The most recent version (4.0) of the WPA Statement on the Five Knowledge Domains of First-Year Composition is available and can be downloaded by section or in full (at the bottom of this page). Further information about the process used to revise the statement and the reasons for those revisions will appears in a future issue of WPA: Writing Program Administration.
For the practical purpose of sharing as reference with colleagues and administrators, the Five Knowledge Domains section should suffice. The rest of this document is then designed to serve those delving deeper into and taking part in creating or revising a program’s or institution’s student learning outcomes (SLOs).
Drawing on the most recent research, practice, and theories of composition pedagogy, this document identifies five domains that describe the most consequential areas of learning in first-year composition programs to help undergraduates develop their skill and competency in college, professional, and community-level writing: Rhetorical Knowledge, Conventions and Language, Critical Reading and Thinking, Material Conditions and Technologies, and Composing Processes. Further included are three cross-category domains–areas of composition that do not fit neatly in one domain but rather have the potential to influence two or more main knowledge domains: Accessibility and Disability, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and Genre. Each domain carries equal weight in importance and when taken together they represent a synergistic vision of first-year writing programs’ desired long-term impact on student writers.
These domains have been developed from a North American context; however, this document may have potential applications internationally.
Writing is a complex lifelong sociocultural, material, and cognitive practice, ever evolving with the shifting tides of technology, culture, and politics. First-year composition programs teach students the critical literacies that help them adapt to new writing situations throughout their college and professional careers and in their local communities. First-year composition seeks to achieve a synergist vision of writing knowledge transfer–learning how writing knowledge and abilities learned in one context are repurposed and recontextualized within new writing contexts. This learning to adapt to a variety of contexts is the common link across disciplines. For this reason, all faculty across disciplines must be as invested in writing pedagogy as first-year composition programs.
Readers will find three ways to use this document:
Previous iterations of the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition featured broad, universal learning outcomes. This Statement uses principles from organic assessment–assessment strategies designed based on a writing program’s unique local circumstances. Similar to organic assessment, broad learning outcomes may be too simple and generic, and do not portray an institution’s complex educational cultures and their contexts. While the five knowledge domains provided here represent a consensus in the discipline, the pathway toward those domains–and thus writing knowledge transfer–will be diverse and complex according to institutional type, faculty expertise and experience, labor conditions, student success resources, and student populations.
Sample learning outcomes are located in the Domain Supporting Documents section. However, they illustrate the genre conventions of learning outcomes, not definitive universal outcomes. We encourage WPAs to create “symbiotic, smart, organic, and locally grown” learning outcomes in their own right.
Composition studies has been called on numerous occasions to work toward linguistic justice. However, an organic assessment approach acknowledges the fraught scope of this document, its ideas, and cultural, geographical, or national reach. While writing has been taught, administered, and formed as its own disciplinary field of study in specific ways in the United States and North America, we acknowledge that many Englishes have developed globally with their respective scholarship and knowledge traditions informing how writing is taught outside of the United States.
Due to local institutional and legislative variability, writing programs and course curricula may have varying degrees of capacity to address issues of language difference in learning outcomes. This iteration of the WPA Outcomes Statement acknowledges the need for such flexibility in curriculum design and provides agency for individual programs and instructors. That includes addressing issues of linguistic justice and translingualism; using banned or controversial words and phrases such as “linguistic diversity,” “linguistic justice,” “equality,” “inclusion,” and the systemic ideas of dominant, marginalized, or official languages; and the corresponding valuing of all dialects or variations of English and all other languages.
WPAs are strongly encouraged to create SLOs that address these terms and ideas within their programmatic and legal capacity to do so.
|
Antonio Byrd |
Bernice Olivas |
|
Sheila Carter-Tod |
Michelle Bachelor Robinson |
|
Al Harahap |
Shelley Rodrigo |
|
Stephanie Kerschbaum |
Amy Wan |
|
Cruz Medina |
The Council of Writing Program Administrators’ (CWPA) Outcomes Statements (v1, 2000; v2, 2008; v3, 2014) are a part of ongoing collaborative revisions by scholars with a wide variety of lived and professional experiences. We, the authors of this version, recognize our positions as administrators, researchers, and teachers include power and privilege that we cannot ignore, distance ourselves from, or disregard. We also acknowledge the challenges faced by past members, leaders, and stakeholders who have devoted their time, expertise, and passion to this work. In honoring the experiences of past committees, we commit to transparency, continuous improvement, and fostering a future that arcs toward justice.
This statement identifies five common knowledge domains of first-year or introductory composition programs in higher education. Drawing on the most recent research, theories, and practices of composition pedagogy, these domains describe the most consequential areas of learning to help undergraduates develop their skill and competency in college, professional, and community-level writing. Each domain carries equal weight in importance and when taken together they represent a synergistic vision of first-year writing programs: to promote and facilitate writing knowledge transfer–understanding that writing knowledge and abilities learned in one context are reused within new writing contexts, both in immediate college coursework and beyond academia.
