How IU’s award-winning First-Year Composition Program is using imagination, relevance, and one-on-one support to help students master the art of writing.

Whether we love to write—or not so much—written communication is a foundational skill and a key to success in college and the workplace. Some futurists have even predicted that writing will remain a robot-proof skill, protecting human workers from the coming wave of change brought on by A.I. and automation.

Luckily for IU Bloomington undergraduates, the Composition Program in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of English was recently awarded a Writing Program Certificate of Excellence by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Known as the world's largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition, the CCCC called the IU Composition Program “exceptional” and “a model for other schools to emulate.”

Composition is a required aspect of general education on the IU Bloomington campus. The program’s director, Dana Anderson, explains that the responsibility of the composition program—First-Year Composition in particular—is to ensure that writing instruction meets with national standards of composition scholarship and teaching. “Not only did we meet these standards, but we met them in ways that were imaginative and well-researched,” Anderson says.

Designing a composition program that serves a broad base of students has required Anderson and his colleagues to act creatively to accommodate a wide array of needs. Restricting class sizes to between 15 to 23 students has been crucial to cultivating the one-on-one interaction students need to build their skills. “The program has proudly changed more in the last five to eight years than it has at any other point prior in its existence,” Anderson says. “We have tripled the number of courses we offer, including courses with an online component, those that are taught with a multilingual pedagogy, and others that experienced instructors get to design for first-year composition credit.”

The program has invested in making students’ experiences in composition courses meaningful, and the results long-lasting. Anderson relies on his three assistant directors, graduate students Mary Truglia, Elizabeth Maffetone, and Rachel McCabe, who develop and teach the curriculum, to devise strategies and curate materials that will engage students. “People are motivated when they feel like there is a reason to be engaged with what they’re being presented, and that has meant presenting ideas in readings that are walking in pace with what’s going on culturally,” Anderson says. He explains that although culture does not dictate the curriculum, when culture pushes issues like disability, sexuality, and identity to the foreground of daily life, "you’d be a fool not to realize the opportunity that a writing class has in trying to make those subjects important to what we read, think, and write about."

According to Anderson, one of the most significant challenges faced by this generation of students is the widespread misconception that struggling or taking a lot of time to write is the same as being bad at it. In reality, struggling to find the right words and taking the time to revise are inherent to the writing process, aspects that Anderson and his team of co-directors are determined to help students embrace.