2024 First Year Writing Student Showcase

The First-Year Writing Annual Student Showcase honors and celebrates the powerful work of First-Year Writing students. Each year, in their First-Year Writing course, nearly 5,000 students workshop and develop projects across a range of forms and perspectives: from the deeply personal to the broadly public, from local to global and transnational, from traditional essays to mixed media projects. To curate the showcase, we invite our faculty and graduate instructors to nominate work that they believe exemplifies the goals and values of First-Year Writing, which include equity and accessibility, rhetorical awareness, and multimodality. From those nominations, the selection committee selects the most outstanding projects.

At our second annual showcase on April 19th, 11 students shared their projects with an audience of family, friends, and First-Year Writing faculty, instructors, and guests. The students reflected on their experience in their FYW course as they developed their topic, made rhetorical choices, and engaged in the writing process. Showcase selectee Jae Taylor showed a clip from her narrated video and explained, “I hope my project (a narrated video titled “Painting and Accommodations”) reaches young college students like me so they don’t feel ostracized by the education system. It also gives an insight to those who may not have the same experiences as us, but have the capabilities for empathy.” Another showcase selectee, Gursimrat Dahry, described her work this way: “The process that has allowed me to create this project (inquiry video presentation titled “Carceral Feminism: A Criminal Justice Response to a Crisis of Violence”) has involved evaluating a women’s rights movement through a lens that is objective and simultaneously empathetic.”

The event provided students a stage to share pieces of their products and processes with attendees, in addition to inviting more focused conversations between students and attendees in a gallery walk with the selected projects and student presenters. Attendees had the chance to engage further with the projects and ask students about their rhetorical choices, writing processes, and takeaways. 

We look forward each year to this event and the opportunity it provides to celebrate the voices and work of First-Year Writing students. This year’s showcase and format embodied the FYW program’s commitment to building inclusive, dynamic writing communities where students are visible and valued.

This year’s selected projects are viewable on the FYW Student Showcase webpage.