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This article offers a genealogy of the deliberative policymaking of the WPA Outcomes Statement 3.0 Revision Task Force. Interviews with Task Force members reveal that the revised statement presents composing, technology, and genre as "boundary objects," in order to preserve the document's kairos for as long as possible.
In the fall of 2014, a diverse group of rhetoric and composition faculty and writing program administrators introduced the third revision of the Council of Writing Program Administrators Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition, colloquially known as "OS 3.0," in the WPA article "Revising FYC Outcomes for a Multimodal, Digitally Composed World" (Dryer et al.). Representing the CWPA Outcomes Statement Revision Task Force, Dylan Dryer, Darsie Bowden, Beth Brunk-Chavez, Susanmarie Harrington, Bump Halbritter, and Kathleen Blake Yancey reported upon the origins and history of the 2014 revision. They explained that "[in] the fall of 2011, motivated by the sense that the field had a broader view of composing than it did a decade ago," CWPA President Duane Roen "recruited ten faculty members . . . from various institutions to explore whether the Statement needed a more systematic overhaul" of the previous two revisions (Dryer et al. 130). For the next few years, the task force collected feedback on possible revisions at workshops and conferences and conducted a formal survey of administrators, faculty, and graduate students. In gathering this input, task force members particularly focused on how to address digital and multimodal composing practices. Frequently, feedback from survey, workshop, and conference participants involved "questioning terms and assumptions (about outcomes, writing, composition, digital, multimodal)" and debating "the implications of word choice in a document that incorporates digital literacy" (133-34). In July 2014, the new OS draft was approved by the CWPA Executive Board; OS 3.0 was presented on the CWPA website shortly thereafter.
The task force's fall 2014 WPA article, as summarized above, constitutes a perfectly respectable history of the processes and considerations informing OS 3.0. However, as with any history, there are certain silences embedded in the narrative. For instance, though the article acknowledges that terms and assumptions were questioned, and later discusses particular features of 3.0-particularly, differences in how the document approaches composing, technology, and genre compared to the previous two Statements-the article nonetheless elides the internal...