Faculty voice: Building generous and generative community through First-Year Writing

Dawn Burns is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Cultures whose commitment to writing and storytelling as acts of personal and social change extends beyond their first-year writing classroom. Burns is the author of A Green Glow on the Horizon (2026) and Evangelina Everyday (2022), founder and co-organizer of the SwampFire retreat for artists and writers, and a recipient of excellence awards from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Ohio Arts Council. Although deeply rooted in the Midwest, Burns also loves to travel and is endlessly curious about people and places.

As a lifelong writer and writing professor, joining MSU’s First-Year Writing Program in 2022 felt like coming home to how I’ve always wanted to teach.

With an innovative curriculum grounded in trust in students and a recursive and reflective practice of “inquiry, discovery and communication” (the program’s learning goals), First-Year Writing is essential to students’ development as writers and learners. At the institutional level, the program supports student retention; at the human level, it supports growth and belonging.

The genius of First-Year Writing’s WRA 101: Writing as Inquiry course can be seen in how students invest in learning, both their own and their classmates’. As my student Dalton wrote about his initial learning narrative, “I thought it would be ‘just another writing assignment,’ but it ended up being one of the most meaningful papers I wrote.”

Insights like Dalton’s result from the First-Year Writing Program fostering students’ curiosity about their own experiences in the world and valuing the skills needed to express why those experiences matter. Students make meaning through writing and peer review, talking about what they’re doing, why it matters and the commonalities among their shared experiences.

Students often write about how hearing each other’s stories as part of the writing process deepened their connections and understanding in ways they will carry beyond WRA 101. In her final reflection essay of the semester, my student Mary wrote that peer review taught her that “being open to feedback can help me become a better writer and learner.”

Campus resources also play a role in my students’ learning. Support staff such as Sean Brown (Career Services Network), Caroline White and Lynne Swanson (MSU Museum), Michelle Word (MSU Broad Art Museum) and Sara Miller (MSU Libraries) help students develop the attitudes and skills necessary for educational success.

For example, MSU Librarian Sara Miller guides students in understanding MSU Libraries and the services and spaces it offers, including research services. Through her “Researching Your Discipline” workshop, Miller gives them space to explore and become curious about literacy practices in their chosen fields. Every semester, I watch students light up as they gain tools to better imagine their possible futures and begin their journeys. As for my own journey as a writing professor, MSU’s First-Year Writing Program has become my home. As I said in an essay recently published in Atlas Obscura, coming home to how I’ve always wanted to teach feels like this:

“My students may be skeptical on the first day of class when I tell them their voice matters, but by the last day, I want them to believe, as Dave Eggers has said, ‘Your voice is essential — the human chorus is incomplete without your voice.’ This human chorus, this eternal babble of stories, is how we build generous and generative community.”

First-Year Writing at MSU helps build such a community where students may flourish during college and far beyond.