Month: June 2024

Reviewed by N. Claire Jackson, SUNY Geneseo

West-Puckett, S., Caswell, N. I., & Banks, W. P. (2023). Failing Sideways: Queer Possibilities for Writing Assessment. University Press of Colorado.

Recent years have seen an increase in scholarship attending to anti-racist (e.g. Baker-Bell, 2020; Inoue, 2017; 2022; Inoue & Poe, 2012) and anti-ableist (e.g. Carillo, 2021; Kryger & Zimmerman, 2020) writing assessment practices. Failing Sideways by Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole I. Caswell, and William P. Banks adds to this body of scholarship on equitable writing assessment by considering how we might queer writing assessment. Queer theory and writing assessment are, admittedly, questionable bedfellows. Karen Kopelson (2013) argued that it might not be possible to reconcile queer theory and writing program administration because of the former’s deliberate “turn away from pragmatism or utility, from the legitimate and legitimated, from institutions and social organizations and progress” (p. 207), and this raises similar questions about why we would want to wed queer theory and writing assessment. In the words of West-Puckett, Caswell, and Banks: “what could possibly be queer about assessment?” (p. 15). Yet for them this irreconcilability is the point. Rather than cataloguing so-called queer assessment practices, Failing Sideways provides a theoretical approach to assessment which resists dominant narratives around writing, teaching, and learning and instead centers the agency of writing teachers and students.

The first two chapters explicate their queer theoretical framework for writing assessment. Chapter 1 links the cultural discourses around “learning loss” that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic to No Child Left Behind and to “Why Johnny Can’t Write” (Sheils, 1975) to remind us many of our assessment practices are driven by this persistent fear of failure. That is, as concerns with grade inflation make clear, we simply cannot imagine a system in which everyone, or even most people, succeed. Thus, Failing Sideways asks us to queer assessment by disidentifying (Muñoz, 2013) with normative assessment paradigms and embracing the disposition of an “assessment killjoy” (à la Ahmed’s, 2017, feminist killjoy). The assessment killjoy “denies convenience, unthinking happiness, and normative investment in the illusion of objectivity” (p. 17) by questioning the linear success narratives and systems of power and privilege that undergird our assessment practices.

Chapter 2 then begins with a discussion of the affects that circulate around academic success (such as pride, joy, anxiety, fear, shame, failure) and asks what assessment might look like if it were to instead center passion, excitement, and desire. This discussion of affect frames their concept of Queer Validity Inquiry (QVI). QVI extends the work of Critical Validity Inquiry (Perry, 2012) by emphasizing student and teacher voices, assuming that our assessments have consequences, and interrogating who benefits, and who is harmed, by our assessment practices. QVI resists the success/failure binary, recognizing that following the “wrong path” can reveal interesting insights into how writing and writing instruction impacts/is impacted by people differently in different contexts. Most importantly, QVI takes the affective experience of writing assessment seriously in order to prioritize the embodied experiences of writers.

Chapter 3 introduces the first of four failure-oriented principles of QVI: failing to be successful. This principle resists normative notions of success and views failure as an opening of opportunity. Our widespread fear of failure, they argue, arises from a desire to avoid shame, which limits the potential of transformative assessment practices. For example, they explore the ways portfolio assessment is often taken up uncritically because our scholarship has already marked it as a “successful” practice. Instead of assuming what was successful in one context will be successful in another, QVI encourages us to embrace this fear of shame and explore other options. They discuss several of their experiences with both programmatic and classroom assessment practices which demonstrate what this might look like, such as a programmatic assessment in which participants were asked to assume the common rubric failed to capture something important about student writing. This approach, they explain, risks potential shame for instructors, as it may reveal they are doing a “bad” job teaching writing. However, they argue it led to productive discussions about what is happening across writing classes and provided space for participants to interrogate their assumptions about writing and learning. What the various examples in this chapter share is a resistance to reducing writing to easily measurable metrics, instead exploring the affective experiences around writing as a way to embrace agency

In Chapter 4 they discuss the second principle of QVI: Failing to be commodified. They argue that writing traits and even assessment itself have become commodities, which they demonstrate through a discussion of the 6+1 Trait® Writing Rubric. While this rubric started as a well-meaning assessment practice, it has transformed into a decontextualized commodity sold as a “quick fix” to writing instruction which merely creates a closed assessment loop. This discussion is especially useful in demonstrating the ways acontextual notions of “good writing” can become entrenched within our assessment practices even when we problematize such static notions of “good writing.” QVI resists such commodification by turning towards assessment practices that highlight vulnerability and consent through collaborative negotiations of the parameters of what matters in writing in the hyperlocal situation in which it is being used, thus resisting norming and embracing the fact different readers will understand texts differently. Once again, they provide several programmatic and classroom assessment examples demonstrating ways they have enacted this principle. What these practices emphasize is not whether or not a student met a particular skill, but the “labor, relationships, emotions, and histories” (p. 142) of the writer as they engage with the various readers of their texts. Writing instructors interested in how they can assist students in moving beyond writing solely for the teacher will find this chapter especially compelling.

