A Sense of Doubt blog post #2303 - What is Rigor in a Writing Course
I have been having regular discussions with colleagues about rigor. Terrible word, really.
I like Asao's analogy here. If you have only ever eaten turkey sandwiches your whole life, and someone gives you chili, would you even recognize chili as food? It's not much like a sandwich. It's not very turkeyish.
But chili is good, too. Try the chili.
This analogy applies to Labor Based Grading (LBG). The so-called "traditional," letter grade system is not the only food on the menu.
AS for whether LBG is rigorous, it is if the students engage in the process and depending on how the instructor applies LBG.
I do hold students to some "labor instructions." If I ask for a pizza, and they make me what they think is pizza, I have to recognize it as pizza, and so I define pizza ingredients.
And then, I give them feedback on how to make a better pizza.
There's good stuff here before the rigor post. I do hold my students responsible for attendance as part of labor. They have to show up for work, and then I give them work to do outside of class, as we do.
There's more to unpack about all this content, but for now, I am sharing these three posts from Asao Inoue's blog.
https://asaobinoue.blogspot.com/2020/04/attendance-in-labor-based-grading-part.html
This post is a three-part series that responds to Erik Armstrong's (@mr_e_armstrong) Tweet. Thank you, Erik, for asking these questions.
Many folks often ask me about ways to account for the busy and often unpredictable lives that many students must face while going to college. How can one use labor-based grading contracts in a writing class, one that uses attendance, or the presence of students, to help calculate course grades?
I'm appreciative of Erik's thumbs, since they raise three great questions, ones often asked in various ways when I do workshops on contracts. To honor the spirit of his tweet, I'll try to address all three of his questions (in three separate blog posts), since I also get versions of all of them all the time. If you are not familiar with labor-based grading contracts, you may want to check out a past post of mine that has lots of other resources on the practice, "How Do You Do Labor-Based Grading in Pre-Existing Curricula."
Problems with Attendance in Labor-based Grading
Most who ask me about attendance requirements in labor-based grading tend to be rightly concerned that it may unfairly disadvantage those students who lives that prevent them from being able to attend class regularly, which often also are those students who fall in to other marginalized categories, such as working students, older students with children and families, students of color, and students with food and housing insecurities.
Requiring the same level of attendance of all students assumes that all students in the room have equal control over and liberty with their time during each week. This is, of course, not usually true in college and secondary classrooms. So what can a conscientious teacher of writing do in such circumstances?
Let's identify at least one value that I think is shared by most writing teachers. It's a principle really, and one we either accept and use to decide how we teach or we have some other value we use to make those pedagogical decisions. In order to learn how to communicate meaningfully, effectively, and ethically, you have to practice using language with others. I'm putting aside other forms of communication that we use today, like pictures and symbols. The bottom line is if we believe this, then we there doesn't appear to be any substitute for doing things. Doing things takes time. Some of our students do not have as much time to do the things we ask of them as others, and that is the thing that is not fair. All teachers and students work within these fundamentally unfair conditions, systems really. We always make compromises and trade-offs in our teaching and learning.
This unfairness is often felt as a tension in how to foster fair and antiracist writing assessment ecologies in classrooms, ones that help students practice ethical literacy and treat everyone as fairly as we can. But the exact solution in your classroom will dependent on the particulars of your students and classroom, and what you value more for your students. That is, what compromises and trade-offs are you willing to make? What's more important to you and your students?
Is it vital to define a successful student's labors as ones done in the same physical classroom? Why? Is it because it is easier, because that situation is more knowable to you as the teacher and designer of the educational conditions? What is the minimum classroom time a student needs in order to prosper in your course? Why? In our current COVID-19, socially distant times, maybe this is not an issue, maybe we can see more clearly now what we really want or need from our pedagogies and assessment ecologies. Maybe the magic isn't just in how much time we spend together (although I think there is magic in that), but also in meaningful interactions, which are easier when we are all together in the same room.
Likely, we've all had to redesign our labor and participation expectations in our courses since the pandemic forced most of us to stay at home and teach and learn at home. Have your redesigns focused on meaningful and purposeful interactions among students that afford the same kinds of outcomes that you got previously in face to face environments, or maybe better ones?
