The Composition Program at the University of Montana seeks to help students make knowledge in an academic context, and thus to initiate them into academic literacy. Treating writing not as a set of skills but as a venue for a meaningful engagement with ideas, the program aims to help students join a scholarly conversation of voices, to understand the needs of different audiences, to achieve rhetorical versatility, and to become more socially just citizens. The program is founded on a definition of writing as a recursive, collaborative process, with strong emphases on critical reading, revision, and peer critique.