Mission Statement for College English and Basic Skills English Department, Seton Hall University

The Freshman English program provides the initial impulse in a four-year experience with writing and reading at Seton Hall University. Students take on projects that give them the experience of joining a community of writers and thinkers, encouraging them to partake in an extended inquiry–about a topic (or topics) of concern to young adults–which moves from peer-based and familiar to increasingly rigorous, critical, and text-based. These projects prepare students not only for academic work but also for participation in the wider community, in each case encouraging them to challenge and interrogate their own and others’ texts. Thus students learn to write for purposes in addition to self-expression and academic analysis and for audiences other than the instructor and other students. In all courses, students are given the tools to develop and reflect on their own writing process, especially by focusing on revision. By the end of Freshman English, students should possess a common set of key rhetorical concepts that allow them to approach a wide variety of rhetorical situations with success. Our ultimate goal is for students to leave the program valuing the reading-writing-thinking connection and experiencing it as empowering to themselves as members of the University and citizens of the world [or “active citizens”].