15 february 2022: Asou Inoue

2/10/2022

In class on Tuesday, we brought to an end our largely historical discussion of the field of Rhet/Comp. We t talked about the role deficit thinking plays in the field and how, in some ways, we can understand the field as in contrast to writing classrooms that focus on error rather than possibility. We talked about the centrality of teaching and of first year writing to the field, certainly in the beginning, but, also, how during the 80s and 90s there was backlash against the "school marm" idea of what the field was about (Crowley).

We Also read the introduction to Asao Inoue's Antiracist Writing Assessment Inoue is a strong example of the kind of scholarship that the field is concerned with now. Here we see legacy--the way he positions writing instruction against ideas of error and deficit, the way he is even talking about a classroom and about teaching and how to teach writing, a concern for representation and diverse students and their success (which really is just the obvious continuation of ideas that were present in Elbow, Murray, etc). We see what has lasted as an area for research (writing instruction) and what has changed (what that instruction looks like).

To really dig deep into current scholarship in the field, this week I've asked folks to read Chapter five and one other chapter. I am repeating the groups and the chapters everyone is reading here:

Chapter 1 & 5 Chapter 2 & 5 Chapter 3 & 5. Chapter 4 & 5
Brian, Maura, & Olivia Alyssa, Megan, & Sarah Ashley, Kayleigh, & Matt Melissa & Shauna

THE PROMPT: Check out the questions that we developed in class on Tuesday night based on discussion of the introduction to Inoue by clicking on this link (same one as I put in the chat on Tuesday and also available on our syllabus and class update page).

As you read your two assigned chapters, see what your chapters offer as answers to these questions. As you post, you might focus on one question you think he addresses a lot in your section or you might focus on a few questions. It's unlikely that any one chapter will answer all of the questions. Post a reading journal that explores how Inoue answers one or more of these questions.

In-class, you'll have time in these small groups to share notes about the most important ideas in your chapter. You should be prepared to share that information with the rest of the class. We'll have a discussion about the ways our questions are answered (and perhaps not answered) in the further chapters of Inoue's text.

11 Comments

Sarah Bond

2/13/2022 05:35:09 pm

The ever-present question on my mind as I read was: Is this a K12 initiative? First of all, some of the ideas are what K12 teachers already consider best practice (ie, individualized feedback, peer review and student revision, community mindedness), although he clarifies that “best practice” is not always antiracist unless the teacher explicitly identifies the white racial habitus in the lesson/activity (83). The other ideas seem to assume a baseline of ability. Students who can problematize their writing have thinking skills that are critical and reflective; they also have language tools that can be revised and manipulated. At one point, Inoue acknowledges that he uses the conventions and SEAE in this book that he challenges in the classroom (112). Does that imply that such tools are useful and effective in reaching a broad audience, even though “good writing” (what a class community settles on as good, 80) extends beyond these tools? He also mentions in his narrative that his shared story-telling experience with his twin brother grew out of his personal interest in reading and “rhetorical savvy… on the block” (294). The degree to which literacy is expected and understood would determine its application in K12 classrooms.
In response to Question #9 about success, the settlement of “good” writing at the university level is fascinating. In the two decades of my career, I’ve seen the K12 writing curriculum expand exponentially to include personal voice, expressivism, journalism, narrative, in addition to research, expository, and analytical writing. For this reason, favoring labor, revision, and personal voice does not seem as far a stretch for K12 teachers as it might be at the university level, where academic writing is prized. This, of course, is the frustration of K12 teachers, who face standardized tests that demand unknowable requirements. Inoue acknowledges this frustration but offers no immediate solution (107) except to perhaps upend the whole system in an effort to make the world a better and more just place (117).
Regarding his value system, Inoue favors labor over “gifts of racial habitus,” or “so-called quality” (80). Through interconnection, students can work together to build a rubric that serves as a starting point, not an end point (285), stripping the former “determination” in order to value labor in discourse as a means of being counter hegemonic (112). The goal is not the product, but change, presumably both private and public (292), which is achieved through rhetorical listening and challenging norms (289). Because Inoue understands traditional grading with a “single strand” (81) as racist and inequitable (116), he uses a rubric that measures student labor with a shocking amount of direction, including instructions about mindfulness and an assigned number of minutes spent in various steps in quiet settings (337-338).
To what extent is all of this feasible? Inoue mentions the need for student diversity (98), explicit mention of racism in every assessment, and student choice in setting standards and expectations (288). A prerequisite is therefore a teacher facilitator who is judicious about fostering transferable skills while valuing student voice in what may not be an obviously diverse classroom. This raises the question of whether the achievement gap is widened when individual communities (many with little diversity) find success at the local level through a local teacher in our various pursuits of what is “good” not only in composition, but in our world.

