First-Year Writing Curriculum

MSU’s First-Year Writing curriculum is focused on inquiry, writing process, cultures, disciplines, story, and reflection. Its goal is to prepare students not only to approach new writing situations with confidence, but also to teach rhetorical concepts for making sense of the world—most immediately, in the transition to college life and learning. 

Five projects within the shared curriculum for both WRA 101 and WRA 195H invite students to put prior knowledge in relation to new and developing understandings of rhetoric, literacy, and culture. While each writing instructor frames the five projects a bit differently, the general curriculum for WRA 101 and WRA 195H 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. Some professors combine projects one and two into a Self, Cultures, and Community Project.

• The Learning Narrative Project invites students to inquire about something they already know pretty well: their own histories as learners. In telling their stories of learning, this project asks 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. 
   
• The Cultural Object Inquiry Project invites students to engage inquiry into their influences. Students inquire into cultural values by choosing an everyday object as the focus. 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 inquire 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.  
  
  
• 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 of the course, 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.