Welcome and About First-Year Writing

Welcome to First-Year Writing at MSU

The First-Year Writing (FYW) Program at MSU puts learners at the center of learning. Our mission is to help learners acquire and practice the moves, strategies, and dispositions that will allow them to develop as writers and producers of knowledge during and beyond first-year writing. This goal is realized through a shared curriculum of writing experiences that ask students to work toward three learning goals: inquiry, discovery, and communication.

These three goals guide the curriculum for FYW courses—WRA 101: Writing as Inquiry and its honors version, WRA 195H. Our approach to the FYW assignment sequence in both courses moves students from writing about their own experience to analysis of cultural and institutional values, to inquiry into rhetorical production, and to reflective goal setting. In short, the FYW learning goals encourage the growth of writing knowledge along with the development of writing actions, practices, and routines. 

The purpose of First-Year Writing is to help each student develop transferable knowledge of writing and rhetoric that will continue to serve them as they learn to write in other courses and throughout their lifetimes. Consequently, our courses do not emphasize student mastery of producing certain kinds of writing (such as “the research paper”) or specific content knowledge, but, instead, we focus on building and assessing capacities for continued growth in writing.

We believe that the work of learning about writing is necessarily unfinished when WRA 101 or WRA 195H is completed, and that students will finish our courses with transferable knowledge and practices that will deliver continued learning throughout their college careers and beyond. The first-year writing experience at MSU does not strive to prepare for every possible writing task or genre that students may encounter in their educational or professional lives. Instead, FYW aims to develop each student’s capacity to understand and adapt to new writing situations.

First-Year Writing’s Vision

The First-Year Writing Program’s vision is to support ALL students at MSU in writing and in their development as writers in college and beyond through our shared learning goals and curriculum, and in doing so, to serve a critical role within each undergraduate Spartan’s general education. 

We enact this vision through fostering a vibrant community of collaborative, expert faculty and instructors who teach WRA 101 and 195H informed by best practices in Writing Studies, and who are supported by the program, one another, and by frequent professional development opportunities. 

We also consistently reflect on and improve our teaching and work through conducting research on student learning and through FYW’s multi-year participation in Academic Program Review. Using research, we update our curriculum and teaching approaches to keep them student-centered, relevant, and focused on equity and support for all students and faculty members. As a part of this work, we prioritize assembling and analyzing MSU institutional and student grade data, along with qualitative data from our own survey- and interview-based self study, to inform ongoing programmatic revisions. Through publication of this research, we seek to foster and lead a culture of writing on campus and within the broader field of Writing Studies.   

 

We’re glad you’re here. Welcome to First-Year Writing at MSU!

Crystal VanKooten, Director 
Joyce Meier, Associate Director 
Bree Straayer, Associate Director
Rofiat Bello, Graduate Assistant