Shauna Cascarella

2/14/2022 02:25:40 pm

Inoue presents an admittedly complex and vast lens through which to view and theorize the writing classroom and his work of anti-racist practices in developing classroom ecologies. Much of his writing seems dedicated to making this ecology ebb and flow in not only a natural way, but also in a way that is highly productive. A lot of our work in looking at his research and theory will come from trying to organize and make sense of it without totally bastardizing the work he has already done (which is a lot). Much of Inoue’s work is about the assessment, but what does he mean by assessment? Inoue writes: “At its center, assessing is about reading and making judgments on artifacts from frameworks of value and expectations for particular purposes” (183). Throughout chapter four, Inoue dedicates to focusing on revealing methods that show and elaborate on the classroom ecology: “Doing so leads us to antiracist work. Let me be clear: An antiracist writing assessment ecology is a classroom that makes more visible the ecology since racist patterns are always less visible in real life” (177).

Inoue provides a sort of guide for how these classes are set up and includes his heuristic set of questions in a logical order that are meant to reveal to the teacher how this is to be done; this heuristic is seven and a half pages long. It’s not work for the faint of heart. In chapter four, however, he does suggest that one must start by identifying and orchestrating the assessment of the classroom. Inoue suggests that this be student led and centered because “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” (237-238). He begins his classes by working with students on creating grading contracts and makes note that labor based contracts helps the performance of students of color and multilingual students and allows for the ecology to become more antiracist (Inoue 177). Due to the nature of his classes (students assessing other students work and sharing so frequently) Inoue makes note that he does not ever require students to reveal personal information regarding “their past or their own sense of racial, class, or gendered identifies, but everyone did” (179). He details how he shares and discusses early on in the class that this personal information informs and influences the ways in which students read and assess the writing of others rather than be used to discuss value, and he stresses the importance of reflecting on how each piece of writing provides “insights into how we value language” (Inoue 179).

All in all I think what is most telling about the work and method Inoue details here is the reaction and engagement of his students. He mentions students who discussed how much they disliked reading before the class and how different their perspectives were upon completion. The growth and insight he saw was staggering and that can be evidenced by the effort his students put in, which he explains through various anecdotes from the classroom. While I don;t believe this work is easy to implement or necessarily meant for the K12 classroom, I do think that there are aspects we can (and should) all take to heart to develop these anti-racist writing assessments moving forward. Hopefully one day the MCAS can follow suit.

Megan G

2/14/2022 05:52:13 pm

In Chapter Two, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, Inoue begins by addressing the various definitions of ecology. He goes through each of them to settle on his own definition, simply put as studying the connection between humans, other humans, and their environment. This set the precedent for the chapter’s central themes, which assist in answering some of our questions from last week’s class.
Inoue examines how certain places are meant for certain groups, meaning any learner who doesn’t fit the mold of a certain educational environment uncomfortable. Inoue himself felt that he was writing at a deficit, remembering he “had to make up for where I came from and who I was” (78). He visually describes himself in class as “a brown spot in a class of white milk”, showing clearly how his environment and the other people in it contributed to his view of himself (78). This brings forward our questions about how outside spheres influence with assessment in the classroom. In Inoue’s case, the outside sphere was a direct influence on his association with his ability to succeed. As he assumed he was behind due to his clear racial difference from the majority of people in his educational environment, he felt he had to overperform just to be viewed as equal to his classmates on assessments. This chapter does not touch on outside parental influence specifically but addresses the broader connection between the local community and their level of diversity. Later in the chapter, Inoue says “The best learning happens in diverse contexts” (116). While he does not clarify his definition of a diverse context outside of the realm of race, this statement claims that the diversity of outside spheres are always a prominent influence in the classroom and can determine the quality of education a student receives. I am left asking this: If the best learning happens in diverse contexts and environments, how can we successfully implement anti-racist practices and ensure there is also high-quality learning in non-diverse contexts? If most students in a certain learning environment align with the dominant discourse, what practices must be implemented for students to comprehend the experiences of those in non-dominant discourses?
Another one of our questions partially addressed by this chapter is what Inoue values in terms of writing and life skill and the value system that underlies his argument. For Inoue it is all about labor. He says it is a “more equitable and fair measure. Everyone has 24 hours in every day” (84). While this answers what he values in assessment, it leaves out the practical component of how a teacher would determine the labor of their student during assessment. Should it be done by self-reported timecards or analysis of proper utilization of class time? There are many ways to imagine this admirable focus on labor but difficult to determine how teachers can measure it to best factor it into the assessment. Inoue fights against measurement ecologies and places emphasis on a more holistic model. Unfortunately, in our current education system which requires thousands of teachers to submit quarterly progress reports on their students, there needs to be a practical and time-conscious aspect to assessment. But Inoue is determined to adjust assessment to factor in labor, noting that this change “to favor labor over the gifts of racial habitus sets up assessment ecologies that are by their nature more ethical and fairer to all” (80). While a more fair and ethical system is the goal for most teachers and administrators, it is difficult to imagine how this method of assessment would function in our current education system. Based off of the few chapters we have read so far, it is safe to say that Inoue’s book is not just a suggestion for anti-racist methods in the classroom but instead a guidebook which shows a restructure of the system is essential to creating more equitable learning environments.