In Chapter 5, the focus shifts towards dissensus and radical justice via failing to be reproduced. Drawing on Edelman’s (2004) critique of reproductive futurity, they argue that our linear success models reproduce (hetero)sexist, racist, and classist writing assessment practices. They draw a connection between these linear success narratives and normative grade distribution models, which, despite extensive critiques, often still inform our day-to-day practices. QVI, however, refuses this reproductive futurity by privileging the unexpected and frequently interrogating our current expectations. To demonstrate how this might work in the classroom, they discuss a digital badging approach to labor-based grading which allows students to pursue a variety of pathways based on their own desires. Turning towards programmatic assessment, they discuss two examples of how sampling demographic data differently can bring insights into the affective experiences of minoritized students that are hidden by our normal data aggregation practices. Central to this principle of QVI, then, is continuing to ask what impacts our practices have on students/writers that are not immediately apparent within our current assessment models. This chapter is an especially important read for WPAs, as it reveals how complacency with our current programmatic assessment models can disadvantage many of our students.

Chapter 6 explains the fourth and final principle: Failing to be mechanized. In this chapter they argue that large-scale programmatic assessment practices focused on objective criteria and normed writers convey writing success as an individualized rather than systemic matter, ignoring the material conditions of the students producing those texts. In failing to be mechanized, QVI embraces the relationality of writing, considering all the human and nonhuman actants that contributed to the writing process. They present game play as a useful way to subvert this mechanization, providing examples such as origami fortune tellers which map the various people and materials that influenced a particular writing project, or learner stories which narrativize a writer’s experiences in a class and resist ranking students against each other. Importantly, these stories can be shared with those being assessed, thus requiring us to be accountable to the students impacted by our assessments.

To conclude, Chapter 7 extends an invitation to readers to join their Queer Assessment Collaborative Killjoy Army. They recognize the chapters in this book do not provide an easy roadmap for how to queer our assessment practices. Yet this is the point: QVI is meant to be messy and time intensive, just like writing itself. They argue this work will not only lead to more equitable and fair assessments, but it will also provide tactics for pushing back on normative institutional assessment paradigms, which they demonstrate by discussing how they have resisted artificially imposed external assessment demands. Thus, readers who question the practicality of the assessment paradigms this book offers should pay especially close attention to this concluding chapter. Lastly, as they ask us to take up the ethos of the assessment killjoy, they remind us that the work of designing fair and equitable assessments is never complete, as assessments need to attend to the specific students we are working with at that specific moment.

In short, through their extensive discussions of how even our most well-meaning assessment tools and practices become normativized, Failing Sideways makes a crucial contribution to our field’s discussions of socially just writing assessment. As they repeatedly note, the book fails to offer any “quick fix” to assessment, or any practices we can immediately implement. However, it does provide a useful framework for developing a new disposition towards assessment that centers the ever-changing needs of our students. Because they focus on both programmatic and classroom assessment, WPAs and writing instructors alike will find this book useful for considering how we might rethink our approaches to assessment.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge.

Carillo, E. (2021). The hidden inequities in labor-based contract grading. University Press of Colorado.

Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future. The WAC Clearinghouse; Parlor Press.

Inoue, A. B. (2022). Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, 2nd ed. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado.

Inoue, A. B., & Poe, M. (Eds.). (2012). Race and writing assessment. Peter Lang.

Kopelson, K. (2013). Queering the writing program: Why now? How? And other contentious questions. Writing Program Administration, 37(1), 199-214.

Kryger, K., & Zimmerman, G. (2020). Neurodivergence and intersectionality in Labor-Based Grading contracts. Journal of Writing Assessment, 13(2).

Muñoz, J. E. (2013). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics (Vol. 2). University of Minnesota Press.

Perry, J. W. (2012). Critical validity inquiry. In K. M. Powell & P. Takatoshi (Eds.), Practicing research in writing studies: reflective and ethically responsible research (pp. 187-211). Hampton Press.