Now, in order to get to this new place of rethinking labor and student interaction in my contract graded classroom, I have to do a few things together with my students first. It really amounts to helping us all be mindful and compassionate to each other and ourselves. And we have to resist being selfish. That is, resist the impulse to think: Well, I can follow this rule or guideline for labor and interactions, so everyone should be able to. Or even the impulse that says: Most of us can follow this rule so everyone should have to.
Good Participation Guidelines Starts with Compassionate Recognition
In all my negotiations over our labor-based grading contracts, I try to help my students first recognize what they may be assuming. We need to recognize what we assume about participation and attendance guidelines, which are really just the specific shape of some of our labor expectations for our classroom. That is, class participation guidelines (like attendance rules) are just agreements about what the conditions of classroom labor should look like. They provide a structural way for us to achieve those conditions. I try to move us through four phases of a dialogue, which gets us to a decision:
This caring for each other is central to what I hear Erik asking about and what I've heard other teachers asking about in similar ways. The vast majority of writing teachers I've met (and I've met a lot of them) care deeply about their students. So helping our students care about each other and make decisions about how they can best engage with each other seems a good way to navigate any problems with attendance issues or any other aspect of a grading system.
Some Possibilities that Must Come from Your Students
So what options or possibilities have I seen or come across? I don't want anyone to think I'm suggesting these, and each requires some explanation, which I won't give, but for me, the magic is in the compassionate negotiations with students. Some ideas though likely will be in these areas:
Mostly, I think, we are always on good ground when we start by having compassionate and mindful conversations with students about our values, our assumptions about how we will labor (and how we show that labor), and the unfair conditions we must work in that are outside of our control.
https://asaobinoue.blogspot.com/2020/04/white-supremacy-of-slos-and-grades-part.html
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?
The short answer is, yes. A much longer answer is in chapter seven of my book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. But in this blog post, I'll offer a shorter version of that longer answer.
The Unreliability of Our Quality Judgements
Here's the issue for many writing teachers and educators: If a teacher uses a labor-based grading system, they are not using a quality-based one, or one in which the teacher determines grades in the course by their own judgements of quality of student performances. Those judgements allegedly are an accurate enough measure of the standard for writing or communication set by the program through their SLOs. In short, using a labor-based grading system can mean not teaching to standards or outcomes established by a program or school. The result is that students do not learn what the course is meant to provide them.
But there is a hidden problem concerning judgement in this logic. And we gotta talk about it before we can even get to understanding SLOs. The two concerns are connected.
The problem is a classic one in psychological measurement. Can any teacher measure something like SLOs in their students' performances the same way as other teachers will in the same school or department? Additionally, can any single teacher measure their own students' literacy performances the same way every time? Can teachers be consistent in their grading of quality writing in classrooms? If you have a standard, and you say you use it to evaluate student performances, you better be consistent, or you'll be unfair to your students. These are questions of reliability.
What the research shows is that we teachers of writing, like everyone else, are not that reliable when it comes to evaluating literacy performances, no matter the standard used. This is how human judgement and literacy work together. It's also paradoxically why it's a good idea to get lots of responses or feedback on your writing before you finish it. The more people who give you feedback, the more kinds of judgements you'll get, and this means, you'll have richer and more valuable information to make changes. But in a situation where grades and evaluations mean granting or withholding opportunities from students, then this unreliability or inconsistency in how people evaluate language is a problem of fairness. It's also a problem of learning too, since why would any smart or savvy student listen to their peers' feedback when the teacher is the only one grading their final drafts?
In a famous 1961 ETS study conducted by Paul Diederich, John French, and Sydell Carlton, the researchers found that the correlations among English teachers evaluating and grading the same set of college first-year writing papers was .41, which is quite low (that's not good reliability). This number identifies the amount of agreement among readers. In statistical terms, it is a measure of linear association on a scatter chart of all plotted grades to all papers in the study. If you square this number, you get a percentage that represents the response variable variation that is explained by your linear model (the scatter chart). What does this mean? It means this percentage is the amount of agreement in your model.
How much did teachers agree? In this case, squaring .41 turns out to be .1681 -- that's just under 17%. So what these researchers found was that when they gave the same 300 papers to 10 English teachers, those readers only agreed about 17% percent of the time on grades given to all those papers, while the full set of 53 readers had even lower correlation of .31, or about 10% agreement. So, even if a group of teachers are off by a small margin in how they evaluate student performances in their classrooms, the results can be quite large in effect when measured across many students and graders. But disagreement is often quite large when it comes to language. What the Diederich, French, and Carlton study show is that agreement among readers who are not normed to each other, even when they are highly specialized and trained in a discipline, like English teachers, are quite random in their evaluations of literacy.
