Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

Entry 39 Let’s look deeper into the CCSS’ appendix to understand the fullness of the problem of whiteness, which is a bigger problem in the academy than just the CCSS. This problem comes from the historical and material conditions we live in. The anonymous authors of the appendix draw on only white male university professors and writing researchers to make their point about the outcomes of writing classrooms being mostly logocentric and “argument” based. They reference Gerald Graff, Neil Postman, Joseph M. Williams, and Lawrence McEnerney. They quote Williams and McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program, and explain that the authors “define argument not as ‘wrangling’ but as ‘a serious and focused conversation among people who are intensely interested in getting to the bottom of things cooperatively’” ( note 264 ).  This ain’t a bad way to think about arguments, for sure. I like the focus on “getting to the bottom of things” through cooperation. But it isn’t the only ...

Entry 38 If what I’m saying about learning outcomes and standards for language seem counterintuitive or wrong, it’s because the systems we live in are built on whiteness (see post 28 on HOWL ), and that whiteness is hard to recognize as politicized or positional (that is, biased). Whiteness is a deep part of the structures that make us as teachers, our languaging, the CCSS, and the OS. The CCSS validation committee (listed in Reaching Higher: The Common Core State Standards Validation Committee ), is a collection of national experts and teachers, and they illustrate the problem I’m speaking of. The problem of white language supremacy is in part embodied in the whiteness of the people who created and validated the CCSS. The CCSS validation committee “was charged with providing independent, expert validation of the process of identifying the Common Core State Standards as part of the CCSSI” ( note 256 ). This committee essentially checked the work of the numerous other working groups and...

Recently, I got this email from my dear friend Eli Goldblatt (at Temple U). He put me in contact with a committed and engaged pair of teachers who are concerned about the changes to admissions for magnet schools in the Philadelphia area , and more specifically they were concerned about a 90-minute, timed writing exam that students would now have to take for several of the magnet schools admissions processes. The exam would be scored by a computer, an automated scoring technology . The move is meant to centralize decisions and eliminate local decisions that were understood before as racist, or having too much bias that led to racist outcomes in some of the magnet schools. So the changes are meant to " increase diversity " (that's good), but as far as I can tell, they mean by this to "eliminate bias" in decisions by people for admission, which opens a host of other racist problems that it seems clear they've not thought through.  These two Philly teachers wan...

Entry 33 A big part of using any set of literacy standards or learning outcomes in a classroom are the models used to demonstrate such things to students. Sometimes the models are dictated by required curricula and sometimes they’re chosen by teachers. An antiracist orientation would help a teacher to consider the nature and histories of their models of “good writing” in ways that implicate the models and teachers in white supremacist and racist systems, even as many of us are required to use those models in our classrooms as teaching devices. The kind of antiracist orientation I’m speaking of in effect asks: Who does the model represent in society and our classroom? How is that representation, and the habits of language it assumes, connected to the history of racism and WLS in society? Who is that ideal embodied languageling that the model invokes or conjures and what are its effects when circulated in our classroom? How do we (teachers and students) make sure that we do not reproduce...