Reviewed by Virginia M. Schwarz (she/her), San Francisco State University

Wood, S. A. (2023). Teachers Talking Writing: Perspectives on Places, Pedagogies, and Programs. WAC Clearinghouse.

As a first-time graduate student in 2006-2008, my favorite “text” was Todd Taylor’s Take 20 (2008), a now out-of-print DVD that explored 20 questions that were, at that time, central to the teaching of writing. The disc featured 22 writing studies scholars talking about their classroom teaching, including Brian Huot, Paul Kei Matsuda, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Mike Rose, and Nancy Sommers. They give us insight into what they wished they would have known as new teachers, and they share strategies for those entering the field and the classroom for the first time. Take 20 gave me a felt sense of community, like I was joining a conversation and these teachers would help me learn. Teachers Talking Writing: Perspectives on Places, Pedagogies, and Programs reminds me of that DVD.

Teachers Talking Writing: Perspectives on Places, Pedagogies, and Programs (TTW) is Shane A. Wood’s full-length monograph inspired by his interviews with writing teachers on his podcast, Pedagogue. As of April 2024, 164 podcast episodes have been published on the Pedagogue website along with their full transcripts. In TTW, Wood groups and synthesizes many of those early interviews to create a rich dialogue around a specific context or topic in the field. These 52 perspectives are strategically organized into three sections: Places, Pedagogies, and Programs.

As a long time listener of Pedagogue, my primary question picking up TTW was whether it would offer something new that Pedagogue does not. Would TTW simply be a reprinted series of interview transcripts? I was really pleased that Wood addresses these questions in his introduction when he describes his own thought process for writing the book and imagines its potential uses. For context, I’m approaching this review of TTW as a former community college instructor and current assistant professor who now works in composition MA and certificate programs. This means that my own interest in Wood’s work stems from approaches to and issues within faculty development and graduate student education. In addition to those frames, readers of JWA may also be interested in TTW because of Wood’s attention to assessment specifically and larger systems of valuing (and devaluing) more broadly.

For Wood, TTW is both an extension and a disruption of a genre, the composition anthology. In traditional anthologies, Wood argues, well-known R1 scholars typically drive conversations about teaching writing (p. 2). Additionally, most of the chapters are solo-authored and therefore can only capture a single perspective (p. 2). While Wood acknowledges how important these texts have been for the field and for his own development, TTW, in contrast, centers teachers, graduate students, junior faculty, faculty across rankings, and faculty from various kinds of institutions (p. 10). Wood also reminds readers that historical silences in the field exist due to racism (p. 10). He hopes that “TTW (and Pedagogue) can challenge gaps in scholarship and further examine power and race” (p. 2, 10). Not only does Wood want to flip the script on who is included, but he was also mindful of opening these conversations to a larger audience by making this text open access. 

Wood images that TTW can be used in a variety of ways, including alongside the Pedagogue podcast. In fact, he describes his book and his podcast as “interconnected” (p. 2). For example, at the top of each printed conversation in TTW, there is a reference and timestamp corresponding to the full audio interview on Pedagogue. This invites readers and listeners to go back and forth between the two mediums or engage them at the same time. Wood also states that readers might use TTW alongside other texts. For example, we might read one of the featured teacher’s own books and then reference a specific interview in TTW to better understand them or their work (p. 14). What makes TTW different from just a chronological archive of interview transcripts is Wood’s strategic grouping of these conversations and the framing he provides in both the beginning and end of each chapter. “I see Pedagogue as a monologue and TTW as the full script for a play,” Wood writes (p. 4). “Pedagogue focuses on individual actors; each episode is a center stage spotlight on teacher-scholars talking about their teaching and institutional context. TTW, on the other hand, is interwoven scenes that comprise a full production and collaborative performance that consists of a much larger plot.” (p. 4). Readers will find that Wood concludes each chapter with a “denouement” where he highlights some of the conversational threads present across multiple interviews. Each chapter ends with a series of questions for further thinking.

TTW is divided into three sections, Places, Pedagogies, and Programs. The first section, Places, has four chapters: (1) Pathways and Reflections on Teaching, (2) Two-Year Colleges, (3) Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and (4) Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The second section of TTW focuses on Pedagogies and includes five chapters: (1) Classroom Writing Assessment, (2) Multimodality, (3) Social Justice, (4) Disability Studies, and (5) Community Literacies. Finally, Wood’s third section, Programs, entails five chapters: (1) Writing Program Administration, (2) Basic Writing, (3) Second-Language Writing, (4) Writing Across the Curriculum, and (5) Writing Centers. Wood provides a summary of each section in the TTW introduction and, for me, the chapters and their pieces (context, excerpts, denouement, thinking questions) are easy to locate, navigate, skim, and read in any order.

