In March 2021, the Rhetoric and Composition Program in the English Department, with generous support from the College of Arts and Sciences, the Writing Center, WAC, and the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, presented a lecture and workshop by Dr. Asao Inoue on antiracist writing assessment:
Keynote Lecture: “What Does It Mean to Do Antiracist Writing Assessment?
Wednesday 3/10, 2:00 - 3:00 pm (EST)
This talk engages with the question of what it means to assess and grade college student writing for a more antiracist classroom. It focuses not on people behaving badly or racist, but rather on the historical and structural ways that most academics judge and read language; teachers’ ways of assessing language; disciplines’ logics and ways with words; and most professions’ expectations of language use. It pays particular attention to the historical practice of grading in universities. Inoue discusses how higher education generally promotes literacy practices through assessment ecologies that are White supremacist, and defines an antiracist orientation toward our teaching and assessing.
Writing Faculty Workshop: “Bravely Challenging Our White Language Supremacy in Our Assessments of Student Writing”
Wednesday 3/10, 3:00 - 4:30 pm (EST)
This workshop will challenge participants to bravely investigate their own classroom assessment practices, particularly their orientations toward student writing as embodied in their feedback to that writing. The workshop will consider habits of White language that inform assessment practices in our own classrooms as well as several “fast thinking” mind heuristics. We’ll pause to reflect upon sample feedback on a student paper that participants bring from a past course of theirs. Faculty participants should bring to the workshop one sample paper with their feedback or assessments to the student on it or attached. This should demonstrate the typical kind of feedback the teacher provides. This workshop asks participants to be brave in the ways that Arao and Clemens describe “brave spaces” for doing race work, especially antiracist work, and to be compassionate to themselves and their colleagues. Participants will get a handout of resources.