Ashley Merola

2/15/2022 01:27:02 am

The third and fifth chapters of Asao Inoue's Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies provide a comprehensive overview of how English educators can create equitable learning experiences for their students in the contemporary writing classroom. Inoue encourages them to contemplate a complex system of seven elements that comprise his heuristic for fostering fair pedagogical practices - power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products, and places (119). Through their awareness and application of these elements, teachers can accomplish what Inoue considers the central objective of antiracist ecologies: to “[engage] students in problematizing their existential writing assessment situations” (119). His concept of challenging and changing the colonizing conditions that confine student freedom in writing classrooms thus poses the two-part question, What are the steps to starting an antiracist writing assessment ecology and how realistic are those steps in relation to the reality of teaching today?

In regard to the steps, Inoue clarifies in Chapter 3 that the term “elements” would better reflect the breakdown of an antiracist writing assessment ecology (119). He further communicates that these elements do not necessitate any particular order. However, I found that his focus on power as the first element he explains makes the most sense in the context of his work. Power, according to Inoue, refers to “the ways we ask students to labor and submit the products of their labor to us for evaluation,” with classrooms being “places in which power is constructed” (121-122). To confront the racist roots of that construction, teachers must ask their students critical questions about assessment, such as “How are the expectations and standards for grading writing, determining students’ progress, or evaluating students as writers used and employed?” (123). Their direct input on and involvement in the evaluative nature of the ecology ensures “fairness and more equitable outcomes and products can occur” (125). I would argue this active role that students play when it comes to analyzing authority in the classroom proves power is the most encompassing and essential element out of the seven and should therefore be addressed first. Although, Inoue himself does not demonstrate a strong preference for one over the other when discussing how to start an antiracist writing assessment ecology in this chapter.

To move onto the practicality of Inoue’s pedagogy, he does acknowledge the amount of time examining all of these ecological elements could take in both chapters. His argument that “focusing on one or two can often lead to discussion of other elements” (174) asserts an “interconnectedness” between the elements that “shows why a teacher designing an assessment ecology can begin anywhere in the system, begin with the element that seems most important or salient to her” (291). Instead of a step-by-step recipe for antiracist writing assessment, the ecology becomes a puzzle that a teacher puts together with their students; they decide which piece they will pick up first and where they will place it, all while deliberating on the people who originally designed the picture. The only disclaimer Inoue offers to this interpretation is that the ecological element with which the teacher begins, such as processes, “will likely be more primary than what those processes become” (292). I can comprehend how applying this assessment pedagogy in the average academic setting would require more proactive planning on the teacher’s part. They would need to adjust the scope and sequence of their courses to accommodate days dedicated to negotiating assessment with their students. Nevertheless, these chapters emphasize the importance of an educator’s efforts toward enforcing equity in the English classroom. Change should outweigh convenience in this circumstance, and with the right professional resources, we can establish antiracist assessment ecologies that transform writing instruction into pedagogy that promotes the success of all students.