Few Schools, Departments, or Programs Assess Their SLOs
The above problems with the reliability of teacher judgement makes the use of SLOs -- which demands that judgements in classrooms be uniform and consistent if those classrooms are fair and accurate -- dubious and dangerous. I've yet to meet a college writing program, or a high school English department that had installed processes that could reasonably assure that the SLOs they have for their courses are measured reliably. And I'm putting aside the problems with where those SLOs come from, who they privilege, and who they harm. I'm simply talking about using them responsibly and ethically in the ways we say we use them. Usually, from what I can tell, programs use SLOs to say they are doing their job, but having SLOs and assessing them are very different things. The first is easy to do and means very little. The second is very hard to do and very expensive.
If a school or classroom is gonna use SLOs to say they are holding students to particular standards of language, then they better have formalized ways to validate whatever decisions they make from classroom grades of writing quality. What does this mean? It means, you need a number of things outside that classroom to assure that what's happening in it is fair. Below is one of the simplest sets of requirements I can think of, and it should illustrate why such procedures are not done in most schools and how costly and time-intensive they are.
Without some version of the above assessment elements happening regularly, the use of SLOs is very dangerous. Why? Beyond the unreliable or inconsistent grades and outcomes that likely will occur in a system that is predicated on the opposite, SLOs end up hurting particular groups of students for no good reason. The students are whom you'd expect: students of color, multilingual, and those students who do not come to the classroom already using the language standards and habits in the SLOs. SLOs create a funnel and filter of opportunity, one takes a large group of diverse people and rewards a few of them. A few make it through the funnel and filter. This is how white language supremacy operates.
The White Supremacy of SLOs
But we can also argue against the very idea of SLOs by looking at where they come from, who is in charge of judging for them in student performances, what their training is, who benefits, and who is likely disenfranchised from all these patterns. And there are patterns, ones you likely can anticipate. These patterns are classed, raced, and gendered because our educational systems, our ways of training teachers, our classroom pedagogies, our society and all that it produces is based on a white supremacist set of assumptions, rules, and habits which reproduces such patterns in teachers and administrators.
In this case, what gets reproduced in the use of SLOs are the habits of white, middle- to upper class, monolingual English language users (see this post and this one to read more about this), which then reproduces people with just those language habits in future teachers and administrators. Just to give a quick sense of one side of this problem, here's a graph from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) that shows the demographics of full-time college faculty in the U.S. in 2017.
Now, this represents only 1.5 million full-time teachers from across all disciplines, which are only 53% of all faculty who teach at the postsecondary level. So while these numbers will likely look different in that part-time group, and in English departments and Writing programs, my sense of visiting many writing programs and English departments over the last fifteen or twenty years is that they represent the kind of racial and gender disparities that affect who judges those SLOs in writing classrooms.
What I want you to notice is that in the instructor and lecturer categories, the groups of faculty most likely to be teaching first-year writing courses, between 76%-80% are white, more are women, and very few are black males. These are the folks who teach writing in college, and it should include all those part-time faculty not in the above graph and graduate teaching assistants but it doesn't. I've visited 36 different college and university writing programs and English departments in just the last two and a half years for various reasons, without exception, their writing teachers are predominantly white and female. Their grad students are the same. The above graph likely doesn't look that different if you included all those who teach writing courses in college. In fact, it very well may be even more skewed toward white teachers.
Of course, being white and female ain't a bad thing and it doesn't tell us one's linguistic proclivities, but it does suggest patterns that are real. It also suggests a few things about one's relationship to language and to the educational structures in the U.S., things beyond good intentions and ideals of fairness to all. How do you think one gets the privilege of being a writing teacher, even a graduate teaching assistant? You demonstrate the habits of language and judgement that are common in the discipline, in academia, and in the groups who established those places, namely white, middle- to upper-class, monolingual English speaking men. This means that no matter how wonderfully stated your SLOs are, they likely will be used as a white supremacist tool. It's how the system works. It's unfair to a significant number of students.
Grades vs. SLOs
Oxnard College offers a clear explanation of SLOs verses grades, which illustrates both the attraction to SLOs by departments and programs and the problem I'm describing above.
