First-Year Writing Seminar Program Values

1. Rhetorical Awareness
   • Develop a careful and critical reading practice for understanding and engaging the ideas of others in a range of genres.
   • Identify and analyze the rhetorical techniques authors use as reasoning and evidence for their assertions.
   • Understand writing as a social process with significance and implications within and beyond the classroom.
2. Writing For Academic Audiences in a Variety of Disciplines
   • Recognize that disciplinary and generic conventions are rhetorically situated.
   • Write about complex subjects with nuance and discernment.
   • Gather, evaluate, and effectively incorporate source materials into your work. This includes selecting appropriate sources (backgrounds, exhibits, arguments, methods) and responsibly integrating them into your work (summary, paraphrase, and quotation). Properly cite source material according to disciplinary conventions.
3. The Process of Composition
   • Engage in various strategies for using writing as a mode of thinking to develop and analyze your ideas as well as to shape them into a clear, well-organized argument.
   • Embrace and deliberately practice writing as a social process by inviting others to respond critically to your ideas and responsibly incorporating their feedback into your thinking and writing.
   • Provide descriptive, revision-based feedback to others.
4. Metacognition
   • Reflect upon, reconsider, and expand your range of writing styles and processes (from pre-writing to final revisions).
   • Transfer and strategically adapt your writing practices and skills to other rhetorical situations across the curriculum.
5. Active Engagement in the Writing Classroom Community
   • Contribute to your intellectual community through class discussions and activities.
   • Listen with curiosity and generosity to the ideas of others and think in creative collaboration with them to produce surprising new constellations of meaning.
   • Develop an endurance for engaging with complexity, ambiguity, and difference.

CCP Writing Subcommittee Statement on Human Authorship and the Use of Generative AI Tools in the FYWS

First-Year Writing Seminar Program Potential Pedagogical Methods

1. Rhetorical Awareness
   • Assign and discuss the rhetorical moves of exemplary undergraduate writing.
   • Assign and discuss the rhetorical moves of skill-appropriate journal articles or book chapters.
   • Assign and discuss a review article from your field to help students understand an academic conversation's range, nuance, and implications.
2. Writing For Academic Audiences in a Variety of Disciplines
   • Introduce the broad conventions of academic writing and the more specific rules and preferences for writing in your discipline. Explain where these rules and preferences originated. Chart any shifts in style or audience expectations to illustrate how “good writing” is culturally situated.
   • Craft writing prompts that ask students to wrestle with ambiguity by engaging with counterarguments and posing open-ended questions.
   • Ask students to identify how a journal article or book chapter effectively uses source materials, including backgrounds, exhibits, critical arguments, and methods. This is a good opportunity to re-read a previous essay. Then, have them summarize, paraphrase, and quote an example of each source type.
   • Familiarize students with library resources: librarians, the catalog, online databases, and ILL.
3. The Process of Composition
   • Design problem-driven writing assignments that encourage students to pose questions and/or problems to explore. 
   • Assign low-stakes exploratory writing that gives students the space, incentive, and tools for more elaborate and complex thinking.
   • Instruct students on how to ask for descriptive, revision-based feedback that is appropriate for where they are in the writing process and moves them toward what they hope to accomplish next.
   • Facilitate peer-review workshops that provide writers with descriptive feedback that narrates a reader’s experience with the text to help writers identify gaps between what they intended and what the reader experienced.
4. Metacognition
   • Ask students to reflect on their own writing by showing awareness of alternative choices, providing evidence from their own work of the choices they made, justifying their choices, and recognizing the implications of their choices.
   • Assign and discuss selections from The Craft of Research 5e––particularly, Part III: Making Your Argument. Ask readers to evaluate the specificity and significance of their claims.
5. Active Engagement in the Writing Classroom Community
   • Present course materials as dialogic rather than informative: as contingent perspectives embedded in a field of inquiry, analysis, and argument.
   • Create decentering tasks that encourage students to see an art object, issue, or problem from an unfamiliar perspective.