Melissa Batty

2/15/2022 11:50:05 am

Asao B. Inoue strategizes directly how to create an antiracist classroom: the writing assessment ecology must be visible to all, teacher, and student, because transparency is the only way to avoid the racist and colonial patterns and practices found within real life. He asserts that grades are caustic to a student’s ability to write texts that are cohesive and of value, to both themselves and the academic community. Inoue states that the production of grades teachers base on “quality” writing are subjective to the White racial habitus that the Eurocentric school system ingrains in students –– whether White or non-White. It is for this reason, that Inoue suggests utilizing grading contracts: agreements which teachers and students create using negotiations in the beginning of each course, and upon classroom succession, the contracts become revisable if students find them to be hegemonically unfair.
Inoue’s antiracist assessment is a clear and concise pedagogical tool for educators and students in post-secondary education. Even though students suffering marginalization often experience inherent biases from institutions of higher education, students can offer public discourse against said practices, promoting antiracist pedagogy within their classrooms. Also, post-secondary educators have greater latitude to configure methodologies consistent with Inoue’s assessment: 1) writing groups which serve as ecological spaces that students construct, foster, and “colonize” (in the writing group, colonization is acceptable because the students decipher the imperial rules they abide by), 2) syllabi’s focusing on labor intensive writing in opposition to “quality” or grammatically perfect writing, 3) self-reflection by students with an emphasis on personal growth versus institutional standards of SEAE writing, and 4) educators imparting upon their students that the additional labor they put into their prose, adds to the growth they incur as both a reader and writer.
The antiracist assessment in post-secondary classrooms then become contracts which normalize quantity over quality, or post-colonial educational tools over colonial educational tools. Since the assessment offers opportunity for students to renegotiate their contract, they focus less on a colonial grade –– “the quality A” –– and more on a labor intensive, post-colonial grade –– receiving an A from the time and energy they put forth into writing and in the classroom. Positing the importance of post-colonial education over a colonial one allows students to embrace the value of their work and the fairness that their educator exhibits within the classroom. Using Inoue’s antiracist pedagogy predisposes a student’s capability to write from a space that is both personal and one of interest, rather than from a space of intrinsic racism; Eurocentric writing prompts, an emphasis on grammar and sentence structure, and an educator’s inherent bias against “urban” students and their White counterparts.
Ultimately, Asao B. Inoue’s antiracist assessment, promotes a pedagogical classroom that is more equal and equitable for all students, especially those experiencing oppression. It creates a safe space for students to explore discourse with their educators and peers, assists educators in facilitating student writers become critical of conventional assessments, removes the fear of “imperfect” or colonial writing from students, and fashions an environment promoting labor and quantity over racial standards of quality.

Matthew Cutter

2/15/2022 01:16:56 pm

While reading chapter 3 I began to see answers forming to our class’s first question which was, "What exactly are the key components of assessment according to Inoue? Since assessment is such a broad term, what is he really talking about? In education we talk about so many ways–what gets assigned and collected versus what students are just writing?"
Inoue listed the key components of anti-racist writing ecology as, power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products, and places. Inoue stresses how interconnected many of these concepts are, and that when you attempt to address one of these concepts in regard to writing assessment, you often end up working with many of these elements all at once. Ultimately, Inoue is making the claim that developing an antiracist ecology for your writing assessment takes creativity, flexibility, and an open mind.

The first component, power, is one of the most important ones. I’ve often thought that the power should be in the hands of the student, it is their education after all. The way we use and exercise our power as teachers can be one of the biggest factors that decide whether our writing ecologies are truly antiracist. Inoue says the following regarding traditional use of power in the classroom, "Classrooms are also places in which power is constructed to discipline students and teachers. Desks in rows and facing the teacher are a physical arrangement
that many have discussed as one that promotes particular power relationships that work against the kind of pedagogical environment we usually hope to encourage in writing classrooms, one that places too much focus on the teacher
as speaker and students as passive listeners" (122).
If the power is focused on the teacher, as it is in a traditional model, we are already taking so much power out of the hands of our students. When it comes to our students of color, they are already dealing with situations in which their agency is limited, why continue to limit their agency when it comes to their education, the most important part of their lives?