As the webpage above states, grades are not SLOs. This means that using quality-based grades does not mean you are following or even administering SLOs. It means you are grading by a standard you've set. They call it an "objective" and it's essentially one step removed from the learning that any course or teacher is attempting to teach or assess.
In fact, grades often are a problem in classrooms that are dictated by SLOs. As the Oxnard page tries to make clear, teachers get confused between grades and SLOs. That is, when a teacher uses grades of quality, they often can be fooled into thinking that they are measuring outcomes, but that is not necessarily the case. And since SLOs and grades are not the same things, a teacher can be using SLOs in their classroom, but grading students based on their own privatized objectives (that likely are not fully clear to the teacher). So if you care about SLOs, then you should be more inclined to get rid of the confusing practice of grades.
The easiest way to understand this distinction between grades and SLOs is to think of grades as a teacher's objectives and these objectives are measured typically by a number or grade. SLOs are outcomes, or the products of learning in a system or course understood or seen in students' performances. So SLOs tend to be quite specific actions or products, much more so than objectives, since objectives are actually subjective -- they are the teacher's understanding or judgement of the results they (think they) see in a group of students. Grades as objectives are like the teacher's translation of the essay that they read. Grades ain't the essay, but what the teachers thinks of the essay. SLOs are the student's essay.
And because there are many paths to any final course grade, grades are not compatible with SLOs if those grades are mean to be some measure of SLOs. So my first concern about the unreliability of individual teachers is often what makes grades so problematic. In short, grades are a horrible measure of course or programmatic effectiveness, especially if SLOs are used to define such terms. And SLOs, because they are more specific and require very particular products to be demonstrated in student performances -- think the funnel and filter -- they too are a problem. They are white supremacist.
WPA Outcomes Statement and White Supremacy
SLOs embrace white habits of language and judgement in how they get used, or how they have to be used by default in classrooms. Remember who gets to be writing and English teachers, where they come from, and what they must demonstrate in order to be teachers. Who do you think creates the SLOs for any course or program? Cycles of reproduction.
The most commonly used outcomes for writing programs in colleges and universities is the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition. Developed by a distinguished group of writing researchers working under the auspices of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), it was first published in 1999 and has been revised two times since then. Its most current version was updated in 2014. Many programs use the Outcomes Statement either as their writing program outcomes or as a starting place to develop their own. I'll offer just one example from the Outcomes Statement to illustrate how such a document has a hard time escaping the white supremacist outcomes it inevitably reproduces, even when good, smart, ethical people use them.
Here's one set of outcomes from the first-year writing program at my institution, ASU. While I'm not a member of that department or program, I know everyone. The web page that offers their program goals references the WPA Outcomes Statement and clearly it has influenced their SLOs. Rhetorical knowledge is the goal, and what that means in terms of outcomes that students will do is listed below it.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with these SLOs. I don't find their articulation to be white supremacist. It is in how they are judged and used in classrooms that makes them so. If writing teachers come from mostly white, middle- to upper-class, monolingual English speaking places, and they require such habits of language to be bestowed the privilege of teaching writing at a school, then how do we think something like "use heuristics to analyze places, histories, and cultures" will be understood, seen, and evaluated in a writing course? It's up to the teacher to decide what exactly this slippery outcome actually looks like. The funnel and filter is still in place, even if you don't use grades.
How teachers understand what these outcomes look like in student performances is crucial to the maintenance of white language supremacy. And most of the time, teachers do not realize they are participating in white language supremacy. In fact, the reproduction of white language supremacy requires that teachers NOT realize they are doing it. If they did, most would stop and do something else.
There is a lot more to talk about. I could go through the WPA Outcomes or any set and discuss the ways white habits of language both influence those outcomes or how teachers must use them from their own white habits of language and judgement, but I'll hold off here. I'll say that judgements that lead to grades usually are the key to white language supremacy.
I'll end by saying that SLOs and grading often work together to produce white language supremacy, and unfairness in classrooms. There are good things to see in SLOs, but lots of bad stuff too. Labor-based grading contracts do not solve all of these problems, but they do make for a classroom ecology without grades, and they offer students a choice to be funneled and filtered, or not. I think, that is important in producing a fair enough classroom ecology.
https://asaobinoue.blogspot.com/2020/04/what-is-rigor-in-writing-course-part-3.html
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 mean that their course is rigorous, nor does it mean that the standards being imposed or how they are applied in those grading practices are rigorous either.
Let me back up a bit.
