The complexities of modern life demand that students be able to interact critically with the pressures that shape their identities and their environment. The university, in its requirement of core competency in Rhetoric and Composition, understands writing as central to discovery and learning, to analysis and communication, and to the critique of social order. The First Year Composition classroom assumes the responsibility to demonstrate ways in which a community of writers can empower each other to participate in the important political, ethical, and cultural discussions of our time by teaching one another the value, power, and pleasure of words.
The First Year Composition Program at NIU prepares students for participation in the academic and professional discourses that they will encounter in their undergraduate studies. To that end, the program develops students' abilities to read and think critically and to write meaningfully in response to what they read. The writing process is viewed as a way for students to develop their thoughts, to create meaning, and to construct texts that address personal, public, and professional issues.
Specifically the goals of freshman Rhetoric and Composition are to help students write effectively in an academic setting. To write effectively students must discover what they want to say and take responsibility for saying it to particular audiences. The program begins by helping students to explore the resources for writing they bring with them and by helping them to develop those resources so that they can write confidently and competently about topics of public concern to a public audience. This work serves as a foundation for guiding students to observe, analyze, report on, and contribute to one or more of the professional conversations that are always under way in every field, which indeed define and constitute a field. To achieve these goals students engage in a wide range of activities: talking, listening, and reading critically; interacting with the ideas and arguments of other writers; locating public and professional information and discovering how to use it. Students in First Year Composition also write regularly and frequently, in a variety of contexts and genres, with different voices and purposes; they write privately and publicly in notes, drafts, journals, reports, summaries, paraphrases, and published essays. They write to explore, to learn, to communicate, and to deepen and enrich their understanding of the power of their language to make meaning.
Further, the First Year Composition Program understands both writing and reading as activities that occur in both traditional and electronic media, and understands the importance of students' ability to communicate effectively in both. To this end, the First Year Composition class meets regularly in a computer lab and uses various elements of the electronic media insofar as these new tools are conducive to the teaching of written communication. The main goal of such course activities is not to teach specific computer skills, but rather to integrate and harness electronic technologies into the general goals of writing effectively.