1981, p. 280).
The trouble with this argument is not that it uses conventional, positivistic, psychometric theories of bias (Jensen, 1976; Reynolds 1982a, 1982b; Thorndike, 1971) to determine if the EPT is not a racist test, which it does, but that it ignores the fact that failure (low scores that mean remediation) pool so cleanly, abundantly, and consistently in Hmong racial and linguistic formations in Fresno. It shows us that larger structural racism is happening in schools and classrooms, as much as it is in the test itself. Good writing assessments should be able to identify such structural racism, not work with it to produce more racist effects. Speaking of the EPT historically, Inoue & Poe (2012) explain why this writing assessment can be considered racist:
The bias of a test, like the EPT, is not just a matter of finding traditionally defined test bias. If this were the case, we most likely must agree with White and Thomas’ original judgment that the EPT is not biased against students of color. Bias can also be measured through the consequences of assessments. If an assessment is to respond fairly to the groups on which it makes decisions, then shouldn’t its design address the way groups historically perform on the assessment? Thus, we wish to suggest that understanding an assessment as producing a particular set of racial formations produces educational environments that could be unequal, either in terms of access, opportunities, or possibilities. (pp. 352-353)
Thus it is the racial consequences of a test that can make it racist and unfair. And these unfair consequences stem from the EPT not addressing local diversity, and arguably only addressing a presumed white majority. So the classrooms at Fresno State are not isolated from the larger structures and previous assessments that construct the students who come. Classroom writing assessments must account for these conditions, and we can do so by understanding better these factors as factors that construct the local racial diversity of our students.
But how do local diversities affect classroom writing assessments in those classrooms? As a teacher if you noticed that 16 out of the 20 students in your writing course were failing their essays, wouldn’t you re-examine your assignment, or expectations, or how you judged essays, etc.? Would you assume that those 16 students are all bad writers, and only four in the class are proficient? Of course not. Now, what if your school had a history of accepting students who were conventionally less prepared for college writing, who tended to have trouble approximating the dominant discourse expected, say urban Latino/a and Black students from poor neighborhoods and schools? Given this context, what would you assume? Would you check your methods, your assignments, perhaps even talk to students about how they interpreted the assignment? Now let’s say that of those 16 students 14 were Asian-American and multilingual, the rest in the class were white. Now, would you still think your classroom writing assessment is potentially flawed, or would you engage with the global imaginary of a sentimental education that says you know what is best for these less developed Asians, or Blacks, or Latinos/as? Would you imagine your role as parental? Would you imagine that you had an obligation to help these students become more proficient in the dominant English of the classroom for their own good? Would this global imaginary keep you from critically examining the way your writing assessment is or is not explicitly accounting for the locally diverse students you have in your classroom and their relations to a white racial habitus that is likely functioning in your assessment? That is, would you change your assessment so that it folded back onto itself instead of pushing back onto your students? Could your assessment assess itself, assess the dominant discourse and not just the discourses of your students?
If your assessment could do this, then it is necessary, vital, that other discourses, other perspectives, other epistemologies exist so that students can compare them to the dominant one the classroom promotes. Notice I’m not saying that the classroom is not promoting a dominant discourse. I’m saying it promotes one alongside other non-dominant ones. And the non-dominant ones become the ways toward critical examination, toward critical assessment practices.
The concept of local diversity ultimately means classroom writing assessments must engage meaningfully with the diverse students in classrooms. It means teachers really cannot develop assessment procedures or expectations without their students’ literacies. And this means, local diversities should change the academic discourse, change what is hegemonic in the academy, but this is a difficult task, one requiring a more holistic sense of classroom writing assessments, a theory of classroom writing assessment as an ecology.
Chapter 2: Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies
It is not hard to think of a classroom as an ecology or to think of writing as ecological. Others have discussed it already, and I’ll draw on them in this chapter (Coe, 1975; Cooper, 1986; Dobrin & Weisser, 2002). But 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? This is the question that I’ll address in this chapter. I’ll do so by considering Freirean critical pedagogy, Buddhist theories of interconnection, and Marxian political theory. My goal in using these theories is to provide a structural and political understanding of ecology that doesn’t abandon the inherent interconnectedness of all people and things, and maintains the importance of an antiracist agenda for writing assessments. I could easily be talking about any conventional writing assessment ecology, that is ones that do not have explicit antiracist agendas; however, my discussion will focus on understanding what a classroom writing assessment ecology is when it explicitly addresses antiracist work.
An antiracist classroom writing assessment ecology provides for the complexity and holistic nature of assessment systems, the interconnectedness of all people and things, which includes environments, without denying or eliding linguistic, cultural, or racial diversity, and the politics inherent in all uneven social formations. Consider the OED’s main definitions for the word, ecology:
1a. the branch of biology that deals with the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Also: the relationships themselves, esp. those of a specified organism.
1b. Chiefly Social. The study of the relationships between people, social groups, and their environment; (also) the system of such relationships in an area of human settlement. Freq. with modifying word, as cultural ecology, social ecology, urban ecology.
1c. In extended use: the interrelationship between any system and its environment; the product of this.
2. The study of or concern for the effect of human activity on the environment; advocacy of restrictions on industrial and agricultural development as a political movement; (also) a political movement dedicated to this. (ecology, 2015)
Several themes from the above definition are instructive. First, the term “ecology” refers to relationships between biological people and their environments. The classrooms, dorm rooms, homes, workplaces, coffee shops, computer labs, libraries, and other environments where students do the work of a writing course have relationships to those students as they work. When the desks in a classroom are bolted to the floor, immoveable, it makes for a rigid classroom environment that can seep into the attitudes and feelings of students as they work in that room. When a dorm room is loud, busy, and cluttered with voices as a student tries to write on her laptop, that environment not only can be distracting but can affect her stance as a reader and writer, keeping her from being open to new ideas, willing to entertain alternative voices or positions, or it may rush her work. The same relationships affect teachers when they read, assess, and grade student writing. The places we do writing assessment, wherever they may be in a particular course, has direct consequences to assessment and the people involved.
Furthermore, places may have important associations with particular groups of people who typically inhabit those places, identified by class, social standing, language use, religion, race, or other social dimensions. Work done in such places can be affected by these associations. For instance, work done at an Historically Black College or University (HBCU) may be done very differently by a Black male student than if that same student was asked to do similar work at
