Asao Inoue's
Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies:
Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future
2015
winner of 2017 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award. Council of Writing Program Administrators 2017 Best Book Award.
Intro
"We should theorize and practice writing assessment simultaneously" (p. 3)
two strands woven into book:
holistic writing assessment
theorizing writing assessment to "cultivate antiracist agendas" (p. 3)
chapter 1
Overriding question driving this chapter:
"how might we define race and understand its function in classroom writing assessments so that we can articulate antiracist writing assessments?" (p. 25)
Chapter 2
Nice overview in second full paragraph on page 10
'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?' (p. 77)
Freire + Buddha + Marx + Gramsci
Asao's Ecology
5 parts
- Relationships between people and places
- Ecologies (re)create the living organisms & environments that constitute them
- Often reference systems of relationships in areas of human settlement
- Actions, effects, consequences of human & environmental activity
- Associated with political activities
(parses OED definition)
Marxian ecology
all systems are political and historical by nature
power relations inherent in judging, in assessment
teachers, parents, admins consenting to things in school that benefit primarily a dominant group (p. 109)
football stadiums
bio labs
Standard English writing textbooks
Concluding
'Enacting classroom writing assessment ecologies as a way to create a humane and inhabitable place for everyone is an antiracist project in intention, process, and outcome' (p. 117)
Bulleted list p. 117
Bulleted list p. 118
Appendix A & B
Chapter 3
Seven elements of classroom writing assessment ecologies
power
parts
purposes
people
processes
products
places
visualized on page 176
Chapter 4
longest chapter
Fall 2012, English 160W--an upper division WI course
Fresno State
23 students
According to course catalogue, a 'project-based course in which each student writes two research papers, each based on some question in her major or discipline' (p. 180)
...
Grading contracts based on labor
'any given activity's artifact tended to be defined in terms of time spent on the activity, length of the document, and whether the writing addressed the prompt or instructions' (p. 181).
.
...
We 'did not use quality to determine credit for a grade on an assignment, nor did we use it to determine if someone met some standard of our local SEAE or a dominant discourse of the classroom' (p. 181)
Following labor activities:
reading
writing
reflecting
labor journaling
assessing
projecting
...
Dialogue on the syllabus
Dialogue on the rubric
Dialogue on writing
'students labored to learn, instead of laboring to earn' (p. 213)
dialogue on the rubric
when students control the articulation of rubrics and reflect upon them, they do valuable intellectual work that helps them as writers and gives them necessary power to make their educational experiences more potent and critical (pp. 237-38)
peer review
overview of Asao's approach to student-authored 'assessment documents' starting on page 238
ASSESSMENT as student-driven
lovely paragraph on page 263-64
final reflection
reflecting on oneself and the other people in the group in a written letter
page 264
Why?
'Because grades are so destructive to student learning in writing classrooms and grades produced by quality (comparisons to dominant discourses) are themselves racist, grading contracts are the best antiracist solution I've found' (p. 178)
grading contract
p. 331
chapter 5
heuristic for bringing these ideas to your locally diverse student population
Conference on college composition and communication
Kansas City, March 2018
Asao is chairing conference
Chapters 4-5, Asao Inoue
By mrifenburg
Chapters 4-5, Asao Inoue
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