Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

"Dallas" from Kiyoshi Inoue I recently asked on Facebook and Twitter if any grad students out there wanted to be an audience member in my Fall semester grad course, ENG 509, "Decolonizing Dominant U.S. Narratives." I thought I'd get a few people interested, but it was more like fifty or sixty people. So, I'm gonna explain how you can join my grad course this fall in this post as an audience member. You should know that there are students enrolled in the course, so they take my priority. I've talked to them already about this, and they were all excited to have an audience, and perhaps have the option to engage with grad students from across the country. I am too.  What's the Course About? The course supports the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts' M.A. in Narrative Studies degree at ASU. It's an ASU Sync course that is offered on our Polytechnic Campus , but because there are only a few students and all felt uneasy about coming to c

Eyeball by Kiyoshi Inoue Last night (Sun, July 19), I did a keynote for the unofficial AP slow conference, "Mosaic 2020" ( #Mosaic2020 ). My talk's title was: "What Does It Mean To Be An Antiracist Literacy Teacher." There was just shy of 1,000 attendees, and some wonderful questions and engagement afterwords. I was honored to be asked to speak to so many hard working and dedicated secondary teachers. It was a wonderful event with truly wonderful people.  In my talk, I paused to offer a poem I wrote as a way to understand the hegemony in schools, how difficult it is to escape it, and a way to consider it in our antiracist efforts. After the talk, several wanted to know where they might find this poem. Of course, I just wrote it last week, have been mulling its details over for about seven or eight days now, so it wasn't anywhere. I promised to post it here. And so I offer it now. I hope you enjoy it, and it offers more questions for you to consider your own

Last night, I was thinking out loud on Twitter, and asked if I had online office hours for any teacher who had questions about their use (or potential use) of labor-based grading contracts in their courses, would anyone be interested? Within hours I got thousands of engagements with the tweet, and 60 replies. So I'm gonna try out some labor-based grading contract office hours this coming week -- that's, July 7 - 11 .  Please keep in mind that these are not webinars or workshops. They are office hours where teachers can ask me questions about their use of labor-based grading contracts.  For this first time around, I'll try to do the best I can with how the whole process works (i.e. signing up, scheduling, etc.), so please be patient and bear with me. Know that I want to talk to you if you have questions and want to talk to me. Also know that I'm trying to protect myself in this process.  After looking at my schedule for next week, I have enough time to do 23 one-on-one

This is part one of two posts on revising in distant learning environments.  I want to respond to a question about revision, which came to me from a colleague Iris Ruiz (@ChicanaDra), in two ways. The first way is from a teacher's perspective: How do you teach revision in these times of social distancing?  In another post, I'll offer the same question addressed to students, so it'll be about how to learn to revise and learn from it. Teaching Revision from a Distance I think there are lots of ways to do this, like most things. I don't think I have all the answers, or even most of them. Mine is just one of many answers. Hopefully I offer here something that helps you further your own thinking about how to help you create ways to help your students revise drafts in your courses that are now online and from taught from a distance. What I offer, though, are ideas that I use in both face to face and online courses. Photo from Mopple Labalaine , "Dafad" Th

This post is part three in a three-part series that responds to Erik Armstrong's (@mr_e_armstrong) Tweet. Thank you, Erik, for asking these questions. If you haven't, read part one and part two .  Is a labor-based grading contracted course rigorous? Is it as rigorous as a similarly structured writing course that uses conventional grades? My quick answer is: Yes, and No. Yes, a labor-based grading system can be just as rigorous as a conventionally graded course, even more rigorous. And no, it is not the same kind of rigorous. Rigor means something different in each kind of grading ecology. These two kinds of assessment ecologies are differently made, often have different functional definitions of rigor, and are just not very easily compared. Comparing what rigor looks like in labor-based grading ecologies next to conventionally graded ecologies is comparing rigor-apples to rigor-oranges. But then, just because a teacher grades papers by some standard of quality does not m

This post is part two in a three-part series that responds to Erik Armstrong's (@mr_e_armstrong) Tweet. Thank you, Erik, for asking these questions. If you haven't, read part one .  How well do SLOs, or Student Learning Outcomes, work with labor-based grading systems? Most college writing programs and high school English courses have SLOs of some kind. They are often used to do a number of things: identify key competencies that students are supposed to learn; help determine curricula; and provide the specific things that programs can assess in order to understand how effective their courses or program is. Do labor-based grading systems in writing classrooms contradict or ignore SLOs? Can you use a labor-based grading system in a course that has SLOs already determining much of what goes on in the course? Photo by CZ , "Spring" The short answer is, yes. A much longer answer is in chapter seven of my book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Incl