Michael: This is
Sherita: Write.
Chris: Think.
Genevieve: Teach.
Michael: A podcast brought to you by the Writing Across the Curriculum, a program in the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at The Ohio State University.
Prof. Inoue: Over time we can take samples of the comments that we make and look back through them at ourselves with a critical eye and say “Am I doing something here that I shouldn’t be doing? Am I doing something here differently than I am doing for this other student? And is that difference important to do or should I be thinking in other ways?” I don’t think that it’s a good idea to say “I should be treating all students the same” like that’s the standard. I don’t think that’s the standard.
Michael: Hello and welcome to Write. Think. Teach. I’m Michael Blancato.
Genevieve: And I’m Genevieve Richie-Ewing.
Michael: Do we as instructors disadvantage students in our grading practices? That’s the question we would like to address in today’s episode of Write. Think. Teach. To help us answer this question, we talked to Asao Inoue, Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and Director of the University Writing Program and the Writing Center at the University of Washington - Tacoma.
Genevieve: Prof. Inoue is the author of award-winning books and articles on the topics of racism and writing assessment. We had a chance to speak with Prof. Inoue about productive approaches to writing assessment when he visited in the fall of 2017 to give the Edward P. J. Corbett lecture organized by the Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies program at Ohio State. We begin our conversation by talking about how common notions of academic failure can hinder learning in writing classrooms.
Prof. Inoue: So I think failure is often perceived or constructed in ecologies as necessary. Although, I want folks to rethink that. I want folks to think about failure in more productive ways, ways that will help us use it. That is, one thing I think all of us know about good learning environments, environments that allow us to grow and develop in the ways that we can and want to: we have to fail. That is, we have to do it wrong or we have to do it not the way we want to do it and move from there. That’s the only way we know how…I mean this is really cliched…it’s the only way we know how to grow. If you go into some classroom and say “Ok, tell me what to do. I’m going to learn something here.” And then this teacher gives you something to do and you do it and you do it the way the teachers wants you to do it and all the teacher wanted you to do – then what have you learned? Nothing. It doesn’t make much sense to me to ask students to perform things that they already know how to do. It makes more sense to ask them to do something they don’t know how to do or that stretches their limits. Or builds on things that they know how to do but maybe they move into an area where they don’t know how to do it. And the only way to do that is to allow them to fail. And in order to allow them to fail, you have to be able to have systems that won’t punish them for failing. And we don’t currently have default systems that way.
Michael: Prof. Inoue is particularly interested in rethinking failure because failure often hides biases that disadvantage students from underserved populations.
Prof. Inoue: Failure is a difficult animal because it’s usually just default. It’s like whatever we don’t want. And oftentimes we don’t know what it is. And that is a problematic thing when it comes to diverse, particularly culturally diverse, linguistically diverse, racially diverse students on our campuses because that means we are probably not accounting for those…and that means there are students who automatically fall into that category of failure by luck of birth. And that’s completely unacceptable to me. I think if a writing program, for instance, isn’t thinking carefully thinking about the racialized languages and racialized bodies that inhabit their classrooms in how they construct their curricula and what grades…how grades are formed in those [classrooms], then failure, if we’re just thinking of failure as grades, failure will be very easily racialized. And I’ve never been at a university that didn’t have failure as racialized. It just is because our society racializes and has particular language biases. Even with good teachers who are really trying hard, it is very difficult even in that space, to get out because the default for systems is a white supremacist system...No matter however you’ve been trained, and no matter who you are, it doesn’t even matter, because we live in this larger ecology, these larger structures, we end up having certain biases and that’s the stuff that we have to find ways to try to control. And as I said, because they are unconscious, they are even more difficult to see and even more pernicious and more durable.
Genevieve: You may be wondering: what can we do about these biases. Prof. Inoue emphasizes that finding and controlling unconscious biases is an ongoing struggle, even for invested scholars like himself. However, he suggests teachers can become a bit more conscious of their unconscious biases by conducting research in their classrooms.
Prof. Inoue: I think it helps if we take second looks at what we do. For instance, I think our classrooms should always be sites of research. If anything, they should be sites of private research where we look back after a year or a quarter or a semester, when we’ve had just a little bit of distance from it, from the work we’ve done with students in those classroom spaces, and look at how we’ve done the assessment work that we’ve done – the comments we’ve made. I’m not meaning we do this extensive study, but over time we can take samples of the comments that we make and look back through them at ourselves with a critical eye and say “Am I doing something here that I shouldn’t be doing? Am I doing something here differently than I am doing for this other student? And is that difference important to do or should I be thinking in other ways?” I don’t think that it’s a good idea to say “I should be treating all students the same” like that’s the standard. I don’t think that’s the standard. I think it’s more important to think “Why am I doing the things that I’m doing here and what are the consequences in the classroom and for those students that I can discern.” Some consequences we can’t know. So that might help us find or at least understand better our own unconscious biases.
Michael: To illustrate the benefits of informal data collection in the classroom, Prof. Inoue describes how his research on his own students changed his teaching practices.
Prof. Inoue: I gather data on my classrooms all the time in every class. I’ve done it for probably 15 years. In fact, I’ve got so much data on my classrooms – I know the grade distributions and how many times I’ve called on particular students in all my classes for the last like decade. It’s fascinating to see the changes and I can point to the practices that made those changes happen. In my spreadsheets for this, this is part of the data, so it’s not just grades. It’s also “How many times have I called on this person for what.” So I can look and I can see as we’re going on “Oh, I have not used any of this person’s writing at all. I need to use her writing or I need to use his.” So I’m looking very carefully at their work. So it makes me look more carefully, in some cases, as the quarter goes on, at other people’s work that might go unnoticed for me. That I just might be sort of doing what I’ve always done in terms of reading their work.”
Genevieve: For more on how to adopt antiracist assessment strategies, check out Prof. Inoue’s book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. We’ll provide a link in our transcript for this episode to an open access, digital edition of the book that’s available through the WAC Clearinghouse: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/inoue/
Michael: That concludes this episode of Write. Think. Teach. We’d like to thank Asao Inoue for taking the time to share his ideas with us. And thanks to you for listening!