As a writing-intensive professional discipline, law study demands highly crafted and strategic use of transactional language. A central mission of a law school is to help students become conversant with the specialized modes and structured forms of law study-to help them acquire a professional voice. Specific challenges arise when that voice is multilingual and in permanent dialogue with multilingual communities, as is the case in New York City.
The unique focus of a law curriculum, augmented by CUNY Law School's highly diverse, multilingual student population and emphasis on preparing public interest lawyers has required some accommodation of WAC/WID goals and methods to the imperatives of legal studies.
This paper explores the challenges entailed in integrating a university-wide Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines initiative to a post-baccalaureate professional school having clearly defined genres, modes of practice, and performance expectations. It specifically focuses on the interaction between this adaptation and the needs of a diverse multilingual student population responding to the NYC highly multilingual and immigrant community.
Addressing the absence of research on WAC/WID at the law school level, this paper will consider the general principles of the WAC/WID methodology, the contribution of the law school's approach to WAC/WID to thinking on the use of these ideas and methods in this multilingual educational context. It will specifically address the implementation of the "writing-to-learn" philosophy on a multilingual student population, focusing on the role and structure of a Writing Center in this type of institutions, as well as on high/low stakes writing and writing as a process- revision and response strategies.
Complete List of Presenters: Andrea McArdle, Silvia Rivero, Lori Wallach, Ronaldo Wilson, Steven Bashkoff, Jaime Cleland