FYW Values

The Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at MSU has a robust set of learning goals for it's First-Year Writing Program. You can find them at the First-Year Writing webpage.

The following list of principles inform and guide our learning goals and speak to the FYW program's student-centered approach to teaching and learning:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Writing students each learn on the fringe of what they know. Consequently, surfacing what they know can help them mark progress and project goals.

5. Inquiry into students experiences enables them to discover new things about things they already know by way of the stories they write about their experiences.

6. Risk taking is critical to writing development. When writing students are encouraged to reach beyond what they know, they will often make mistakes.

7. Effective writing development depends not only on making mistakes, but on learning to make the most of those mistakes. Making the most of making mistakes is one expression of finding opportunities for further development and revision in what they have written.

8. Writers benefit from working with other writers.

9. 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.

10. The practices, values, and effects of writing are variously situated in individuals and in communities and cultures.

11. Purpose, Process, and Culture are important both in learning to write, and in assessing how writing works in the world.

12. Because writers develop over a lifetime, informed self-reflection on both the processes and products of writing experiences is critical for assessing strengths and setting goals for continuing development.