By Dr. Katie Fitzpatrick
In the opening of his book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts, Asao Inoue (2019) writes:
It is often believed falsely that grading is just an institutional necessity, something we can ask students to ignore, at least while they are learning. But to attempt to do that is to ignore the way grades work in classrooms, how they shape many aspects of the entire ecology, how they influence students’ and teachers’ actions. Not thinking of assessment first, or at least simultaneously with pedagogy, is a mistake. And our students who do not already come to us embodying a dominant English will pay for it, even when our intentions are to help those very students. (p.2)
As Inoue suggests, the pressure of assessment tends to permeate the classroom—and the effects of that pressure may overwhelm other anti-racist aspects of your pedagogy. It is therefore vital to consider anti-racist approaches to grading and feedback.
Writing Assessment and Structural Racism
The powerful negative effects of assessment may be even more pronounced in the writing classroom since writing and language assessment have long been connected with structural racism. In the US, “standardized English-centric writing assessment in the US emerged alongside (and was used to advance) anti-immigrant nativism, anti-blackness, colonialism, and the eugenics movement” (Gere et al., 2021, p. 389), while in Canada, the enforced use of English or French at Residential Schools played a key role in the ongoing cultural genocide against Indigenous Peoples. At most universities, the assessments given in writing courses are also treated as “judgments made about who does and does not deserve opportunities for success,” including access to programs, majors, scholarships, or employment (Perryman-Clark, 2016, p. 206). Writing classrooms where traditional assessment structures remain unchallenged play an active role in perpetuating these problems, purporting to distinguish “good” from “bad” writing (and writers) on the basis of dominant (implicitly White) standards.
Questioning Your Practices
In working to challenge your own traditional assessment practices, you might ask yourself:
- Do you assess student writing by a single “standard”?
- Where does that “standard” come from?
- How can you displace it to better value different languages, Englishes, rhetorics, and writing goals that students may bring to your classroom?
- How can you create a classroom organized around learning and student agency instead of around the threat or trauma of assessment?
Three Things to Try for Now
- Educate yourself about the history of writing assessment and think critically about your own ideas of “good” writing. Begin to develop a more capacious and flexible understanding of how students might write successfully in your course.
- Learn more about “Critical Language Awareness” (see annotated bibliography), which encourages faculty and students to analyze how dominant, exclusionary writing standards are formed and maintained. Consider how you can foreground (or at least surface) this type of critique in your classroom.
- Learn more about “Labor-Based Contract Grading” (see annotated bibliography), which assesses students based on effort expended in the course rather than perceived writing quality. Consider adopting this approach—or another non-traditional “ungrading” approach.
References & Recommended Readings
- Balester, V. (2012). How writing rubrics vail: Toward a multicultural model.” In A. Inoue and M. Poe (Eds.)
Race and Writing Assessment. Peter Lang. - Blum, S. D. (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West
Virginia UP. - Carillo, E. (2021). The hidden inequities in labor-based contract grading. Utah State University Press.
- He, L. & Shi, L. (2008). ESL students’ perceptions and experiences of standardized English writing tests.
Assessing Writing, 13, 130-149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2008.08.001 - Horner, B., Lu, M-Z., Royster, J.J., & Trimbur, J. (2011). Language difference in writing: Toward a
translingual approach. College English, 73(3), 303-321. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25790477 - Gere, A.R., Curzan, A., Hammond, J. W., Hughes, S., Li, R., Moos, A., Smith, K., Van Zanen, K., Wheeler, K.L.,
and Zanders, C.J. (2021). Communal justicing: Writing assessment, disciplinary infrastructure, and the case for critical language awareness. College Composition and Communication, 72(3), 384-412. - Inoue, A. (2015). Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially
Just Future. WAC Clearinghouse. - Inoue, A. (2019). Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate
Writing Classroom. WAC Clearinghouse. - Perryman-Clark, S. M. (2016). Who we are(n’t) assessing: Racializing language and writing assessment in
writing program administration. Toward Writing Assessment as Social Justice [Special Issue]. College English, 79(2), 206-211. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44805919 - Shapiro, S. (2022). Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom. Routledge.