Assessment, as a focus topic, has its own chapter under Pedagogies. Wood constructs this conversation from his Pedagogue interviews with Nancy Sommers, Chris M. Anson, Jennifer Grouling, and Asao B. Inoue. The questions he selects and the excerpts he includes primarily center classroom writing assessment and, more specifically, feedback and response. Sommers shares some of her commenting strategies and how they emerge from the shared language and context of each class; for example, she thinks about the writer in addition to the writing, she talks to students about commenting before they receive comments on their first assignment, and strives to give feedback that is reflective both specific conversations with students and her own values as an educator (p. 113-116). Next, Wood includes Anson who shares that he became interested in students’ perceptions of teacher response as a graduate student when his own teacher used cassette tapes to record feedback (p. 117). This leads into Grouling’s interview and research on how different learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard) and material technologies (iPads) can impact the kinds of comments teachers make on student writing (p. 119-121). Asao B. Inoue is the final person Wood includes, and in these excerpts, Inoue talks about centering labor in an assessment ecology to “shift [what is problematic] away from the politics of language and the politics of identity… to the politics of economics and how much time do I have” (p. 124). Inoue also discusses fairness and assessment, his grading contract negotiation process, and the importance of students’ participation in shaping classroom practices (p.122-125).

I can imagine using this chapter in many of the ways Wood describes in his introduction. For example, I would be excited to pair the first three interviews (Sommers, Anson, & Grouling) with chapters from Bad Ideas About Writing (Ball & Loewe, 2017) for graduate students, faculty, and as a reflective experience for myself. Taken together, these texts would likely start a productive discussion about a variety of feedback approaches and practices. Also, if I were using TTW to explore someone’s body of work, Inoue’s interview on Pedagogue and the excerpts here in TTW could work alongside and bring another layer to theoretical texts like Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (Inoue, 2015) and Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (Inoue, 2019). If someone is beginning to learn about teaching writing and writing assessment, TTW offers more context and support than individual Pedagogue episodes alone. The thinking questions that Wood includes at the end of this chapter (or versions of them) could probably work in most classrooms or workshops, and one of the questions directly asks readers to reflect on how assessment and teacher response are connected to linguistic justice and diversity (p. 126).

In his own words, TTW “centers conversation as a tool for building knowledge and community, and prioritizes dialogue, inclusivity, and accessibility” (p. 14). I also value Wood’s critique of anthologies in the field and his appreciation for the texts that made us but also his recognition that these are inherently narrowed, often privileging R1 tenure-track faculty. For example, in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (Adler-Kassner, L. & Wardle, 2015), one well-known scholar is tasked with defining each key disciplinary term. Coming from a two-year college, I often found myself outside the “we” in many canonical writing studies handbooks. While there are going to be gaps in any collection, I agree with Wood that dialogue across perspectives can serve as an intervention in dominant disciplinary narratives and add important nuance to conversations about teaching.

Ultimately this book gave me ideas for additional ways to use the podcast. I also think this could be a valuable tool for new teachers of graduate students, like myself, who might be conceptualizing course design or perhaps for senior faculty who want to reinvent their “introduction to composition and rhetoric” course. Wood organizes these interviews in a conversational way and emphasizes inquiry. When students ask me for teaching or career advice, I often tell them that I will share what I think but only if they promise to talk to at least three other people. TTW encourages and embodies this spirit of discovery, acknowledging that all perspectives are limited while also celebrating each as an important part of a larger story. Wood’s book intervenes in a genre that lends itself to codifying knowledge, best practices, and celebrating particular institutions and stories. I appreciate Wood’s effort to include a range of voices in TTW, and I can imagine that some teachers and students will find this accompanying text very valuable for working through important issues in composition. For me, Wood’s multimodal, multivocal work feels like a necessary update to Take 20.

References

Adler-Kassner, L. & Wardle, E. (2015). Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Utah State University Press.

Ball, C. & Loewe, D. M. (2017) Bad Ideas About Writing.

Inoue, A. B. (2015) Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. WAC Clearinghouse.

Inoue, A. B. (2019). Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom. WAC Clearinghouse.

Taylor, T. (2008). Take 20. Bedford/ St. Martin’s.