Writing and Assessment

This week's post is inspired by something I encountered and reflected on this week, but I also saw Jess Rauchberg had an amazing thread on something similarly connected. I want to talk about writing, and particularly the writing instructors see as part of assessment practices in their courses and how ultimately that writing is assessed. 

Writing is a means of communication that appears in almost every course in colleges and universities. Students may be asked to write essays, reports, journals, reflection pieces, summaries, annotated bibliographies, speeches, presentations, portfolios, and many other formative or summative assessment pieces. A discussion that I often have with instructors is, how is the writing being weighted in your course, and if you are weighing this writing highly in your course (which is often the case) are you teaching the students how to do this writing in the class? This usually brings up some reflective moments because often the answer is no, I am not not teaching them how to write this assessment, I am focusing on the disciplinary aspects of the course; they should have learned how to write in another class that they took before this one. 

This thinking about writing is pushed backwards in curricular and pedagogical minds to where the limit approaching negative infinity is undefined (look at me putting in a math joke into this post). It is always something that should have happened in the past, in first year undergrad, in high school, in junior high, in kindergarten. Yet, there on the rubric, for the assessments are aspects like grammar and style that are often weighted at 30%. And the criteria for those grammar and style elements are often written with a normative understanding of English, based on "Standard American English" or "Standard Canadian English." 

I had a conversation on the first day of class with my students this semester about "standard English" and how there is no one standard English, but rather Englishes and hybrids and a lot of other ways folk communicate. It was bit of shocking moment for them, students who are mostly English language learners, or hyphenated language users, where many times in their educational journey they were told that their English was faulty. There are many folk who have written on this in many ways like  Stephanie Kerschbaum , Asao Inoue , Ada Hubrig , Anti-Ableist Composition Collective so what I am saying and framing here is not new, but it occurred to me this week that there is not a lot of this discussion in faculty development spaces (especially in Canada) and there needs to be so here we are. 

The question that I was pondering this week is what do instructors do when given student work that does not fit a "normative" framing of grammar and style? Say a student submits a 5 paragraph essay, and most of the paragraphs are actually long run-on or overly compounded sentences and there is absence of punctuation and capitalization throughout. What would you do as an instructor? Here are your options:

1. Return the essay to the student saying this is done incorrectly and do it again
2. Mark up the essay with colours indicating run-ons, grammar errors, and punctuations and give it a failing grade
3. Stop and read the essay for ideas that are present and not focus on the grammar or style and have a conversation with the student after if they feel comfortable discussing with you.

Okay now that you have decided what you do, how would your decision on what to do change if you had received an accommodation for that student from the accessibility office? Would it be the same, different? Chances are your ideas would shift and you would pick a different option, maybe. Well what if I reminded you how expensive, timely, and often fraught the accommodation process is for so many students and so they often choose not to get a documented accommodation form. Would your ideas change still? Okay now that you have all that to think about I am going to add another level to this. 

Have you ever been asked or taught as an instructor to look at the essay in the way suggested in option 3? If you did, where did you learn this from? If you didn't would you really have liked for this to happen? If you would have liked for this to happen, where do you think is the best timing for this type of discussion and training? Here are your options:

1. In graduate school
2. As faculty development training
3. Some place else

The decision that one makes to the first question are often due to time constraints and lack of awareness. If you are teaching a course with 60 students you will not have time for option 3, especially if you are working on a contract as an adjunct/sessional, or as a graduate student. But even if you do have time, or make the time, and have a smaller teaching load, you may not default to option 3 because as we know there is not a lot of pedagogical training that happens so folk come to their pedagogy often mimicking what they have seen done in their own schooling and the feedback they have received on their own work. Or depending on one's positionality, you may approach this in a way that actively moves against what you have experienced previously because you knew it was problematic and work to support the student.

So what needs to happen? Well one we need to have more conversations about smaller class sizes, but I am not going to dip my toe in that water cause I know that is a complex situation. But what could happen is more conversations at different levels about "standard English" and how that can be racist and ableist, and how neurodivergent students are in your classes, I guarantee. The question is where do these conversations need to start and continue for instructors (I want them everywhere, but I am trying to identify ways I can support this)? Are you an instructor and think this is professional development programming that should happen somewhere? Can you please let me know. I want this to happen and I want us to have a conversation about this. If anything I hope this post gives you the space to reflect on the writing you receive and assess, and I would love to talk more about this.