What is rigor though? I mean, if we want to question rigor in a labor-based grading system, we should figure out what we are asking about first, then we'll know how to understand better the answers we come to. We'll also know better how rigorous any course grading system is -- and what we really mean when we say that.
We should keep in mind that being a hard grader, limiting the frequency of the highest grades in a class, does not automatically mean a course is rigorous. It could mean that the course is unfair. That is, being a "hard grader" does not make you a rigorous grader. It may mean you're just creating unfair conditions for your students.
Rigor in Conventionally Graded Ecologies
In a conventionally graded writing classroom, grades circulate in the ecology in at least a few important ways:
In conventionally graded classrooms, rigor is often formed by how grades circulate, how they are used to communicate how well student do, how much they've learned (or need to learn), and how much they push or motivate students. Put simply, grades tend to be the prizes and penalties teachers dole out to students.
And rigor is often associated with how frequent penalties are distributed in a grading ecology. The more penalties, or lower grades, the more rigorous the course is assumed to be. This also assumes that all rigorous courses give fewer prizes than penalties to students. This kind of grading ecology is often silently toxic to students and their ability to learn. Rigor often means, "toe the line," "do what I (the teacher) says," or "follow these orders." I think, we can be more creative and imaginative with our conceptions of rigor, especially in the highly diverse and creative space of a literacy classroom.
It is difficult, though, for a teacher to imagine what their courses, and their rigor, would be like without grades. How will students know how well they are doing? How will I push them to do better? How will I motivate them? Good questions, but not ones that I believe need to be accomplished in a system that coerces students. Still, it's hard to imagine that other classroom. Most of us have few experiences of any other kind of formal learning environment than a graded one.
I mean, it's like being given the same meal every day for your entire life, say a turkey sandwich with Swiss cheese, never seeing or experiencing any other food, not even knowing that other options exist. How are you going to assess the turkey-ness or the Swissy-ness of your meal? How nutritious is it? Well, that doesn't matter, and likely you've never considered your food's nutritional value since you only eat turkey and Swiss. Such judgements like how nutritious a meal might be is meaningless. In fact, you may not even put much value on food or eating since those activities always equate to a turkey and Swiss sandwich.
Then one day someone gives you a bowl of chili with beef in it. Now, this may not even look like food to you. You may not even know what to do with it. Remember, your whole life, all you've known as food was a turkey and Swiss sandwich. You may be tempted to ask yourself what you should do with this -- it's not a meal. But that other person tells you that, no, this too is food, and it has things that your turkey and Swiss does not have. Try it! But you ask: How turkey is it? How Swissy is it? It's neither of those things. It's something else that is also edible. It offers a different nutritional profile. It's a different kind of meal with different affordances.
My point is, conventional grading ecologies create a certain kind of turkey-and-Swiss rigor from the elements that are available in that kind of ecology, like those grades and a teacher's habits of language used to make judgements that are then used to form grades. In short, turkey-and-Swiss rigor is made in ecologies by the circulation and use of grades, as the list above shows. Chili rigor is made differently because it uses labor to generate course grades, and removes quality-based grades on all papers and performances, thus it's rigor is about time on task, and engagement in tasks. It affords students opportunities to resist, take risks in language, and attend differently to the same quality-based feedback on their writing. The real question is: Which kind of rigor do you prefer? What kind of rigor is best for students and their learning?
What Rigor Really Is
The term "rigor" has Latin roots meaning "stiffness." Rigor mortis means "stiffness of death." So in one old sense, when we claim our courses, or teaching, or grading is rigorous, we draw on a Latin term that is actually describing something as stiff, unbending. That may not be a problem for everyone, but in a diverse society like the U.S., in changing contexts and environments, in dynamic societies of flux, in places that requires teachers to be compassionate and open-minded, I find the opposite a better way to frame my own ways of judging and assessing students. I'd rather be bendable, open, engaged, flexible than stiff and unbending. Things that bend are less likely to break. Things that are stiff, are more easily broken.
Additionally, rigor is also a code word for white racial habits of language since all literacy teachers have been trained and certified in white supremacist educational systems and academic disciplines. Teachers work in educational systems that demand they follow or mimic such linguistic codes. If rigor means unbending, then when you grade rigorously, you are less willing to bend from your standard, from the one you know, which comes from your training and histories of language use. And what are those histories? White supremacist.
