First-Year Writing Curriculum

MSU’s First-Year Writing curriculum is rhetorical, focused on story, reflection, and inquiry. Its goal is to prepare students not only to approach new writing situations with confidence, but also to teach them the uses of rhetorical concepts for making sense of their world—most immediately, in the transition to college life and learning. The shared curriculum for both WRA 101 and 195H invites students to put their prior knowledge in relation to new and developing understandings of rhetoric, literacy, and culture. It moves students through a sequence of five writing experiences and reflection opportunities designed to help them

discover and articulate their ongoing writing and educational goals;
understand the uses of writing for learning; and
acquire the means to be lifelong makers of knowledge through writing.

The project sequence is scaffolded so that each experience yields conceptual and productive knowledge useful for the next, and so that rhetorical resources accumulate over the course of the semester. While each writing instructor frames the five projects a bit differently, the general curriculum includes a Learning Narrative Project, a Cultural Object Inquiry Project, a Disciplinary and Professional Literacies Project, a Remix Project, and a Final Reflection Project, along with reflection opportunities during and after each major assignment.

The Learning Narrative Project invites students to engage inquiry as a means to discover and communicate new knowledge about something they already know pretty well: their own histories as learners. In telling their stories of learning, this project ask students to consider their experiences with learning in and out of school to encourage them to reflect on the relationship between their learning histories and their present lives. In this first experience with college writing, students learn that their experiences both in and out of school can be useful as resources for academic inquiry.
The Cultural Object Inquiry Project invites students to engage inquiry as a means to discover and communicate new knowledge about their influences. The moves of this project ask students to inquire into cultural values in which they are implicated as learners by choosing an everyday object as the focus of guided exploration. This experience gives them further practice in processes of inquiry. In this project, students explicitly extend their inquiries into the practices and values of learning revealed in the first project into wider cultural contexts.
The Disciplinary and Professional Literacies Project invites students to engage inquiry as a means to discover and communicate new knowledge about their ambitions and professional futures. This project enables students to learn about the literacy practices of a profession or discipline of their choice by looking at textual products of disciplines as cultural and rhetorical. It combines the self-discovery aspect of the Learning Narrative Project with the inquiry process of the Cultural Artifact Project. The Professional/Disciplinary Literacies project invites students to continue asking the questions implicit in the first project (What am I doing here, and what resources do I bring to the project of my education? What do I need, and how do I achieve my goals?), and to put these in relation to discoveries about the literacies of disciplinary and professional cultures.
The Remix Project invites students to write and compose in a new mode, genre, or collaborative capacity. This project asks students to remix a written product from the first three projects into a new form or for a different audience, a practice that helps students be more aware of the purpose, audience, medium, mode, and/or genre of the rhetorical product they compose.
The Final Reflection Project is the culminating experience toward which the previous projects have been directed, and it takes students’ own learning as its object of inquiry. It invites students to reflect on the development and uses of their learning over the course of the semester: to make evidence-based claims about what they have learned, to set goals for their ongoing learning, to propose the means for achieving those learning goals, and to use the evidence and examples they have created throughout the semester to support each of these types of claims. This assignment builds directly from all of the activities of the semester by inviting students to cite examples from early and final drafts of their assignments, their proposals, their peer-review sessions, their student/teacher conferences, etc.

During and in between these major assignments, students complete shorter evidence-based reflections where they articulate learning that occurs through the projects. In this way, students both articulate and enact their learning throughout the course, and the focus of assessment is not the final form of student essays or products. Instead, the writing knowledge gained throughout the process of composing the products is emphasized, and lessons that students can take away and transfer to other writing situations in the future are emphasized through reflection.