Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies

The WAC book I'll be reading and sharing with class is Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future by Asao Inoue. (2015)

The book can be found here.

I'm initially drawn to this book because been thinking about variation in the English language, particularly as I'm also taking a seminar on World Englishes. At the end of last semester in ENGL 591, my work began to focus on hybridity both in terms of culture/language and also in terms of composition with computers. These features coupled with my ongoing interest and commitment to antiracism and awareness of bias attracted me to this book. In the context of this class, I suppose I'm interested to see how digital spaces and composition both support and challenge antiracist writing assessment.
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This book is rich in many ways. What follows is a brief synopsis, some illustrative quotes, and a personal connection I made with the text.

The main research question: “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?” (3).

Niche setting: There has been lots of writing assessment research published on race and the ways in which students of color are often measured as performing at a sub-par level compared to their white peers.

Niche filling: But none of these scholars have developed an antiracist pedagogy aimed not just at individuals by at a system wide level. Inoue uses the theories of Friere, race theory, whiteness theory, Buddhism, and Marxian philosophy to develop a theory of the classroom and broader writing assessment as ecology. From this theory, Inoue offers extensive examples of pedagogy he has developed and shares sources and resources for free use.

Inoue's Project: “This book attempts to theorize and illustrate an antiracist writing assessment "My tendency is to have a larger ecological purpose-product established in the ecology, one that fits my antiracist agenda. In order to confront any racism, students should experience a problematizing of theory for the college writing classroom by theorizing writing assessment as an ecology, a complex system made up of several interconnected elements.”

Key Concept: White Racial Habitus (extending Bordieu)

"Invisible, “unraced” individuality, non-political, and it simultaneously defines and denies difference. White racial habitus often leads to racist effects in the classroom. Its terminology is increasingly covert" (50).

...But habitus also invites us to consider ecology. Ecology (and Sangha-community) as metaphor for the classroom.

Ecology as a metaphor allows for a simultaneous recognition of individual students' backgrounds and capabilities while understanding that students always operate within broader systems including the classroom and university. Ecology recognizes that were are all products and producers of our educational environments.

Pedagogical heuristic: LABOR BASED GRADING CONTRACTS

Principle One: "How much labor you do is more important to your learning and growth as a reader and writer than the quality of your writing. Their existential writing assessment situations as racialized situations."

The bulwark of Inoue's practice is a movement toward involving students in their assessment and basing course grades on the effort and labor that they put into the class, not necessarily the composition the produce. This is a way of circumventing assessment that holds all work to standards which are usually developed (unknowingly) from white racial habitus.

And my personal connection:

My family name, two generations ago, is also Inoue. Despite identifying a multi-racial and of Japanese American heritage, Inoue only mentions the internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II once (semi)-directly and once suggestively in the entire book.

My maternal grandmother, Gloria Kazuko Inoue, spent nearly three years of her life as a high school-aged girl incarcerated in the internment camp at Tule Lake, California. (1942-1945)

Several years ago, I was helping clean out my grandparents home and came across a small brown booklet with a handwritten label reading "Autograph." It's about the size of a large check book and is bound with a folded metal clasp. Inside are pages of recycled paper. On the pages are farewell wishes and autographs that my grandmother's friends wrote to her when they were all released from the camp in 1945. It reads a lot like a high school yearbook, and in some ways, for her it was. Some of the handwriting is in English and some is in Japanese. One striking page includes a sketch of Mount Shasta (visible from the camp), text in Japanese, and in quoted English the phrase "Where there is a will there's a way."

While I've kept this booklet packed away, this course in computers and composition and reading Inoue's book prompted me to take digital photos to archive the book. The cover page and page mentioned are attached below and photos of the pages are viewable here.

I see this as an example of antiracist (multimodal) composition given the resources that were available in an environment imbued with heavy white racial habitus. The Japanese term, "Gaman" is roughly translated as "perseverance" and  more carefully as " patience, tolerance, and suffering through the unbearable stoically while maintaining dignity." Gaman was a common term people mentioned in the camps as way to encourage one another through a political ecology that none of them chose; it sets the bar for labor-based contracts unfathomably high. And yet so much of their composed and embodied experience has been forgotten.  

Cover of a hand-constructed booklet of farewell writings from Tule Lake Internment Camp (1945)

A page from the booklet "Autograph" written in Japanese and English with a sketch of Mount Shasta. (1945).