Stephen Tchudi

The Hidden Agendas in Writing across the Curriculum.

I first began thinking about the hidden agendas in writing across the curriculum when a physics teacher accused me of having one. I was presenting a workshop for secondary teachers in Grand Junction, Colorado, and after a session on ways of making content-area assignments, the physics teacher came up to me. I figured out your hidden agenda, he said. What? (Like most of us, I try to be up front with my students about what is planned and whats intended.) Youre not just asking me to add more writing to my course, he explained, Youre asking me to change my whole style of teaching. He went on to paraphrase some of my remarks in the session. I had stressed that good content writing assignments should allow students to synthesize their understanding and to focus it for an audience, real, if possible. I had made some uncomplimentary remarks about the typical regurgitation-type essay exam and had deprecated textbook study questions as purposeless and audience-less.

Interdisciplinary English and Re-forming the Schools.

argues that Certainly not! said Alice indignantly one key to Ah! Then yours wasnt a really good e-fOrig school, said the Mock Turtle... school it(Carroll 1960, 92-93) schools-d isCOVthe Thus Lewis Carroll launches his mock r iovryt discussion of the disciplinary contents of of intereducation. The Mock Turtle goes on to brag disciplinary that he took Reeling and Writhing, plus Studies. the different branches of Arithmetic-Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. There was course work in Mystery, ancient and modern, Seography, and Drawing, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils, and these were topped off by the classics: Laughing and Grief (93). Could it be that Lewis Carroll antici-

Invisible Thinking and the Hypertext.

The narrator of The Glass Canoe, a novel by Australian David Ireland, spends much of his time in a Sydney pub puzzling over life as he is carried along the glass canoe of his beer stein. He wonders about how and why things happen, such as how a record player always knows to put the needle exactly at the edge of a record, or how much force is created by acres and acres of grass on a golf course all growing upwards at once, or why light always travels at the same speed, or why light wants to bother escaping from where it was in the first place. He admires the people who are creative and imaginative, and he speaks of the magic of human understanding. As a reader, teacher, and sometimes wonderer, I was especially interested in the narrators comments about Danny, one of his pub mates, who spends his nonwork hours in a beery stupor, but who, on Saturdays, is a brilliant rugby player. I can tell you something that has awe and majesty, the narrator writes, something so close to magic that I bet no one can put it into all the words needed to describe it:

Rogers City on the Moskva: A Writing Program in Moscow.

We descended through gray into gray, cutting through the clouds to touch down on Russian soil. As we traveled down the runway, most of us were silent, simultaneously exhilarated and nervous, peering through the fog into towering pines like those we knew in northern Michigan. But as Dorothy observed about Kansas, we knew we werent in Michigan anymore. We were a sixteen-member contingent of American students, teachers, and community members representing the Huron Shores Summer Writing Institute of Rogers City, Michigan. Eight high-school students from northern Michigan participated, along with Rogers City community members and teachers, the editor of the local paper, and four university professors, including the three authors of this article.

How Do Good English Curricula Develop

dont. Sometimes the top-notch curriculum comes about from committees which toil for years over professional issues and selection of materials. Sometimes an outstanding program seems to be the exclusive product of an inspired and energetic curriculum leader. Although we English teachers often talk about the contents of good programs and criteria for evaluating them, the professional literature does not offer many insights into the process of composing that most elusive of genres: the English language-arts curriculum. While engaged in writing a monograph on the English curriculum (The Process of English Language Arts Curriculum Development, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, forthcoming), I became curious about questions of curriculum process. After casting about for curriculum narratives in the professional literature and finding few, I turned to the NCTE Centers of Excellence. In the fall of 1989, I surveyed the centers that had been selected for recognition between 1987 and 1989.