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UTEP's First-Year Composition program is the recipient of a 2022-2023 Writing Program of Excellence Certificate from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Welcome to the First-Year Composition (FYC) program at the Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é of Texas at El Paso.

UTEP’s composition program is dedicated to helping students acquire and develop the composing abilities they need to succeed in their academic careers, their future professions, their civic responsibilities, and their lives. Our courses aim to develop students’ sense of themselves as practicing writers. The FYC program views writing as an ongoing practice. We offer students opportunities to compose and revise, draft and re-envision their thinking through a series of shorter assignments and longer projects. Students write alone and in groups; they receive feedback from teachers and peers while learning how to become generous, invested, critical readers of one another’s work. Drawing on the rich scholarship of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, we have designed our courses to help students address the challenges of 21st century composing. In these courses, students are empowered to determine the most effective strategies, arrangements, and media to use in different rhetorical contexts.

The assignment sequence has been updated to a 5-module structure for both courses that centers the experiences of students as agents of their own writing who devote much of RWS 1301 toward an exploration of their language practices, including translanguaging, shuttling between languages and language use, and navigating the different communities in which they learn. Our program’s focus on language practices is a direct reflection of the situations and contexts that exist within our students’ and instructors’ lives.

RWS 1302 concentrates on research as a process of developing an inquiry, with students moving from a genre analysis into a project on local fieldwork that requires them to examine primary sources they encounter daily, to broader research (building from the local) on an issue of their concern. Numerous sections of 1302 have been tailored for an explicit community engagement focus as part of a collaboration with UTEP’s Center for Community Engagement. Students in those sections receive a Community Engagement and Leadership (CEL) designation on their transcript; however, students in all sections study social justice issues throughout every module. 

For questions about First-Year Composition related to placement, curriculum, policies, pedagogy, and resources, contact First-Year Composition Director Dr. Lauren Rosenberg at lmrosenberg@utep.edu.