This document is designed to facilitate conversations and decision-making efforts among writing program administrators, university administrators, writing center directors, graduate instructors, teaching professors, faculty across disciplines, and any other relevant stakeholders. Many approaches to curriculum development can be complex and specific to institutional type, student population, labor conditions, faculty expertise and experience, university resources, community needs, and current laws and policies regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Therefore, users of this document will not find generic, broad learning outcomes for each knowledge domain. Instead it is theoretically aligned with organic assessment–a practical framework to develop assessments according to the unique conditions of the local level. WPAs are encouraged to develop learning outcomes that align with the five knowledge domains and match the unique contexts of their institution.
Students should analyze contexts, genres, and audiences as they develop purposes and goals for their writing and produce texts using the full range of their linguistic, cultural, and semiotic repertoires. The texts that students consume and produce, both in and out of academia, may be alphanumeric combined with multimodal formats, thus creating epistemic conditions that include various digital and visual rhetorics. Students need support to understand their composing processes as embodied and connected to the ways that different people navigate texts and contexts and to consider the ethical and material stakes of these processes.
Students understand that all people bring diverse linguistic histories and practices to various contexts, each offering valuable perspectives. No dialect or language is inherently superior; value is shaped by communities and power dynamics. Instruction that privileges Standard English risks reinforcing inequities and overlooking students’ linguistic assets. Conventions and language are not universal—they evolve with cultural and disciplinary contexts. Students understand how conventions are constructed and negotiated, and why power circulates through language. Students are equipped to analyze, adapt, and advocate for their linguistic identities.
Students develop strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and analyze a text, including reading to understand what a text says, what a text does, and what a text means. Students need support to develop critical reading practices through standalone reading instruction and integrated reading and writing instruction. Students come to first-year composition with a wide range of reading practices. These reading practices emerge from their lived experience and education histories and shape how they uptake critical reading and thinking in first-year composition.
Composing is always subject to the material conditions of the rhetorical context; such material conditions might include time and space, knowledge, previous writing experiences, and access to production and distribution technologies. Students should critically attend to and reflect on material and ethical considerations in choosing and using information and technologies, acknowledging that they are not always in control of, or able to access the material conditions of any given rhetorical context.
Students develop a variety of strategies to create a wide range of texts. The strategies composers use are seldom linear but rather iterative and recursive, often consisting of interlocking individual and collaborative activities that lead to a completed (for-now) project. Such recursive activities include critical thinking, planning, creating, revising, and (re)creating, based on composers’ rhetorical situations, interactions with feedback and other composers, and the material affordances that shape their composing. Reflection and metacognition help composers adapt as a project unfolds as well as to deepen writing knowledge and transfer.
In addition to the five knowledge domains above, this statement includes three cross-category knowledge domains: areas of writing knowledge that relate to multiple domains above. For example, developing Genre knowledge involves Rhetorical Knowledge, Conventions and Language, Material Conditions and Technologies, and Composing Processes. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) impacts many writerly activities, and the discipline contests to what extent writing programs should teach GenAI, if at all. What learning outcomes match the values of the discipline and the program’s definition of critical GenAI literacies? These domains are implicated yet so influential they cannot be flattened into one of the five domains. Therefore, these domains should be in consideration as WPAs design new learning outcomes according to the five knowledge domains.
Students should learn about and reflect on the diverse ways they and other readers or audiences engage with conventional print-based and multimodal texts. While accessibility can include consideration of what language styles, conventions, and uses might support a reader’s uptake of a text, it must also center the embodied needs of disabled composers and readers.
Generally, specific kinds of digital technologies are not elevated to a learning outcome or domain. However, this cross domain for GenAI is predicated upon how writing programs are developing responses in different ways. The continuation of these cross-domains depends on the trajectory of the discipline’s interventions. Students understand GenAI as a class of artificial intelligence systems that can create new content, such as text, images, audio, and video. Students familiarize themselves with GenAI’s many forms, such as chat interfaces, features embedded in software, and AI agents. Students become aware of this technology's contributions to existing social inequalities, as well as its material impact on the environment, labor, creativity, human agency, and students’ learning. At the discretion of program and university leadership, students critically reflect on what GenAI platforms do and do not add to learning composing processes, research methods, and other writerly activities.
Students understand that genre is a social action. That is, they understand that genres are purposeful responses by writers to recurring situations within contexts and communities, not simply categories of texts and their typical features. Genres help writers identify the conventions of a given text, whether it is primarily alphanumeric or multimodal, as well as the expectations for audiences who are familiar with these texts. Analyzing genres helps writers to understand unfamiliar texts.