Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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need to be understood better and accounted for in writing assessments. How could it be that so many more Asian-Americans taking the EPT are deemed remedial by that test than any other racial formation at Fresno State? Are they all just bad writers? If a recent survey of all Hmong students conducted in the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Fresno State is accurate (266 students responded), only 10% of Hmong students say they use only English on and off campus on a daily basis to communicate to others. Most (63.4%) say they use mostly English but sometimes another language, while 23.4% say they use half English and half another language. So if this is true, then it’s reasonable to say that the Hmong formation at Fresno State is highly literate, at least functional in two different languages. The EPT as a writing assessment doesn’t account at all for the local diversity of Fresno State, for the dual languaging of Hmong students. It only cares about the institutional need to promote the myth of the monolingual, native English-speaking student. Local racial diversity, which in this case is constructed by home and school language practices and conditions of immigration to name a few factors, is ignored by the EPT.
The EPT clearly has problems adequately accounting for the multilingual students in Fresno if over 72% of Asian-American students are designated as remedial by it, meanwhile only about 25% of white students are. And we shouldn’t be fooled by arguments that claim the EPT, or any writing assessment, could produce fairly such numbers in student populations, populations who come from the same schools, all born in the U.S. The argument is that perhaps the EPT is actually testing writing competency and not biased against Fresno Hmong since it cannot be determined that the EPT measures something different in Hmong students or measures the same construct differently in Hmong students (Inoue & Poe, 2012, pp. 343-344, 352; White & Thomas, 1981, p. 280).
The trouble with this argument is not that it uses conventional, positivistic, psychometric theories of bias (Jensen, 1976; Reynolds 1982a, 1982b; Thorndike, 1971) to determine if the EPT is not a racist test, which it does, but that it ignores the fact that failure (low scores that mean remediation) pool so cleanly, abundantly, and consistently in Hmong racial and linguistic formations in Fresno. It shows us that larger structural racism is happening in schools and classrooms, as much as it is in the test itself. Good writing assessments should be able to identify such structural racism, not work with it to produce more racist effects. Speaking of the EPT historically, Inoue & Poe (2012) explain why this writing assessment can be considered racist:
The bias of a test, like the EPT, is not just a matter of finding traditionally defined test bias. If this were the case, we most likely must agree with White and Thomas’ original judgment that the EPT is not biased against students of color. Bias can also be measured through the consequences of assessments. If an assessment is to respond fairly to the groups on which it makes decisions, then shouldn’t its design address the way groups historically perform on the assessment? Thus, we wish to suggest that understanding an assessment as producing a particular set of racial formations produces educational environments that could be unequal, either in terms of access, opportunities, or possibilities. (pp. 352-353)
Thus it is the racial consequences of a test that can make it racist and unfair. And these unfair consequences stem from the EPT not addressing local diversity, and arguably only addressing a presumed white majority. So the classrooms at Fresno State are not isolated from the larger structures and previous assessments that construct the students who come. Classroom writing assessments must account for these conditions, and we can do so by understanding better these factors as factors that construct the local racial diversity of our students.
But how do local diversities affect classroom writing assessments in those classrooms? As a teacher if you noticed that 16 out of the 20 students in your writing course were failing their essays, wouldn’t you re-examine your assignment, or expectations, or how you judged essays, etc.? Would you assume that those 16 students are all bad writers, and only four in the class are proficient? Of course not. Now, what if your school had a history of accepting students who were conventionally less prepared for college writing, who tended to have trouble approximating the dominant discourse expected, say urban Latino/a and Black students from poor neighborhoods and schools? Given this context, what would you assume? Would you check your methods, your assignments, perhaps even talk to students about how they interpreted the assignment? Now let’s say that of those 16 students 14 were Asian-American and multilingual, the rest in the class were white. Now, would you still think your classroom writing assessment is potentially flawed, or would you engage with the global imaginary of a sentimental education that says you know what is best for these less developed Asians, or Blacks, or Latinos/as? Would you imagine your role as parental? Would you imagine that you had an obligation to help these students become more proficient in the dominant English of the classroom for their own good? Would this global imaginary keep you from critically examining the way your writing assessment is or is not explicitly accounting for the locally diverse students you have in your classroom and their relations to a white racial habitus that is likely functioning in your assessment? That is, would you change your assessment so that it folded back onto itself instead of pushing back onto your students? Could your assessment assess itself, assess the dominant discourse and not just the discourses of your students?
If your assessment could do this, then it is necessary, vital, that other discourses, other perspectives, other epistemologies exist so that students can compare them to the dominant one the classroom promotes. Notice I’m not saying that the classroom is not promoting a dominant discourse. I’m saying it promotes one alongside other non-dominant ones. And the non-dominant ones become the ways toward critical examination, toward critical assessment practices.
The concept of local diversity ultimately means classroom writing assessments must engage meaningfully with the diverse students in classrooms. It means teachers really cannot develop assessment procedures or expectations without their students’ literacies. And this means, local diversities should change the academic discourse, change what is hegemonic in the academy, but this is a difficult task, one requiring a more holistic sense of classroom writing assessments, a theory of classroom writing assessment as an ecology.
Chapter 2: Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies
It is not hard to think of a classroom as an ecology or to think of writing as ecological. Others have discussed it already, and I’ll draw on them in this chapter (Coe, 1975; Cooper, 1986; Dobrin & Weisser, 2002). But what exactly is an ecology, and how might we define an ecology in order to use it as a frame for antiracist classroom writing assessments? This is the question that I’ll address in this chapter. I’ll do so by considering Freirean critical pedagogy, Buddhist theories of interconnection, and Marxian political theory. My goal in using these theories is to provide a structural and political understanding of ecology that doesn’t abandon the inherent interconnectedness of all people and things, and maintains the importance of an antiracist agenda for writing assessments. I could easily be talking about any conventional writing assessment ecology, that is ones that do not have explicit antiracist agendas; however, my discussion will focus on understanding what a classroom writing assessment ecology is when it explicitly addresses antiracist work.
An antiracist classroom writing assessment ecology provides for the complexity and holistic nature of assessment systems, the interconnectedness of all people and things, which includes environments, without denying or eliding linguistic, cultural, or racial diversity, and the politics inherent in all uneven social formations. Consider the OED’s main definitions for the word, ecology:
1a. the branch of biology that deals with the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Also: the relationships themselves, esp. those of a specified organism.
1b. Chiefly Social. The study of the relationships between people, social groups, and their environment; (also) the system of such relationships in an area of human settlement. Freq. with modifying word, as cultural ecology, social ecology, urban ecology.
1c. In extended use: the interrelationship between any system and its environment; the product of this.
2. The study of or concern for the effect of human activity on the environment; advocacy of restrictions on industrial and agricultural development as a political movement; (also) a political movement dedicated to this. (ecology, 2015)