This document, parts of which draw on the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition, sets out what we want USP students to have learnt from the WCT programme as a whole (among others: WCT1, WCT2, WCM, WC, folio) by the end of their studies. The document is a work in progress and for this reason we will keep refining it.

Preamble: Upon graduation WCT students will have demonstrated that they have become critical readers, writers, and thinkers. They will have done so by interacting and communicating with an awareness of their own positions within a community as they engage in discourse that is appropriate to the particular context, and that is sensitive to the intellectual, social, cultural, and linguistic diversity of a learning community. Students will have learnt to do so by: 

1. Participating and Collaborating

By graduation, WCT students will be able to:

• engage with a larger intellectual community of writers and speakers
• participate effectively in classroom conversations and collaborate in knowledge production, and in being able to articulate to others what they have learnt in the programme
• share productive, critically considered, and substantive feedback with peers
• reflect on their own ideas and revise their positions in relation to constructive feedback from peers
• produce multimodal texts (written, oral, and visual) that effectively promote informed discussion

2. Developing Rhetorical Awareness

By graduation, WCT students will be able to:

• write and think with a clear purpose and focus
• orient an audience toward a better understanding of the issues under discussion
• respond to the expectations and needs of an intellectually, culturally, socially, and linguistically diverse audience
• produce effective texts in multiple genres
• recognize, develop, and deploy various and appropriate conventions of multiple genres
• adopt an appropriate stance within a particular rhetorical situation
• demonstrate an awareness of the motivations for producing texts
• articulate the significance of their position for an audience
• be able to distinguish between the expression of opinion and the construction of reasoned argument (as well as between types of reasoned argument), and write in such a way as to be able to defend a thesis
• identify the claims, evidence, and analysis of multimodal forms of argument

3. Engaging in Critical Thinking and Inquiry

By graduation, WCT students will be able to:

• read closely and carefully
• use writing and reading for inquiry: learning, thinking, and communicating
• develop genuine, worthwhile research questions independently
• synthesize knowledge across multiple disciplines
• ask discipline-appropriate questions while striving to develop knowledge across disciplines
• integrate their own ideas with respect to current debates in the field; bring texts into conversation with each other; relate theory and practice
• demonstrate an ability to offer and analyze evidence that is both genre- and audience-appropriate
• speak and debate with an appreciation for complex social and cultural sensibilities
• learn how to engage orally and visually in effective ways, for instance through in-class presentations and also beyond the classroom

4. Learning Techniques of Composing and Crafting

By graduation, WCT students will be able to:

• understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks that include finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources
• formulate research plans
• employ appropriate research methodologies
• develop and employ a set of flexible strategies for generating ideas and texts
• develop and employ a set of flexible strategies for shaping and arranging ideas and texts
• develop a range of economical and engaging styles that are appropriate to intellectual, social, cultural, and linguistic diversity between and within contexts, audiences, and genres
• demonstrate an understanding that self-assessment and revision occurs at the levels of ideas, drafts, and sentences
• develop and use a set of flexible strategies for revising their texts
• collect and analyze primary data
• locate, evaluate, synthesize, incorporate, and document secondary sources (e.g. through library work)
• employ design conventions appropriate to genre and media, for instance correct formatting of papers
• employ flexible proofreading and editing skills