Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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the final chapter, I offer a heuristic for antiracist writing assessment ecologies that I hope will be generative for writing teachers. The heuristic distills the previous chapters’ ideas into a usable set of questions that may help teachers design and test their own antiracist classroom writing assessment ecologies. The heuristic is based on the discussion from Chapter 2 and the seven elements from Chapter 3. While I offer an extensive set of questions, they are only meant to be generative, not exhaustive. This closing discussion offers ways to think about the heuristic and what it offers and what critique the heuristic may provide to conventional writing assessment ecologies. I close the book with a few stories of writing assessment ecologies from my own past as a child and young adult in hopes that they reveal why racism and whiteness are important to consider in any classroom writing assessment ecology.
My project in this book, then, is to think holistically about what classroom writing assessment is or could be for teachers and students. It’s about seeing classroom writing assessment in its entirety, not just parts of it, which we often do when discussing it. While I’ll suggest here and there ways to think about writing assessment in large-scale settings, even use a few large-scale writing assessment examples, such as placement decisions or high stakes tests, large-scale writing assessment design, implementation, or validation are not the focus of this book. I do believe that an ecological theory of classroom writing assessment offers ideas toward large-scale writing assessment and its validation, but I am not engaging with discussions of large-scale writing assessment or its validity in the way that others have concerning cultural validity (e.g., Huot, 2002; Inoue, 2007, 2009c; Messick, 1989; Moss et al., 2008; Murphy, 2007; Ruth & Murphy, 1988).
In one sense, I am gathering together in one place vocabulary that writing assessment folks have used in various ways for years. We just haven’t put it down in one place, assembled everything together to show what the entire ecology looks like and how it is experienced by students and writing teachers. We certainly haven’t named it as an ecology, or considered it as an antiracist project. The closest we come is Ed White’s Teaching and Assessing Writing (1994), but his account avoids a detailed discussion of race, cultural diversity, or multilingualism. And his discussion isn’t about theorizing classroom writing assessment as a whole, or as an antiracist project. White is more practical. This is just as true for White’s Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher’s Guide (2007). Both are important introductions for teachers and WPAs when designing classroom writing assessments, or program assessments, but they don’t attempt to theorize classroom writing assessment holistically and as an antiracist project in the way I do in this book. They don’t draw on any literature outside of writing assessment or composition studies to make sense of race, racism, or whiteness, as I do.
One might argue that my project does not create new theory or understandings about writing assessment or its validation, classroom or otherwise. It simply repackages the same theory already adequately described by others applying yet another set of terms, ecological ones that are unnecessary. This is not true. By recasting writing assessment as an antiracist classroom ecology, I offer insights into writing assessments as complex systems that must be thought of as such, revealing them as more than what they seem, and suggesting what we might do better tomorrow, especially if we want to promote antiracist agendas. Understanding classroom writing assessment as an ecology that can be designed and cultivated shows that the assessment of writing is not simply a decision about whether to use a portfolio or not, or what rubric to used. It is about cultivating and nurturing complex systems that are centrally about sustaining fairness and diverse complexity.
While a teacher could use a theory of writing assessment as ecology without having an antiracist agenda for her classroom, I have couched my discussion in these terms because an antiracist agenda in the writing classroom is important and salient to me and many others. Some writing assessment theorists would speak of this goal in terms of designing a classroom writing assessment that is valid enough for the decisions a classroom teacher intends to make, say to determine a course grade and a student’s readiness for the next course. They might speak of bias or disparate impact. I have purposefully stayed away from such language, although I have engaged in that theorizing in other places by discussing the way writing assessment can be theorized as a rhetorical act that can be mapped to the ancient Hellenic discussions of nomos-physis (Inoue, 2007), and by discussing writing assessment as a technology that helps us see racial validity (Inoue, 2009c).
However, I have found that many writing teachers are turned off by the language of psychometrics, and it doesn’t make any clearer what we need to do in the classroom, nor does it help students understand their roles and responsibilities in the ecology without a lot of reading into the literature of educational measurement and psychometrics. Additionally, these discussions are more concerned with program assessment, not classroom writing assessment, the main difference being that the latter is conducted exclusively by teachers and students for their purposes, purposes of learning. So using the language of psychometrics and educational measurement is not directly helpful for classroom writing assessment, even though it could be. A different set of accessible terms are needed for teachers and students. In fact, the old psychometric terms can be a barrier for many teachers to thinking carefully about classroom writing assessment because most are not familiar with them and many see them connected to positivistic world views about language and judgment.
I have been tempted to use the language that Patricia Lynne (2004) uses to help redefine the psychometric terms used in writing assessment, which agree better with the common social constructivist assumptions that most in literacy studies, English studies, and composition studies hold about language and meaning. Lynne’s terms are “meaningfulness” and “ethicalness,” which she uses to replace the psychometric concepts of validity and reliability. Lynne explains that meaningfulness references the “significance of the assessment” and “structures the relationships among the object(s) of writing assessment, the purposes of that assessment and the circumstances in which the assessment takes place” (2004, p. 117). Meaningfulness urges two questions for teachers to ask: “why is the assessment productive or necessary or appropriate?” and “what [do] assessors want to know and what [do] they need to do to satisfy their defined purposes?” (Lynne, 2004, p. 124, 125).
Ethicalness, on the other hand, “addresses the broad political and social issues surrounding assessment,” and “organizes and provides principles for understanding the conduct of the participants and the procedures for evaluation” (Lynne, 2004, p. 118). It can urge writing teachers to ask: “who is involved in the decision-making?” and “what procedures will the assessment requir[e]?” (Lynne, 2004, p. 138). Lynne’s terms are perhaps more usable and friendly to writing teachers generally, but they don’t explicitly account for all of the elements that move in and constitute any ecology, elements that writing teachers should be aware of since they are part of the ecology’s design. These terms also do not account for the relationships among elements in an assessment that make it more fittingly an ecology. As Lynne’s questions suggest, her terms account for an assessment’s purposes, people, power (politics), and processes (procedures), but not explicitly or systematically, not in interconnected ways, and it could be easy to ignore or take for granted the parts, products, and places within classroom writing assessment ecologies. Most important, Lynne’s terms do not account for whiteness, or the ways local diversities complicate the judging of writing by a single standard, even though her terms could.
If there is one ecological element that may be the best synecdoche for the entire ecology, it is place. Antiracist writing assessment ecologies, at their core, (re)create places for sustainable learning and living. This is their primary function, to create places, and I think we would do well to cultivate such assessment ecologies that self-consciously do this. Ultimately, I hope to show less conventional ways of understanding and enacting classroom writing assessment, since conventional ways have not worked well in reducing the racial hierarchies and inequalities we continue to see in schools and writing classrooms. Conventional writing assessment practices rarely if ever dismantle the racism in our classrooms and schools because they do not address whiteness in the dominant discourse as hegemonic and students’ relationship to it.
Let me be very clear. Racism in schools and college writing courses is still pervasive because most if not all writing courses, including my own in the past, promote or value first a local SEAE