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Showing posts from 2016

Grading Contracts, Laboring to Labor, and Sinclair Lewis

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It's been over a month since I last posted something. Winter quarter has been very busy with lots of projects, work, administration, and other things taking up every square inch of my time. So I want to offer a little something.  I came across this wonderful teaching blog by John Warner on Inside Higher Ed's web site. The article that caught my  eye, which past around my Facebook feed, called, "Students Aren't Coddled. They're Defeated" (posted on Feb 16, 2016). In it, Warner discusses the ills of grades in writing (and all) courses in college and how the desire for them tends to ruin the individual psychology of the student - that is, they have to care about As and not necessarily about learning. In the end, he says to help undo some of the damage that the system creates in students, he uses grading contracts, which he'd written about in the past , twice. The initial post was early in the Fall, a post called, " There Is No Such Thing as An Educ...

Review of My Book: Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies

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This post is in part shameless self-promotion, but then the history of blogs is such that this is part of the genre. Recently, Katrina Love Miller (University of Nevada, Reno) wrote a review of my latest book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Social Just Future . The review is titled, " Working Against Racism: a Review of Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies ," and it is in the Journal of Writing Assessment . It's a wonderful review, and she nicely captures most of the themes and lines of argument that I attempted in the book. I'm very grateful for Miller's review and for the co-editors of the journal, Diane Kelly-Riley and Carl Whithaus, to assign my book for a review so early. I hope to see more reviews in the coming year or so from other journals. I won't engage with the review, but let Miller's words and mine in my book stand on their own merits. I'll end this brief post by giving you a taste of where ...