Learning Goals
Program Learning Goals and Outcomes for First-Year Writing
WRA 101: Writing as Inquiry and its honors counterpart, WRA 195H, focus on three overarching learning goals: inquiry, discovery, and communication.
- Inquiry: posing questions, increasing curiosity, and finding significance through writing for present and future learning.
- Discovery: constructing understanding of oneself and of disciplinary and cultural values through the writing process and by interaction with sources, others, and material resources.
- Communication: developing understanding of rhetorical situations and composing ethically with appropriate modes, tools, approaches, and genres based on this understanding.
As part of an inquiry process in WRA 101 and 195H, students will be able to:
- ask and seek answers to questions and engage in dialogue around questions throughout the writing process.
- indicate an engaged interest in and curiosity about topics, and find significance in topics throughout the writing process.
- share research questions and link them to self, course texts, or others through specific reference or description.
- identify questions, habits, learning, or skills applicable to the future.
As a part of discovery in WRA 101 and WRA 195H, students will be able to:
- describe a process of learning through writing, reflecting, revising, and giving/receiving feedback.
- express a deeper sense of self-understanding and belonging in the university as a result of the course and the writing process
- articulate understandings of how disciplines communicate their values and practices
- articulate understandings of cultural values and practices
- describe an understanding of rhetorical situations (including consideration of audience, purpose, and mode) and apply that understanding to writing situations.
- locate, use, or cite primary and secondary sources
- use evidence and examples to write toward a specific purpose.
- communicate ethically using different modes and technologies (including Generative AI)
First-Year Writing’s Foundational Principles
The following principles are foundational to FYW’s learning goals and programmatic outcomes:
- For writers, inquiry, discovery, and communication are related and recursive acts. These acts help writers track how they create and convey knowledge both to others and to themselves.
- When writing students care about what they write, it is easier for them to become better readers of their own writing and to find opportunities for further development and revision in what they have written.
- Learners of writing have useful prior knowledge and capacities. In fact, experience is central in learning to write: it is both a source of knowledge and a subject for inquiry.
- Writing students each learn on the fringe of what they know. Consequently, surfacing what they know can help them mark progress and project goals.
- Inquiry into students’ experiences enables them to discover new things about things they already know through the stories they write about their experiences.
- Risk taking is critical to writing development and when writers are encouraged to reach beyond what they know, they will often make mistakes.
- Effective writing development depends not only on making mistakes, but on learning to make the most of those mistakes.
- Writers benefit from working with other writers.
- Helping others find opportunities for further development and revision in what they have written can be as productive and instructive for reviewers as for writers.
- The practices, values, and effects of writing are variously situated in individuals and in communities and cultures.
- Purpose, process, and culture are important both in learning to write, and in assessing how writing works in the world.
- Because writers develop over a lifetime, informed, evidence-based reflection on both the processes and products of writing experiences is critical for assessing strengths and setting goals for continuing development.
First-Year Writing Learning Goals and Program Learning Outcome Grids
The following grids contain the FYW Learning Goals and Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs), designed to:
- help FYW instructors understand the work of teaching this course
- communicate FYW Program values
- identify and name individualized learning goals appropriate for each student
- help students identify and name their own individualized learning goals
- invite pedagogical conversations
- show the program’s distinctiveness and communicate its priorities