Mission Statement
Reading and writing are integral at the university as a means for both learning and demonstrating achievement. Moreover, students need to develop multiple strategies for writing for multiple audiences for multiple purposes. We believe that there are certain general skills that we can teach in a first-year writing course that students can learn and apply to various disciplines.
First-Year Composition aims to help students learn how to craft an argument based on different sources of information. This entails teaching students a general set of reasoning strategies that they can use to persuade an audience. Our course in argument is essentially a course in rhetoric, the art of discovering what to say and using language to share what people know, believe, and value. In turn, rhetoric provides a way to think about writing as part of a discourse that aims to bring about understanding of some public issue and, perhaps, agreement or action. Our emphasis on rhetoric is in keeping with the University's civic goals: to nurture in each student a sense of moral responsibility as citizens.
First-Year Composition at the University of Notre Dame is supported by a unique set of resources embodied in our staff, our approach, and our materials. The Writing Center encourages conversations about writing and the writing process. Community-Based Learning sections of First-Year Composition extend student conversations into the world beyond the University, while Multi-Media sections give students more opportunities to experiment with electronic media and expand their conceptions of literacy. In all sections of FYC students interact with texts compiled by our instructors, as well as with prize-winning essays in an anthology Fresh Writing . FYC instructors meet to discuss pedagogy and evaluation regularly, attend practicum in preparation for teaching, and participate in orientations and other initiatives designed to provide instructors and students with sound, helpful, and tested methods and materials for teaching and learning writing. Although the theme of readings in the course may vary from section to section, writing assignments and assessment practices are uniform. Our aim is to insure equity—that is, to insure students' experiences in FYC are similar.