What Are First-Year Writing Courses For?

It’s an impossible, multivalent question, but it’s a question we should continue to ask as our teaching—sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes by design—develops and changes over time. Surely FYW courses are primarily writing courses, and it is writing that most explicitly defines the work we do in them. Defending the required college writing seminar means arguing that students learn something about writing by the course’s end. And yet I have always been resistant to and even a little alarmed by a course that would merely present writing as set of techniques or tools to be acquired and perhaps mastered. If a writing seminar is just shop class for words, count me out.

In recent years, I’ve given increasing attention to the general education context of the First-Year Writing courses. I started to include the “Habits of Mind” from NCTE’s “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” because they speak to values that reach beyond the instrumental skill of writing. Writing, here, is described as emerging from and contributing to activity that prioritizes openness, engagement, creativity, curiosity, and the like. And this year, I even added to my syllabus some of the exact phrases of UConn’s General Education Guidelines, which emphasize “critical judgment,” “moral sensitivity,” “awareness,” and “consciousness of the diversity of human cultures and experience.” In the narrowest, most technical sense, FYW courses serve as introductions to students’ writing requirements at the university and to the information literacy competency that all students are expected to achieve. Greater literacy and more writing (especially writing within shared, collaborative contexts) undoubtedly implicitly supports the development and practice of critical judgment and moral sensitivity. But, at a time when very little about the goals of education can be assumed, it helps to make explicit the close connection between inclusive, ongoing, evidence-driven inquiry and the broader practices of informed citizenship.

Theodor Adorno is probably the writer I turn to most often to both support and challenge my teaching. Many of his essays explore the interface between large, standardizing entities (like universities, government offices, etc.) and the malleable individual, who desires to be legible and connected to larger systems but who is also subject to the distorting and sometimes even cruel elements inherent in such systems. Adorno, who witnessed Germany’s fall into fascism, remained allergic to mass movements or standardization of any sort, but he saw a clear role for teachers: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again” (191). I’ve triggered Godwin’s Law just mentioning this, so I will move away from any hastily drawn historical comparisons. Still, Adorno’s plain declaration is directed at any technologically advanced society that exerts pressure on the individual:

One can speak of the claustrophobia of humanity in the administered world, of a feeling of being incarcerated in a thoroughly societalized, closely woven, netlike environment. The denser the weave, the more one wants to escape it, whereas it is precisely this close weave that prevents any escape. This intensifies the fury against civilization. (193)

Adorno poses education as a process of historical inquiry, self-reflection, and confrontation with fear. Although he speaks out against the hardness and coldness that can come from educational models too focused on training and discipline, he dialectically rejects the premise that love could be ”summoned in professionally mediated relations like that of teacher and student” (202). Rather, he asks us to engage with one another in manner that combats isolation without superimposing a unifying order. Education provides a site for community building and interaction, but it also offers students the prospect of some autonomy, of exercising “the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating” (195).

When I think about what an introductory writing seminar should be, I think of it as a site for staging this activity, this dance of connection and differentiation, through writing itself (and through the subsequent circulation of this writing). Although Adorno’s contexts are grim and we hope quite distinct from our own, we should perhaps heed his warning about a model of learning that is too certain of its goals and methods, too quick to privilege reproduction of the system over engagement with its members.

*All quotes from Theodor Adorno’s “Education After Auschwitz” in Critical Models (Columbia UP, 2005).