From our collaboration with the Gardner Institute and its Gateways to Completion program, the First-Year Composition program operates from the principle that equitable practices are good for all students and all instructors. We strive to create the classroom and working conditions for our students, faculty, and staff that give all people the best possible chances for success. This ranges from first-generation and working-class to international students, as well as from first-time instructors to tenured faculty who teach our courses. Our program also recognizes its obligation to better serve students, staff, and instructors from historically underserved populations in accordance with best practices from our national organizations, such as NCTE, and long-standing resolutions such as Students’ Rights to Their Own Language, and recent resolutions such as Educators Rights and Responsibilities to Engage in Antiracist Teaching, Recognizing Teacher Experts and their Paths to Expertise, Disability Studies in Composition: Position Statement on Policies and Best Practices, and many more. A full list of NCTE National Resolutions, which our program fully affirms and supports, can be found here.
The Oklahoma State University First-Year Composition faculty and instructors are committed to actively resisting ways in which institutional spaces enact the silencing, marginalization, and exclusion of community members on the basis of race, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, immigration status, national origin, language, ethnicity, sex, religion, ability status, socioeconomic status, age, body type, and other aspects of identity.
As a community that prioritizes the student and a student-first curriculum, we acknowledge that we—FYC instructors, staff, and faculty—have a responsibility to first create a classroom community and curriculum that acknowledges the ways in which institutional spaces harm and threaten student identities. Our curricula ask students to create personal writing projects, to bring their personal experiences into the classroom, to reflect on their own writing histories and futures, and to examine the ways in which they are asked to write, communicate, and create across spaces, disciplines, and communities. We believe that to ask students to partake in personal creative endeavors such as these without both critiquing and resisting institutional systems of oppression is to cause irreparable harm to our students, and to place them in precarious situations. Therefore, we involve ourselves, our community, and our curricula in conversations about academic practices that help us to both understand the ways in which academic spaces have contributed to the neglect of historically marginalized communities and individuals, and to create new practices to ensure our classrooms are equitable and inclusive spaces for all. When it comes to the safety and success of our students, we believe that silence and passivity in response to institutional oppression is complacency. Therefore, we actively reject rhetoric and academic practices that cause intentional harm towards our students, and further, involve our FYC instructors, our community, and our curriculum in ongoing and current conversations about institutional inequity. We seek out pedagogical and writerly practices that acknowledge all of our students and their ways of being in our classrooms. We believe that engaging in this necessary work benefits every student in our department. We will continue to work to enact necessary change within the spaces we inhabit, ensuring that our classrooms are equitable, accessible, and inclusive to all.
For more information, please read through our community site to find organizations, practices, and resources that are committed to ensuring equity, accessibility, and inclusivity at Oklahoma State University.