ABSTRACT THE BIAS OF CURRENT WRITING ASSESSMENT METHODS AND THE OVERREPRESENATION OF STUDENTS OF COLOR IN THE (original) (raw)
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Volume 49 February 2015 Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, violent, or confrontational, are judged by physical features, or are invisible across mainstream media and within school classrooms. Few investigations have explored how they respond to and interpret such imposed representations. Nor, for the most part, have studies examined how girls represent themselves among a society of others pathologizing and defining who they are. This inquiry investigated self-representations in the writings of eight African American adolescent girls ages 12-17 who participated in a historically grounded literacy collaborative. Coupling sociohistorical and critical sociocultural theories, I organized and analyzed their writings through open, axial, and selective coding. Findings show that the girls wrote across platforms similar to those African American women have addressed historically, which included writing to represent self, writing to resist or counter ascribed representations, and writing toward social change. The girls wrote multiple and complex representations, which included ethnic, gender, intellectual, kinship, sexual, individual, and community representations. These findings suggest their writings served as hybrid spaces for the girls to explore, make sense of, resist, and express different manifestations of self. The representations the girls created in their writings did not fall into static notions of culture or identity. Instead, their self-representations were socially constructed and were responsive to their lives. This study extends the extant research by offering wider views of representations from the girls' voices, as well as a broadened historical lens to view their reading and writing with implications for how English language arts educators can reconceptualize the roles of writing in classrooms.
Newsletter, George Washington University Department of English, Spring 2019
GWU English Department Newsletter, 2019
Interview about Alexa Alice Joubin's new book on "Race" (Routledge Critical New Idiom series). Alexa Alice Joubin published a new book, Race, in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series. Co-authored with postcolonial theorist Martin Orkin, this is a major new work in the field, because it draws on culturally and historically diverse materials to examine the intersections of race and gender, whiteness, blackness in a global context and race in South Africa, Israel, India, Europe, the United States, East Asia and Asian America. From Black Lives Matter movements to #MeToo movements, the book close reads a wide array of examples from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the 20th century. If race is a central part of human identity, can one own or disown one’s race? To which community would a multiracial person, an immigrant or a diasporic subject belong? What future is there for race as a viable analytical concept? The book argues that race is profoundly constituted by language and narratives. Race is a signifier that accumulates meaning by a chain of deferral to other categories of difference such as gender and class. Co-writing a book involves both singing side by side and ventriloquism. This book started its life in Martin’s notebook. After Martin fell ill, Alexa took over the project but tried to preserve both voices. In the United States, race often brings to mind people who are not white, while whiteness remains unmarked and serves as a benchmark category—as if white is not a race. The second feature in American racial discourses is the alignment of a race-based social group with innate or inner qualities rather than class. Third, the focus on black and white sometimes obscures other groups within the United States, such that Hispanics, Latinos, Chicanos, Asian Americans and Native Americans often fall under the rubric of ethnicities rather than “race.”
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2017
Based on empirical evidence, this study identifies a contradiction between attitudes towards the use of African-American English in student writing vs. how such writing is actually rated by university English instructors. Even when instructors expressed highly positive views of the use of stigmatized varieties of English in student essays, a statistically significant difference (p=0.027) was found between their ratings of essays with and without features of African-American English. These findings indicate that university instructors, even those who are consciously aware that linguistic discrimination is problematic, are not immune to the effects of linguistic discrimination. These results highlight the importance of dialect education and awareness programs for university English instructors as well as the need for further research into the prevalence of standard language ideology and linguistic discrimination at the university level.
Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity
This edited collection provides the first principled examination of social justice and the advancement of opportunity as the aim and consequence of writing assessment. Contributors to the volume offer interventions in historiographic studies, justice-focused applications in admission and placement assessment, innovative frameworks for outcomes design, and new directions for teacher research and professional development. Drawing from contributors' research, the collection constructs a social justice canvas—an innovative technique that suggests ways that principles of social justice can be integrated into teaching and assessing writing. The volume concludes with 18 assertions on writing assessment designed to guide future research in the field. Written with the intention of making a restorative milestone in the history of writing assessment, Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity generates new directions for the field of writing studies. This volume will be of interest to all stakeholders interested in the assessment of written communication and the role of literacy in society, including advisory boards, administrators, faculty, professional organizations, students, and the public.
Whiteboys": Autoethnography, Internalized Racism, and Composition at the University's Gateway
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Clarifying the relationship between L2 writing and translingual writing: An open letter to writing studies editors and organization leaders. College English, 77(4), 383-386. Bartholomae, D. (1985). Inventing the university. In M. Rose (Ed.), When a writer can't write: Studies in writer's block and other composing-process problems (pp. 134-166). New York: Guilford Press. Bleich, D. (1997). What can be done about grading? In L. Allison, L. Bryant & M. Hourigan (Eds.
Pedagogy, 2019
How can college writing teachers engage in antiracist writing assessment work with their students? To some degree, my central concern in this article is a response to Taiyon J. Coleman et al.'s (2016) discussion of white supremacy and structural racism and their work for equity at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, a concern on which I think all writing teachers should dwell. We live, learn, and teach not simply in the racist ruins of bygone eras but in schools and disciplines firmly built and ever maintained by white supremacy. Whether we are teachers of color or white teachers, white supremacy in our judgment practices of student writing influences all of us. White supremacy is structured into the ways everyone reads and judges writing. We are all implicated, no matter how we identify ourselves or our political beliefs. In the concluding section by Coleman, she writes, "If we as teachers of writing normalize (read, accept) the dominant presence of constructed whiteness in the field and discipline among our students and colleagues, how might that consciously or unconsciously affect our teaching in the classroom and the assessment of students?" (Coleman et al. 2016: 367).
What's in a Name?: Basic Writing in America and Beyond Shaughnessy
WORDS, 2010
Ira Shor CUNY OPEN WORDS: Access and English Studies is dedicated to publishing articles focusing on political, professional, and pedagogical issues related to teaching composition, reading, creative writing, ESL, and literature to open admissions and nonmainstream student populations. We seek critical work in areas such as instructional strategies, cultural studies, critical theory, classroom materials, technological innovation, institutional critique, student services, program development, etc., that assist educators, administrators, and student support personnel who work with students in pedagogically difficult settings. Articles should consider the particularities of these settings-issues, for example, surrounding the identifier of "open access,"