One of the ways Inoue explores to make our writing assessment anti-racist is through a changing of our grading practices. Changing to a grading practice that puts more power into the hands of our students can be one of the biggest ways to move toward a more anti-racist writing ecology. One of the ways we can do this is through grading by contract. Inoue says of this grading practice, "The most obvious feature of the contract is its focus on labor, not quality, to determine course grades.33 The contract and portfolio kept grades off of day-today and major assignments in all courses, and focused students’ attention toward the labor they did each day or week, which is a feature of assessment ecologies that can be antiracist" (130).
By focusing our grading practices on the labor that students produce, we are putting more value on the learning process and less value on the product. Nobody ever actually learns anything from a test, so why put so much weight on them? The learning happens during the process. I use a form of contract grading in my classroom and have definitely noticed more learning happening than when I had used a traditional grading system. By taking the focus off of a final average, students instead have to focus on the entire process, as well as my feedback in order to achieve an A. I feel that they learn more in the process, by focusing on the journey instead of the destination.

Alyssa Campbell

2/15/2022 01:44:21 pm

In Chapter 2 (Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies), I found myself being drawn back again and again to the concept of outside and inside influence of people within a writing classroom, or in any writing classroom. This is most directly related to one of our class-curated questions: How do outside spheres influence experience with the assessment in the classroom?

The closest I could come, in these readings, was in chapter 2. Inoue's entire breakdown of how people should be seen as active participants in an ecosystem. Seeing a classroom as an ecosystem demonstrates the way that people interact with one another within the constraints of that classroom, but also takes into consideration what happens outside of that time period as well. Inoue writes "Places, environments, help make us who we are, and we help make places what they are" (p.78-9). In other words, we are both helping change the classroom, and being in the classroom is helping to change us, simultaneously. While this may seem a bit meta at first and difficult to break down, it makes sense when you compare it to the laws of science. When you do an action on an object, it is doing one in return. In other words, just as you can affect and change things around you, you are also effected and changed by the things around you as well as the other people around you.

Within the scope of a class, most specifically in the making of a writing class designed on the nuances of the overlap of experiences, it is essential, then, to note what each person carries with them. If someone has experienced writing either positively or negatively, they are unknowingly carrying this with them into the ecosystem of the class. It makes me wonder what I unknowingly carried with me, most worryingly in the forms of biases or prejudices, into classes where I was learning. On the other side as a teacher when I am teaching writing, how often am I doing the same?

Inoue does not condemn the unknowing, however. His methodology and suggestion is not built on shaming; it is built on the active process of everyone becoming more educated, together. This educating, together, allows for students and instructor alike to acknowledge shortcomings, acknowledge biases and prejudices, and thus offers them time to collaborate and come together to actively find a solution. Being an actively antiracist classroom, writing or otherwise, would mean addressing the difficult topics no one wants to touch, and handling them as a class, with no one individual playing the role of "Expert."

Kayleigh Holt

2/15/2022 02:11:51 pm

As a teacher at the K-12 grade levels something that, unfortunately, is on my mind often when planning a lesson is how I will be able to relate it back to the learning standards. In my district the standards that we are currently teaching to are posted on our boards and are meant to be updated daily to correspond to our given lesson. This is something that during observations people look for and make note of. As I began reading chapter three of Asou Inoue’s book, the driving question that I had in the back of my mind was how possible it would be to apply Inoue’s practices in the K-12 classroom, particularly in classrooms and districts where the curriculum is tightly controlled and “teaching to the standard” is sacrosanct.

In “Chapter 3: The Elements of an Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecology”, Inoue outlines the seven inter-connected elements that form antiracist classroom writing assessment ecologies. Those elements are power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products and places, and they join together in a variety of different ways to form a complex system. Throughout Inoue’s explanations of the different elements the themes that stood out most to me were those of transparency and self-reflection. In regards to transparency, students are ideally to have an active role in the class from the very beginning, as Inoue states, “Students get to be fully involved in the setting of expectations, processes, and the making of judgments and grades” (pg. 125). This sharing of ownership in the class leads to the students feeling more connected to the parts, the processes and the products. Transparency also takes steps to level the playing field for all students and allow everyone a more equal chance to succeed. Self-reflection is also a strong theme throughout as students are meant to reflect on their “own habitus, then compare it to the dominant one of the classroom, they can see their assessment practices as more than subjective, more than personal opinion, more than “just what I think,” but interconnected to larger, social, cultural, and racial habitus” (pgs. 150-151).

