[Download] "Engaging with Assessment Technologies: Responding to Valuing Diversity As a WPA (Writing Program Administration)" by Writing Program Administration # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Engaging with Assessment Technologies: Responding to Valuing Diversity As a WPA (Writing Program Administration)
- Author : Writing Program Administration
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 64 KB
Description
I agree with both Jonathan Alexander's and Paul Kei Matsuda's suggestions for engaging "diversity" in WPA work and research. As a WPA and academic of color who works in an historically Hispanic Serving University, where only about 40% of our students are white, most are working class, and about 15% may be classified as Gen. 1.5 or ELL, I find both of Alexander's and Matsuda's suggestions accurate articulations of my own efforts as a Co-Director of our FYW program and as its assessment coordinator; however, there is one issue not yet explicitly mentioned, "diversity's" role in writing assessment efforts, either program or classroom. Regardless of the curriculum, course goals, teachers, or students in our courses, we all have one duty in common: to assess student writing in some fashion. We all do it, or have to do it. When I say "assess," I mean all reading activities, open responses, evaluations that articulate judgments, holistic assessments of work done or not, placement decisions, and grading. Essentially, any time we read and judge, or ask our students to read and judge, which produces articulations of judgments about texts, then we are engaged in processes of assessment, or as I prefer to call them, assessment technologies. In another place, using scholars such as George Madaus, Brian Huot, and Peggy O'Neill, I theorize writing assessment as technology in order to address issues of racial formations and racism in assessments. I define a writing assessment technology as "[a]n historically situated, hegemonic environment in which power is made, used, and, transformed, that consists of sets of artifacts and technical codes, manipulated by institutionallysanctioned agents, constructed for particular purposes that have relations to abstract ideas and concepts, and whose effects or outcomes shape, and are shaped by, racial, class-based, gender, and other socio-political arrangements" (108-09). In effect, an "assessment technology" points to the entire environment, including agents and processes that create an assessment, its decisions, and outcomes.