular development and administration, Writing Programs faculty are active in their professional fields. They serve on editorial boards and as officers in professional organizations; they host national conferences, lead state and national writing assessments, and have won awards from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Council of Teachers of English. They have also published highly regarded textbooks and research in such fields as literature, cultural studies, history, women’s studies, and folklore, as well as rhetoric, ESL, composition and computers, education, assessment, and Writing Programs Administration.

Pedagogy

The title “lecturer” is perhaps a misnomer for Writing Programs faculty considering the active, process-oriented pedagogical approach we utilize in our courses. Because we confer frequently with students about their writing as well as facilitate collaborative work and class discussion, our students receive the kind of individual attention and feedback they might receive at a small college. Students learn that writing means rewriting, and that effective written communication occurs in specific intellectual and social contexts. We encourage students to join academic discourse communities as active agents of inquiry, not passive recipients of information. To help them join such conversations, we work not only to familiarize students with the surface conventions of standard English, but also to enhance their ability to use language as a means of investigation, discovery, and expression.

Our premise is that reading and writing are complementary and interrelated activities, and accordingly, we encourage students to read texts attentively and critically, to examine various rhetorical situations and respond appropriately, and to develop skills at each stage of the writing process: planning, composing, revising, editing. Students work on evaluating evidence, constructing arguments, organizing ideas, and refining prose. Because we assess the skills and needs of our entry-level students, Writing Programs courses often play a large role in students’ academic success and transition to university life. Whether highly or marginally prepared, students benefit from the range of backgrounds, values, and perspectives they are exposed to in our workshop-style classes.