But why buy into the turkey-and-Swiss rigor, or rigor as unbending? The main reason I can tell is the assumption that grades help the teacher control students and what is passable writing "quality." If I as the teacher do not approve of your languaging, then you will get a lower grade, and that shows me that I have a standard, and when I can enforce it in this way, I know my class is rigorous, tough, stiff, unbending. I hold my standards, and those standards are the sign of my stiffness. I am doing my job very well.
Notice the hierarchical language, a sign of white supremacy. Forming hierarchies out of other things, like language -- or rather someone's judgements of language -- is a racist and white supremacist practice that began as soon as race became a concept that was socially important in identifying people and their qualities in history. Rigor in conventionally grade classrooms is simply another way to do racism without being racist. It's a code for a single standard that comes from and is controlled by the same group of language users that have always controlled such things in the world: White, middle- to upper-class, monolingual, English speaking men. Only now, many people of color and women have been colonized by the language of this group (usually out of necessity), and have become the taskmasters and gatekeepers of it, most notable are writing teachers.
Rigor, then, is synonymous with a white standard of language because it means a classroom or teacher is stiff and unbending, acknowledging only the language practices that they understand as good and right. It is a parental orientation to students and their learning. There is only one group on the planet who has assumed a near universal, parental, we-know-what-is-best attitude toward everyone else: White, European groups of people. This has always resulted in that group's dominance over others.
What this means today is this. We don't ask our students how white their languages are (we did this in the past). We ask how rigorous are WE as teachers. This pedagogical question, one meant to be about how we are helping our students learn, turns out to be a parental question about ourselves. How colonialist are we? That's pretty whitely. How stiff are we? How unbending are my standards as a teacher? No matter how you garnish the ecological dish, conventional grading ecologies are still the same old turkey sandwich.
Rigor in Labor-Based Grading Ecologies
Rigor in labor-based grading ecologies can be different because there are no grades circulated, so those three elements listed above are not present in the classroom. Other things are. And the various kinds of labor of students are all valued more than a teacher's judgements of quality, or that teacher's idea of the standard as the main way to go. In labor-based classrooms, rigor is more easily defined by:
A more ideal reason to revise, in my mind, would be the product of a process of gathering information from rich feedback from multiple readers, all taken together by the writer. As I like to say, good writers make decisions; they don't follow orders. But in order to be a good writer, you also need the right ecology that allows you to be able to make decisions and not force you to follow orders by those who mean to punish you if you do something else. Labor-based grading ecologies allow the former, while conventional ones allow the latter.
A labor-based grading ecology allows writers to learn through their own exercising of agency and control, not through a teacher's coercing them by withholding grades. Rigor in labor-based grading is not centered on the teacher's language practices and how they judge others by them. It's based on how students work, how they labor, and what meaning they draw from such laboring.
Regardless of the classroom ecology, students learn exactly what they can learn in this moment in the course, no more, no less. Grades give students lots of reasons to follow orders, but very few reasons to make critical and brave decisions as writers and learners. I want the rigor we create in my classrooms to be the kind that helps them be brave, critical, and ethical, to be open, bending, and flexible, and not stiff, unbending, or grade-grubbing sheep that just follow orders in racist systems.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2106.08 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2167 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
There's more to unpack about all this content, but for now, I am sharing these three posts from Asao Inoue's blog.
https://asaobinoue.blogspot.com/2020/04/attendance-in-labor-based-grading-part.html
Attendance in Labor-Based Grading -- Part 1 of 3
-This post is a three-part series that responds to Erik Armstrong's (@mr_e_armstrong) Tweet. Thank you, Erik, for asking these questions.
Many folks often ask me about ways to account for the busy and often unpredictable lives that many students must face while going to college. How can one use labor-based grading contracts in a writing class, one that uses attendance, or the presence of students, to help calculate course grades?
I'm appreciative of Erik's thumbs, since they raise three great questions, ones often asked in various ways when I do workshops on contracts. To honor the spirit of his tweet, I'll try to address all three of his questions (in three separate blog posts), since I also get versions of all of them all the time. If you are not familiar with labor-based grading contracts, you may want to check out a past post of mine that has lots of other resources on the practice, "How Do You Do Labor-Based Grading in Pre-Existing Curricula."
Problems with Attendance in Labor-based Grading
Most who ask me about attendance requirements in labor-based grading tend to be rightly concerned that it may unfairly disadvantage those students who lives that prevent them from being able to attend class regularly, which often also are those students who fall in to other marginalized categories, such as working students, older students with children and families, students of color, and students with food and housing insecurities.
