Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

Okay, so I haven't been doing this blog for a while, like a year, but I've decided to try to keep up with it again. My goal is to do one blog post a week. So, expect to see postings coming on this blog soon. Maybe in the next day or so.

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...

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 ...

As a way to reflect upon my first-year writing course this term, I want to share some student reflections on my class and think about them. All three students quoted below have given me permission to use their words and their names. The class was the first course in a two-quarter stretch sequence, so I'll see all these students in the next class next quarter, which is very exciting. I've been thinking a lot about the ways in which value and judgments on writing circulate in the writing classroom these days. This thinking began with John Trimbur's good CCC article from 2000, "Composition and the Circulation of Writing." In short, Trimbur argues that writing teachers might pay closer attention to the circulation of writing in classrooms as a kind of commodity. I've taken his ideas a step further and been thinking and finding ways to pay attention to the ways judgments and assessments of student writing circulate in the assessment ecology of my classroom. What ki...

Auckland, New Zealand I'm heading off tomorrow to Auckland, New Zealand to present at the Symposium on Second Language Writing conference at AUT University. My colleague, Kelvin Keown, and I will present an on-going study that we're doing that looks at the effects of the material conditions of multilingual writers in upper-division W-courses (writing in the major courses) on their use of feedback on their writing. Perhaps on my return, I'll give a bit of that presentation here and the feedback we received from those who participated in our session. For the rest of this post, I'd like to pose a few pedagogical questions to writing teachers, questions I've been thinking about recently while doing workshops and talks at various places on antiracist classroom writing assessment practices. At such events, I urge writing teachers to consider ways to explicitly cultivate antiracist agendas in their writing assessments. I explain the two main assumptions a teacher mi...