College Writing
At Pitzer College, writing is an integral part of an academically rigorous liberal arts education emphasizing social justice, intercultural understanding, and interdisciplinary learning. The mission of the College Writing Program is to support the teaching and learning of writing across the curriculum. Since all disciplines use writing to create and disseminate knowledge, Pitzer College has a rich tradition of shared responsibility for the teaching of writing. The College Writing Program builds on this strength, supporting a vibrant and interdisciplinary culture of writing on campus.
College Writing programming is bottom-up and responsive to faculty and student needs. We support faculty in their roles as teachers and writers through faculty-driven workshops, consultations, and resources that build community around writing and its instruction on campus, including in the First-Year Seminar Program. We support student learning through writing-intensive courses (WRIT) and faculty-informed assessment. The Writing Center, housed within College Writing, supports this mission through a wide range of collaborative workshops, consultations, and initiatives for students, including peer tutoring.
Our Values
Rather than seeing writing as a “skill” that can be learned in one course or conversation, we believe learning to write well is a lifelong pursuit supported by challenging new tasks, timely feedback, and peer communities. We empower students to make informed and situated choices about their writing in alignment with their values and goals—and the particular rhetorical needs of their audience and the genre. Writing is both a mode of learning and a means of communicating. We believe that students learn best when we teach writing as a recursive process—with scaffolded opportunities for practice, feedback, and reflection.
Our Goals
As a writing across the curriculum program, the goals of College Writing are:
- To support students as writers across their academic careers.
- To facilitate student engagement with writing as a liberal art – a means of practicing the habits of mind of various fields of inquiry
- To give students opportunities to write across a wide range of rhetorical situations and genres and to practice composing in different media
- To nurture a campus culture that holistically supports writers
- To foster faculty community around the teaching of writing and our varied practices as writers