Using those two themes, transparency and self-reflection, as guides for how to apply an antiracist writing assessment ecology in the classroom, I do think that it would be possible at the K-12 level. That’s not to say that it would be easy to do, and a lot would depend on the given grade level as I can see many of Inoue’s ideas of what questions you could ask the students to guide reflection and other such examples being more suited and easily adapted for students at the secondary level. In classrooms such as mine, where the curriculum is set to the standards I can also see there needing to be quite a bit of reverse engineering, with a loose connection to the standards, as standards should not be the driving force behind the students’ learning. In regards to standards, Inoue states that in our modern more diverse classrooms, standards are no longer a fair measure of our students’ abilities, “in fact, [they are] overly limiting, binding students and the academy, holding us back” (pg. 131).

Olivia Limoncelli

2/15/2022 02:14:15 pm

In chapter one, Inoue discusses how we define race in our classroom and what its role is in classroom writing assessments. With this focus, he gives us the key to creating and grading antiracist writing assessments which begins to address questions numbers 1 and 10. After presenting a couple of essay examples, Inoue said, "If we assume that the prompt, a familiar kind of argumentative prompt, was free of structural racism- that is, we assume that such tasks are typical in the curricula of schools where this student comes from and are typical of the discourses that this student uses- and we assume that the expectations around the first four items on the rubric are not culturally or racially biased (we can more easily assume that the last two items are racially biased..." (p 40). With that being said, Inoue suggests that we first look at the prompt. It must be free of cultural or racial bias. But what does this mean really? I do not have this eye for the essays or prompts that I assign. Inoue provokes his readers to really think about the prompts and what might make them racist. He explains that if the prompt is biased toward or associated closely to a white body and a white discourse, then this would make it a racist writing prompt. When grading, Inoue suggests that we must take a step back to see if the reason the students score is low, is due to the prompt being inherently racist or biased towards a specific group. Therefore, we need to look at the writing assessment as a whole and not just grade errors for essay organization, run-on sentences, etc. So, to answer question number 1, one of the key components of the writing assessment is the criteria in the prompt. The other is the rubric and the way that we decide to grade the student based on the suitability of the prompt.
Inoue opens a door to assessment "ecology" in chapter five. The makeup of the writing assessments is essentially pedagogy (p 283). The values in which Inoue addresses related to assessment (question 10) include the relationships which make up the ecology. This includes relationships among people, discussions and conversations, and judgements (p 290). Students should be asked to reflect on these ideas in their writing. The questions given by Inoue, are meant to help us develop our own prompts for students to "investigate" and "negotiate" these elements as well. In doing this, Inoue is giving us some of the steps to take in order to make this possible (question five). Although, it will be an extensive amount of work. Inoue also mentions "interconnectedness" in this section. What are the elements which interconnect? How do we create ways for students to consider the "inter-is"? (p 291). Inoue explains that if the processes of "reading, discussion, agreement-building, and articulation of the rubric" are aimed back toward the "student as an element in the ecology", then the student can begin to see the interconnection between themselves and the rubric as a part of themselves in the same makeup or "ecology". (p 292). This idea of connecting themselves to the rubric and writing assessment itself can be what Inoue considers one of the key components to the assessment. This addresses the assessment as a whole.

Maura Geoghegan

2/15/2022 02:24:53 pm

In Chapter One Inoue addresses how race functions in writing assessments and takes the time to unpack the terms and structures in connection with this. Inoue shows just how pervasive of an issue this is within the writing classroom as well as society in general. Chapter Five offers more specific steps that can be taken for designing antiracist writing ecologies, but both chapters acknowledge that this is a demanding task to take on since the issue is much larger and more complex than one individual teacher, assessment, or school. It’s both societal and historical and this then individually affects students.

