Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue

Condon, my other mentor, who introduced me to the field of writing assessment. He was often on my shoulder as I wrote and revised drafts of this book. His broad smile and his gentle deep voice is always guiding me. I thank Norbert Elliot, who in subtle ways always gives me things to learn, some of which ended up in this book. I thank Mya Poe, my PIC, my friend, and from whom I’ve learned so much. I feel so fortunate to work with her, even though we are usually on two different coasts. I thank Chris Anderson, my first mentor, friend, and colleague from Oregon State University, whom I asked to read an earlier version of the book and who gave me valuable and important ideas. His kind and careful feedback was instrumental in making this book what it is. He was also one of my first teacher models in college, one who taught me that cultivating a compassionate ear is always the best pedagogical stance to take. I also wish to thank the incredible folks at Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse, Mike Palmquist and his editorial team who made this manuscript sparkle; Sue McLeod, my editor, who was wonderful, encouraging and helpful.

      Thank you to my twin brother, Tadayoshi L. Inoue, who has supported, loved, helped, and challenged me my entire life. I am always and ever-mindful of how deeply blessed and fortunate every minute of my life has been (I was born four minutes after my brother) to be a twin, and know twin-love. He has been the rock I have always had the privilege and good fortune to stand on and next to.

      And then there are a number of folks who helped me along the way through conversations and emails: Tom Fox, who read the entire manuscript, gave me thoughtful and insightful ideas that made the book better in tangible ways; Carmen Kynard, who always has good things to say and encouragement to offer; Vershawn A. Young, my dear friend whom I can count on to push me and question everything; and Chris Gallagher, who offered crucial ideas to the guiding metaphor of the book (ecology) in a 45-minute meeting we had at Cs in Las Vegas. That meeting was the tipping point for me in thinking about the book and what it should ultimately be.

      I offer a very special thanks to my graduate students at Fresno State, who were a constant source of inspiration, ideas, critiques, and joy while I was there. They taught and gave me more than I feel I ever offered them. And finally, I thank my undergraduate students at Fresno State, especially the students in my Fall 2012, English 160W course that make up much of Chapter 4, who often needed to have a lot of faith in me and what I asked of them. I am grateful for the labor and trust that each year my students give me and our classes. They are why I do what I do, and what makes my career, research, and life possible. I learn how to learn from them every year.

      Introduction: Writing Assessment Ecologies as Antiracist Projects

      How does a college writing instructor investigate racism in his classroom writing assessment practices, then design writing assessments so that racism is not only avoided but antiracism is promoted? What I mean is how does a teacher not only do no harm through his writing assessments, but promote social justice and equality? In the broadest sense, this is what this book is about. It’s about theorizing and practicing antiracist writing assessments in classrooms.

      My assumption is that writing teachers should carefully construct the writing assessment ecology of their classrooms both theoretically and materially. In fact, we should continuously theorize and practice writing assessment simultaneously. So this book is about antiracist classroom writing assessment as theory and a set of practices that are productive for all students and teachers. I realize that thinking about race or racism in one’s pedagogy and assessment practices will rub some readers wrong. They will say we need to move past race. It’s not real, so we shouldn’t use it theoretically or otherwise in our assessment practices. I do not deny that race is not real, that there is no biological basis for it, but biology is not the only criterion for considering something as real, or important, or worth discussing and addressing in our assessments. Because of this important concern by many who might read this book, I dedicate the first three chapters to addressing it in several ways. I think all would agree that we want classroom writing assessments to be antiracist, regardless of how we individually feel this project can be accomplished. This book is my attempt at finding a way toward this worthy end.

      My main audience for this book are graduate students, writing teachers, and writing program administrators (WPAs) who wish to find ways to address racism in their classroom writing assessment practices, even those who may not be sure if such phenomena exist. In other words, I have in mind writing teachers who wish to cultivate antiracist writing assessments in their writing classrooms. Thus there are two strands in this book of interest to writing teachers: one concerns defining holistically classroom writing assessment for any writing teacher, which can lead to better designed and implemented writing assessments in classrooms; and one is about theorizing writing assessment in ways that can help teachers cultivate antiracist agendas in their writing assessment practices. In my mind, these are really the same goals. We cannot do one without the other. If we are to enact helpful, educative, and fair writing assessments with our students, given the history of whiteness and all dominant academic discourses promoted in schools and disciplines, we must understand our writing assessments as antiracist projects, which means they are ecological projects, ones about sustainability and fairness, about antiracist practices and effects.

      Thus all writing teachers need some kind of explicit language about writing assessment in order to create classroom writing assessments that do all the things we ask of them in writing courses, and have the ability to continually (re)theorize and practice them better. Additionally, I see an audience in teachers who are looking to understand how to assess fairly the writing of their diverse student populations, which include multilingual populations, working class students, disabled students, etc. More specifically, I am interested in offering a usable theory of writing assessment that helps teachers design and implement writing assessments that are socially just for everyone. My focus, however, will be racism. I realize that race and racism are different things. Race is a construct. It’s not real. But there are structures in our society and educational institutions that are racial. These structures help construct racial formations in the ways that Omi and Winant (1994) explain, which I’ll discuss in Chapter 1.

      Racism, on the other hand, is real. It is experienced daily, often in unseen ways, but always felt. We may call the racism we see something else, like the product of laziness, or just the way things are, or the result of personal choices, or economics, but it is racism. There are social patterns that can be detected. Thus, I do not use racism as a term that references personal prejudice or bigotry. I’m not concerned with that kind of racism in this book. I’m concerned with structural racism, the institutional kind, the kind that makes many students of color like me when I was younger believe that their failures in school were purely due to their own lacking in ability, desire, or work ethic. Racism seen and understood as structural, instead, reveals the ways that systems, like the ecology of the classroom, already work to create failure in particular places and associate it with particular bodies. While this book could focus on any number of dimensions that construct diversity in our classrooms, I have chosen race (and antiracism as a goal) because it has salience for me as a teacher, past student, and scholar. I am a teacher of color, a former working class student of color, who attended mostly or all-white classrooms in state universities. Racism was a part of the scene of teaching and learning for me, a part of my day-to-day life. I know it still exists, even in writing classrooms where good, conscientious teachers work.

      But this could be my own demon, my own perceptions of things. Why articulate a theory of writing assessment around antiracism and suggest others use it? Why not let the second half of the book’s title, teaching and assessing for a socially just future, be the main subject of the book? Beyond the ethical need to eradicate racism in our classrooms, racism is a phenomenon easily translatable to other social phenomena that come from other kinds of diversity in our classrooms (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, linguistic differences, ethnic differences, disability, etc.). The dynamics are similar even though the histories of oppression are different. These other dimensions, of course, intersect and create what we often think of when we think of race, because race isn’t real. It’s fluid and broad. It’s a construct we see into the system, which at this point the system (re)constructs through these other structures, like economics and linguistic differences (from a dominant norm). So the ways race and racism function in writing assessment, in my mind, epitomize larger questions around fairness