Program Goals

Student Goals

Goal 1:

The program will produce students who are knowledgeable, skilled, and adaptable in the strategies of multiple genres.

Goal 1: Craft and Rhetorical Strategies

Students will become skilled in the craft and rhetorical strategies associated with creative, scholarly, and professional writing.

1. Students will experiment with various genres, audiences, purposes, and contexts.
2. Students will develop a vocabulary to identify and discuss elements of craft and rhetorical strategies in their own work and the writing of others. 
3. Students will experiment with the elements of craft and other rhetorical strategies and apply them to their own writing.
4. Students will reflect on their current level of proficiency and identify where they should seek to improve their skills.
5. Student will demonstrate a skilled use of elements of craft and rhetorical strategies.

Goal 2: Process 

Students will discover strategies for how to engage and manage the complexities of writing as a multi-stage, recursive process.

1. Students will discover and demonstrate how reading, research, experimenting, drafting, reflection, and revision are utilized in a multistage process of writing.  
2. Students will discover and experiment with a variety of compositional strategies and processes to explore their material.
3. Students will develop the ability to reflect upon, revise, and edit their own work and the work of others through multiple drafts.

Goal 3: Reading 

Students will study exemplary texts in a variety of genres to identify the skills available to them and to understand their textual and social contexts.

1. Students will discover and demonstrate how their writing is influenced by texts and genres that precede them or that respond to similar contexts, audiences, and purposes.
2. Students will identify and critically reflect on the exemplary qualities of writing by other students and by published authors.
3. Students will identify, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and apply writing techniques and rhetorical strategies gleaned from the models of exemplary texts to their own writing.
4. Students will reflect on past reading and prepare a plan for future reading as an aspect of their writing process and their overall creative, scholarly, and professional agenda.

Goal 4: Genre

Students will explore new genres and deepen their understanding of the genres in which they have the greatest interest.

1. Student will identify and apply the traditions and conventions from which their writing emerges.
2. Students will experiment in multiple genres to develop their understanding of how the strategies and conventions of one genre can be applied to another. 
3. Students will reflect on those conditions in which a convention might be challenged or supported.
4. Students will discover and reflect on how genres change over time or new genres emerge in response to their social, technological, literary, and rhetorical contexts.

Goal 2:

The program will produce students who are who are knowledgeable about the audiences they address and the social, political, and intellectual contexts in which they write.

Goal 5: Audience

1. Students will identify their potential audiences, both ideal and real.
2. Students will reflect upon the expectations of a variety of audiences in literary, professional, and academic contexts.
3. Students will reflect on how they wish to relate to the audience’s expectations and values, whether to affirm or challenge them. 
4. Students will develop an understanding of how readers relate to the texts as co-creators of meaning.

Goal 6: Context

Students will understand how their writing is affected by their social, historical, professional, literary, rhetorical, and technological contexts.

1. Students will read and research to discover how their work enters into a conversation with contemporary or previous works.
2. Student will discover how cultural and technological changes over time affect audiences, genres, purposes, the roles writers play, and the work they produce.
3. Students will discover the impact of technology on all stages of the writing process and on how writing is published and received.
4. Students will explore the conditions that encourage new genres or new forms of writing to emerge

Goal 7: Research 

Students will discover the research methods and strategies available to them and how these may be adapted to a variety of genres, audiences, purposes, and contexts.

1. Students will cultivate intellectual curiosity to investigate both the form and content of their writing. 
2. Students will employ research technologies and methods that are most appropriate to their creative, scholarly, or professional goals and purposes.
3. Students will use sources with integrity by accurately representing and correctly citing the ideas and intellectual property of others.
4. Students will search for the best means of creating ethical, truthful, and responsible representations and to understand the limits of creative license.in their writing.

Goal 3:

The program will produce students who are able to reflect on their motivating purpose and the quality of their work as they apply what they have learned to their profession or artistic calling.

Goal 8: Reflection and Self Awareness

Students will develop, self-critical awareness of their writing.

1. Students will reflect on their goals, purposes, strategies, influences, contexts.
2. Students will discover standards by which they measure the quality of a work. 
3. Students will identify and articulate strengths and weaknesses in their own writing.
4. Students will recognize and demonstrate that the composition of a text represents a series of authorial choices and will be able to identify and consider the impact of choices.

Goal 9: Purpose, Identity, and Professionalism

Students will explore the various purposes that motivate them and develop their identities as writers as artists, scholars, professionals, and as contributing members of various communities.

1. Students will discover how writing is a means of interrogating the world, posing questions and looking for solutions.
2. Students will discover how writing is a method of bringing a fuller awareness to their experience.
3. Students will show commitment and persistence when exploring new material under conditions of uncertainty.
4. Students will reflect upon the roles they play as individuals and as members of a larger community.
5. Students will demonstrate awareness of professional opportunities available to them through the development of their writing skills and strategies
6. Student will develop adaptability in applying the skills they have learned in to a variety of creative, scholarly, or professional contexts.

Goal 4:

The program will produce students will cultivate creative courage as they synthesize what they have learned as they progress toward making an original and valuable contribution to their field of artistic or professional objectives. 

Goal 10: Creativity, Originality, and Innovation

Students will plan and create works that demonstrate creative courage, originality, and innovation in order to contribute to a larger cultural conversation.

1. Student will discover how creativity involves risk and learn to identify when such risk-taking is of value.
2. Students will discover that strong writing often emerges from uncertainty or ambiguity and will investigate instances of dissonance.
3. Students will articulate and demonstrate the ways in which they have challenged conventions and other risks they have taken with their writing. 
4. Students will cultivate a sense of curiosity in their reading and writing about a wide range of subjects and experiences.
5. Students will produce texts that synthesize and present experience or information in novel and valuable ways.

Goal 11: Synthesis 

Students will discover, understand, analyze, apply, synthesis, and evaluate above goals, adapting them to their personal goals as they create new works.

1. Students will understand the interrelationships between all the above goals to the processes of composition they employ and the texts they produce.
2. Students will plan, reflect upon, and complete a highly crafted and sustained, multi-staged work in a genre of their choosing. 
3. Students will be able to reflect upon and discuss the genre, audience, purpose, skills and strategies, intellectual and artistic influences, context, and the value of this sustained work.