One of the most prominent ways Inoue sees writing assessment negatively impact different racial formations at the university level is through standardized testing. Inoue focuses on Fresno State University as an example and the standardized test that he primarily discusses is the English Placement Test (EPT) which determines whether students need to be placed in a remedial writing course. Inoue criticizes the EPT because it’s current design has allowed white, middle class students to have the most success while other racial formations such as Hmong or African American students are the ones that fail and end up in remedial writing classes. Writing assessments and standardized tests such as the EPT do students a disservice by ignoring the local diversity among them and assuming they can write using a “white, hegemonic English” (62). Standardized testing is a difficult topic to tackle since teachers don’t have much, if any, control over them. However, they do have control over the writing and assessment that is done in their classroom. With this in mind, Inoue argues that “good writing assessments should be able to identify such structural racism, not work with it to produce more racist effects” (74). The first step Inoue seems to encourage in order to start to create antiracist writing assessments is to be prompted to take a closer look at one’s writing classroom and assessments (71). Inoue’s “generative” list of questions in Chapter 5 offers a place to begin this reflection in order to create more antiracist writing assessments (284).

Through Inoue’s writing and his discussion of how race functions in writing assessments, we can also see explicitly and implicitly what he values in terms of both writing skill and life skill. Inoue values diversity and actually acknowledging the diverse skills, experiences, etc. that students bring to the table. Encouraging “sameness” as opposed to diversity in rubrics and writing procedures “enforces homogeneity, and punishes diversity” (71). Denying or choosing to ignore differences only benefits the white racial habitus and existing power structures. Inoue does not believe fairness should be the focus when it comes to creating antiracist writing assessments because judging students by the exact same standard is not going to accomplish the work that needs to be done in order to acknowledge the diversity of students in our classrooms; Inoue calls for “revolutionary change, radically different methods, structures, and assumptions about the ways things are now and how to distribute privileges” (56). As shown by this, Inoue values questioning the norm and the power structures that are currently in place in order to bring about change and encouraging students to do the same. He ultimately cares that students are able to access writing assessments in a variety of ways that will acknowledge their diverse backgrounds as well as provide them with a way to meaningfully interact with writing as opposed to focusing on particular requirements, such as using SEAE, or creating a product that is not relevant to their lives (292).

Brian Seibert

2/15/2022 02:51:28 pm

In chapter 1, “The Function of Race in Writing Assignments,” Asoa Inoue gave some background knowledge and depth. He introduced and defined a number of terms that were used throughout his book. There were not many answers to our questions in that chapter, but perhaps there were two that were touched upon: “Since assessment is such a broad term, what is he really talking about?” and “Who is this for?”

In regards to “what is he really talking about?”, there were some specific terms that were defined. Although the focus was on assessments, his aim was both more narrowly focused as well as set in broader terms at the same time. It was narrow when he specifically referred to writing assessments, mainly in the form of broad standardized tests like the SATs or MCAS. Since those are very common measuring sticks, those types of writing assessments trickle down into classrooms in order to prepare to do well on those assessments.

His focus was broadened when he spoke about writing assessments representing the larger dominant discourse. He used the word hegemonic, meaning ruling or dominant in a social context, many times, especially when referring to the Standard Edited American English (SEAE). That “type” of English according to Inoue is what colleges want students to be proficient in when writing and speaking. It is considered to be proper English, which is associated with the ruling “White Body.”

He also argued that the power of those writing assessments were hidden. The racism attached to them was not and is not overtly obvious. He addresses the question, “Who is this for” throughout the chapter. The antiracist classroom is essentially for everyone. Teachers are encouraged to set up their writing experiences in such a way that makes it fair for everyone. He gave examples from Fresno State, where he taught writing classes. He showed the statistics of students who took introductory level English courses and the percentage of students who failed. The point he highlighted was that people of color were failing those classes at a higher rate than the white students. He argued that critics of his and his writings would try to give reasons to justify the numbers. He claimed that the statistics had to be racist. He did not blame teachers, but the “racial habitus,” or more specifically, the “White Racial Habitus.” He used those terms to go along with the terms mentioned above as the dominating discourse rooted in the white perspective. To add validity to his argument, it would have been stronger if he used samplings from across the nation, not just from Fresno State. The statistics may have been similar in a larger sample.

He also used an example to demonstrate the white racial habitus among test scorers. He showed an example where a student wrote an essay on a standardized test. Then, showed the scorer’s remarks as the student received a 2. One of the comments mentioned a paragraph where the student referenced a boycott that did not seem to be connected to the prompt. In reality, the student likely was referencing a boycott made by Hispanic workers to demonstrate how companies relied on them. It was unlikely that the test scorer knew of the occurrence and penalized the student for having a different connection to the prompt.

15 february 2022: Asou Inoue

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ENGL 513

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