WRA 101 and WRA 195H

About The FYW Curriculum

Our story-based FYW curriculum is rhetorical, inductive, and inquiry-based. 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 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 designed to help them

discover and articulate their educational goals through a series of structured inquiries into their own learning, cultural values, and academic literacies;
understand the uses of writing for learning and symbolic action; 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. The five projects may be framed and inflected differently in accordance with the thematic emphases of the courses in which they are situated, but the general curriculum includes a Learning Narrative Project, a Cultural Artifact Project, a Professional/Disciplinary Literacies Project, a Remix Project, and an Experiential-Learning Documentary (ELD)/Reflective Learning Narrative Project.

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–even as the narrative itself will eventually become a useful resource for academic inquiry, especially as a resource for the final reflective narrative.
The Cultural Artifact 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 (formulating questions and forming theories of cultural value). In this project, students explicitly extend their inquiries into the practices and values of learning revealed in the first project into wider cultural contexts. By way of the first two projects, which guide students through systematic inquiry into personal experiences, FYW students are introduced to research as a process of discovery for which strategies can be practiced and learned.
The Professional/Disciplinary 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 as cultural artifacts to understand the 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 ultimate goal of this project is not so much to create a report on any given profession’s literacy practices, per se, but to help students to begin to know the professional cultures they hope to join and to use both the information they discover and their processes of inquiry to make informed decisions about their ongoing literacy development.
The Remix Project invites students to engage inquiry as a means to discover and communicate new knowledge about their audiences by way of working in a new mode, genre, or collaborative capacity. This project builds on the learning of the preceding projects by making rhetorical moves implicit in these projects the explicit focus of attention. It asks students to create a product that helps them be more aware of the purpose, audience, medium, mode, and/or genre of the rhetorical product they make. It invites students to experience and reflect further on processes of invention and arrangement and further develops inquiries into relationships between rhetorical purposes, audiences, and resources (material, conceptual, and ethical). While students often create outstanding rhetorical products (movies, podcasts, live presentations, etc.), the goals of this project are to invite students to take risks, to undertake new writing experiences, to negotiate new ways of working, to make the most of mistakes they make along the way, and to use these experiences to formulate goals for how to use problem-solving strategies to inform their ongoing development as writers.
The Experiential-Learning Documentary (ELD)/Reflective Learning Narrative Project invites students to engage inquiry as a means to discover and communicate new knowledge about themselves as writers. This project, the culminating experience toward which the previous projects have been directed, takes students’ own situated and in-process 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 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. The ELD/Reflective Learning Narrative Project is designed to empower students to investigate and celebrate their successes and to make the most of their mistakes by setting goals that emerge from reflecting on their activities that went less well than they had hoped.

The FYW curriculum at MSU does not presume to predict or replicate every possible writing task students may encounter in their educational careers. Instead, it aims to develop students’ capacities to understand and adapt to new writing situations by giving them the means to ask the kinds of questions good writers ask: What is the purpose of this writing? What is the task? What does it ask of me? What is the larger context? Who is my audience, and what are its needs and expectations? What sorts of evidence may be more and less useful in this context? What kind of language is appropriate for the work this writing must do? What do I already know, what do I still need to know, and where can I find useful resources?

The goal of the FYW curriculum is to help students develop transferable knowledge about writing–about concepts, processes, strategies, and practices.