Curriculum

According to the Enrollment Trends Dashboard on the UNC Charlotte website in November 2021, UNCC had an undergraduate enrollment of 24,116 and a graduate and professional enrollment of 6,332 (total: 30,448). The class of 2025 included 4,256 undergraduate students. 90% of those students were from North Carolina, 52% were female, and 48% were male. At UNCC, 47% of students are enrolled in one of two colleges: Liberal Arts and Sciences (30%) and the College of Business Administration (17%). The remaining enrollment is spread across the College of Engineering (13%); the College of Health and Human Services (13%); the College of Computing and Informatics (11%); the University College, where undecided students are placed (11%); the College of Arts and Architecture (3%); and the College of Education (2%). 

In terms of writing and the writing requirement, students could receive credit for UWR 1103 and be exempted from the University Writing Requirement if they scored a 3 or above on the AP exam.

During our site visit in November 2018, UNCC required all students to complete one 3- or 4-credit course in writing as part of the Development of Fundamental Skills of Inquiry portion of the General Education curriculum. UWR 1104: Writing and Inquiry in Academic Contexts is a 4-credit hour course (3 hours face-to-face and 1 hour online) that most students use to fulfill the requirement. Students can also fulfill this requirement by taking UWR 1103: Writing and Inquiry in Academic Contexts, a 3-credit-hour version of the course that does not include online instruction. Students with exceptional GPAs and test scores are placed, on a limited basis, into 1103.

There are 5 areas where students work to develop knowledge and skills in UWR 1104.

Rhetorical Knowledge

Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to identify and apply strategies across a range of texts and writing situations. Using their own writing processes and approaches, writers compose with intention, understanding how genre, audience, purpose, and context impact writing choices.

By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

• Use rhetorical concepts to analyze and compose a variety of texts using a range of technologies adapted according to audience, context, and purpose;
• Assess how genres shape and are shaped by readers' and writers' experimentation with conventions, including mechanics, structure, and style;
• Develop the flexibility that enables writers to shift voice, tone, formality, design, medium, and layout intentionally to accommodate varying situations and contexts.

Critical Reading

Reading critically is the ability to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, and texts. When writers think critically about the materials they use, they separate assertion from evidence, evaluate sources and evidence, recognize and assess underlying assumptions, read across texts for connections and patterns, and identify and evaluate chains of reasoning. These practices are foundational for advanced academic writing.

By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

• Use reading for inquiry, learning, and discovery;
• Analyze their own work and the work of others critically, including examining diverse texts and articulating the value of various rhetorical choices of writers;
• Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias) primary and secondary research materials, including journal articles and essays, books, scholarly and professionally established and maintained databases or archives, and informal electronic networks and internet sources;
• Use a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations.

Composing Processes

Writers use multiple strategies, or composing processes, to conceptualize, develop, and finalize projects. Composing processes are seldom linear: a writer may research a topic before drafting then conduct additional research while revising or after consulting a colleague. Composing processes are also flexible: successful writers can adapt their composing processes to different contexts and occasions.

By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate flexible strategies for drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing;
• Recognize and employ the social interactions entailed in writing processes: brainstorming, response to others’ writing; interpretation and evaluation of received responses;
• Use their writing process in order to deepen engagement with source material, their own ideas, and the ideas of others and as a means of strengthening claims and solidifying logical arguments.

Knowledge of Conventions

Conventions are the formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres, and in so doing, shape readers’ and writers’ expectations of correctness or appropriateness. Most obviously, conventions govern such things as mechanics, usage, spelling, and citation practices. But they also influence content, style, organization, graphics, and document design.

By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate how to negotiate variations in conventions by genre, from print-based compositions to multi-modal compositions;
• Investigate why genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, design, formatting, tone, and mechanics vary;
• Use the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation conventions to practice applying citation conventions systematically in their own work;
• Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising.

Critical Reflection

Conventions are the formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres, and in so doing, shape readers’ and writers’ expectations of correctness or appropriateness. Most obviously, conventions govern such things as mechanics, usage, spelling, and citation practices. But they also influence content, style, organization, graphics, and document design.

By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate how to negotiate variations in conventions by genre, from print-based compositions to multi-modal compositions;
• Investigate why genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, design, formatting, tone, and mechanics vary;
• Use the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation conventions to practice applying citation conventions systematically in their own work;

Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising.

Students in all sections of the course produce a digital portfolio based on an inquiry project. There is variation in the theme or topics for the inquiry project at the instructor’s discretion, but the overall product created by the students is the same. There is more variation in the weekly studio projects, but most are focused on production of digital texts in service of the main project or as practice for something that will need to be produced for the main project.

The faculty teaching UNCC's FYW courses have a lot of flexibility and individual choice in determining what digital assignments students will create in their classes. This ethos of faculty agency—of faculty being able to determine what specific digital tasks and tools students will use—makes this section of UNCC's Curriculum page look more sparse than other exhibits' Curriculum pages. However, the reason for that is not that UNCC FYW faculty are not teaching digital writing; it's just that there are not the same kind of standardized assignment descriptions and rubrics that some other programs have. As Cat Mahaffey explained during our interview, this is because their department's goals are not tool-focused (e.g., what digital tools should students all know how to use after taking this class) and are instead rhetorically focused (e.g., thinking about purpose and audience in order to determine what digital genre might work best). Therefore, while there are some individual faculty member's assignment sheets below that illustrate some of the varied digital genres students create (e.g., podcast, multimodal research guide), there are no shared digital assignments for us to include here aside from the Portfolio.

Portfolio Project

Each student in FYW creates a digital portfolio—website—during the semester.

Digital portfolios are supported by a 1-credit hybrid studio component of the course where students do micro-assignments that ask them to practice the skills, both rhetorical and technical, that will be deployed on a larger scale in their digital portfolio projects. (For an example of such a studio assignment designed to give students low-stakes practice with digital composing, see the Podcast, Infographic, and PowerPoint Assignment materials included in the gallery below.)

According to the First Year Writing website, "The purpose of the portfolio is to provide a place for students to curate selected coursework that demonstrates engaged inquiry, rhetorical flexibility, rigorous reflection, and awareness of visual design and digital composition. Students analyze their reading and writing processes, reflect upon their learning from the course, and articulate their understanding and application of the department's First-Year Writing student learning outcomes."

When UNCC FYW faculty began their portfolio-based curriculum, they used Weebly as their platform; however, over time, they shifted away from Weebly due to concerns about privacy. At one point, a university-wide committee investigated adopting a portfolio platform for the entire university to use, but FYW faculty were resistant to having one particular platform mandated for all courses. Therefore, the same kind of flexibility and individual choice that occurs in individual assignments also occurs in how, exactly, the portfolio assignment is completed. As Angela Mitchell noted in our interview, there are "a lot of options, but there's nothing standard."

Below, find direct links to teaching materials used to implement the curriculum for this particular institution. Note, you can also find all teaching materials for all institutions in the resource repository by clicking here.