Diversities
Writing teachers who wish to engage in antiracist writing assessment practices must address race at the local level, considering the racial and linguistic diversity in their classrooms, something very few writing assessment discussions have been able to do. Race is a tangled construct, a clumsy, slippery one. It is not biological, nor even real in the ways that language use or citizenship status are, but race is a way to understand patterns in lived experience that equate a social formation’s relation to dominant discourses and a local white racial habitus, one’s relations to power. If we assume that writing assessments are ecologies (I’ll make this argument in the next chapter), then they are local in nature, as others have discussed (Gallagher, 2010; Huot, 2002; O’Neill et al., 2009), and as NCTE and CWPA have recognized as an important consideration for effective writing assessments (CCCC, 2009; NCTE & WPA, n.d.). If they are local, then the populations that participate in them at the local level are important to theorize into our writing assessment practices. So, how can we understand local diversities in particular schools and classrooms in ways that help teachers to assess the writing of racially diverse students in their classrooms?
On today’s college campuses, the local student populations are growing in their racial and cultural diversity, and this diversity means different things at different schools. According to The National Center for Educational Statistics enrollment figures for all U.S. colleges and universities, the numbers of Black and Hispanic20 students have steadily increased: Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of college students who were Black rose from 11.3% to 14.5%, and the percentage of Hispanic students rose from 9.5% to 13%. For the same years, they show that international (“nonresident alien”) student enrollment remains virtually the same at 3.4% of the total student population (U.S. Department of Education & National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). And this doesn’t mention the variety of Asian and Asian-American students on college campuses, or the very small but just as complex numbers of Native American students, nor does it adequately complicate what each of these racial categories means at particular schools.
Regardless of the local complexities, with all these students comes more English literacies spoken and written in the classroom. Paul Kei Matsuda highlights the importance of these trends in composition as a field and the classroom by arguing that composition studies must address more directly the “myth of linguistic homogeneity,” that is, that writing classrooms and programs work from a false myth in which the teacher’s or program’s normative image of typical writing students is of “native speakers of a privileged variety of English” (2006, p. 638). Matsuda extends a critique by Bruce Horner and John Trimbur (2002). Horner and Trimbur argue that U.S. college writing classes hold assumptions about the preferred English—the privileged variety of English—used in classrooms, which they call “unidirectional monolingualism.” They argue for “an alternative way of thinking about composition programs, the language of our students, and our own language practices that holds monolingualism itself to be a problem and a limitation of U.S. culture and that argues for the benefits of an actively multilingual language policy” (2002, p. 597). Matsuda and Horner and Trimbur are talking about writing assessment without saying it. The myth of linguistic homogeneity really boils down to how we read and judge writing of locally diverse students. A writing pedagogy that doesn’t assume a unidirectional monolingualism is one that assesses writing and writing students by considering more than a single dominant English. But to incorporate their good ideas, to construct writing pedagogies that do more than demand a dominant discourse, we must begin by thinking about local diversities in classroom writing assessments.
In Jay Jordan’s (2012) discussion of multilingual classroom realities, he too argues that the Englishes that come to us in writing classrooms are more and more global Englishes, a part of a “globally changing language,” and we “cannot afford to continue ignoring the multiple competencies students have developed ‘on the ground’ and often before entering our classrooms” (p. 53). These are conclusions that others have also made about world Englishes (Canagarajah, 2006) and code meshing (Young, 2007, 2011; Young & Martinez, 2011). Claude Hurlbert (2012) makes a convincing argument for considering “international composition,” or an English composition classroom that considers epistemologies across the globe as valid and worth learning from and about (p. 52). The bottom line is that the cultural, material, and linguistic diversity in our writing classrooms demands a writing assessment theory that is robust enough to help teachers and WPAs design and deploy writing assessments that are responsibly informed and fair to all students, regardless of their pre-college experiences or cultural and linguistic heritages. Furthermore, this theory of writing assessment should be dynamic enough to account for the ways various racial formations may change when participating in the classrooms that the assessments produce. I could use the conventional assessment language to describe the kinds of writing assessments that I’m speaking of, that the decisions from them be valid enough and reliable writing assessments, or use other terms, such as ethical and meaningful (Lynne, 2004), but the point is that we understand what we are creating and what those creations do in our classrooms to and for our students and teachers.
In our increasingly racially and linguistically diverse writing classrooms, a theory of writing assessment is robust if it can address the difficult question of ethnic and racial diversity among students and teachers, a question addressed publically in 2008 on the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Diversity blog (http://cccc-blog.blogspot.com/). Diversity seems to mean many things to many people. Much like the critique that Joseph Harris makes of “community” in composition studies, that it has no negative binary term (2012, pp. 134-135), an argument he actually draws out from Raymond Williams definition of the term (1976, p. 76), “diversity” may have only positive associations in academia. This isn’t a problem until we find that the concept is deployed in ways that function to erase difference, or merely celebrate it without complication (Schroeder, 2011), or as a commodity for institutions to measure themselves by (Kerschbaum, 2014, p.44). In other words, we like to celebrate diversity without dealing with difference. And these complications are different at historical moments and geographic places, at different schools. So it may be best to speak only in terms of local diversity around our writing assessments. This doesn’t solve the question of the meaning of “diversity,” but it does give us a place to begin understanding so that the writing assessments we have in local places can be developed in ways that meet locally diverse needs.
In the abstract, the idea of designing a writing assessment in response to a local set of diverse students and teachers is no different from best practices in the field of writing assessment. Huot’s (2002) calls for “context-sensitive” assessments, meaning they “honor the instructional goals and objectives as well as the cultural and social environment of the institution or agency” (p. 105), seems to say the same thing. But looking closer at Huot’s explanation of this principle reveals an absence of any concepts or theories that could explain or inform in some robust way the racial, cultural, or linguistic diversity that any classroom writing assessment might have. Huot explains:
Developing writing assessment procedures upon an epistemological basis that honors local standards, includes a specific context for both the composing and reading of student writing and allows the communal interpretation of written communication is an important first step in furnishing a new theoretical umbrella for assessing student writing. However, it is only a first step. We must also develop procedures with which to document and validate their use. These validation procedures must be sensitive to the local and contextual nature of the procedures themselves. While traditional writing assessment methods rely on statistical validation and standardization that are important to the beliefs and assumptions that fuel them, developing procedures will need to employ more qualitative and ethnographic validation procedures like interviews, observations and thick descriptions to understand the role an assessment plays within a specific program or institution. (2002, p. 106)
While it is clear in Huot’s discussion that teachers should be taking into account their particular students when developing writing assessments, which makes for “site-based” and “locally-controlled” assessments (2002, p. 105), he