Requiring the same level of attendance of all students assumes that all students in the room have equal control over and liberty with their time during each week. This is, of course, not usually true in college and secondary classrooms. So what can a conscientious teacher of writing do in such circumstances?
Let's identify at least one value that I think is shared by most writing teachers. It's a principle really, and one we either accept and use to decide how we teach or we have some other value we use to make those pedagogical decisions. In order to learn how to communicate meaningfully, effectively, and ethically, you have to practice using language with others. I'm putting aside other forms of communication that we use today, like pictures and symbols. The bottom line is if we believe this, then we there doesn't appear to be any substitute for doing things. Doing things takes time. Some of our students do not have as much time to do the things we ask of them as others, and that is the thing that is not fair. All teachers and students work within these fundamentally unfair conditions, systems really. We always make compromises and trade-offs in our teaching and learning.
This unfairness is often felt as a tension in how to foster fair and antiracist writing assessment ecologies in classrooms, ones that help students practice ethical literacy and treat everyone as fairly as we can. But the exact solution in your classroom will dependent on the particulars of your students and classroom, and what you value more for your students. That is, what compromises and trade-offs are you willing to make? What's more important to you and your students?
Is it vital to define a successful student's labors as ones done in the same physical classroom? Why? Is it because it is easier, because that situation is more knowable to you as the teacher and designer of the educational conditions? What is the minimum classroom time a student needs in order to prosper in your course? Why? In our current COVID-19, socially distant times, maybe this is not an issue, maybe we can see more clearly now what we really want or need from our pedagogies and assessment ecologies. Maybe the magic isn't just in how much time we spend together (although I think there is magic in that), but also in meaningful interactions, which are easier when we are all together in the same room.
Likely, we've all had to redesign our labor and participation expectations in our courses since the pandemic forced most of us to stay at home and teach and learn at home. Have your redesigns focused on meaningful and purposeful interactions among students that afford the same kinds of outcomes that you got previously in face to face environments, or maybe better ones?
Now, in order to get to this new place of rethinking labor and student interaction in my contract graded classroom, I have to do a few things together with my students first. It really amounts to helping us all be mindful and compassionate to each other and ourselves. And we have to resist being selfish. That is, resist the impulse to think: Well, I can follow this rule or guideline for labor and interactions, so everyone should be able to. Or even the impulse that says: Most of us can follow this rule so everyone should have to.
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| Photo by Iñaki Tejerina Guruziaga, "Valle de Belagua" |
In all my negotiations over our labor-based grading contracts, I try to help my students first recognize what they may be assuming. We need to recognize what we assume about participation and attendance guidelines, which are really just the specific shape of some of our labor expectations for our classroom. That is, class participation guidelines (like attendance rules) are just agreements about what the conditions of classroom labor should look like. They provide a structural way for us to achieve those conditions. I try to move us through four phases of a dialogue, which gets us to a decision:
- Recognition of the unevenness to accessing time. This means that I want to prompt students to articulate ways that they see and realize that we cannot all meet every single scheduled session, or that some of us have considerably busier lives, more obligations that draw on our time and energies, keeping us from the course in some way. It's also a recognition that we all have good intentions to be fully present, available, and studious, but our lives often keep us from achieving these goals. In this opening discussion, we also realize the paradox in our situation, that the ideal way to learn to ethically and meaningfully communicate is to spent an appropriate amount of time doing so, reading and writing for each other, but we all do not have the same amounts of time available.
- Recognition of the unfairness of our conditions. Once we see the unevenness of the access to time among each other, we can recognize that our situation is not ideal. Yet we must address it together productively and ethically, which means we cannot leave anyone behind. Everyone matters. People, no matter who they are or what conditions they must live and learn in, are more important than our personal notions of the ideal classroom or learning environment. So this step is about understanding and articulating publicly in a compassionate way that our situations, our conditions, are unfair, but we as colleagues who necessarily learn in community together strive to be fair to all. We recognize that we are interconnected, that our own learning is always a function of the learning conditions of our colleagues around us.
- Negotiation of attendance/participation guidelines. Now that we know the structural unfairness of our situation in our class, we can discuss and come to some hard agreements, likely with various options for students to fulfill attendance/participation requirements. I usually start by reminding students that their experience in the course is only as good as the guidelines we set for ourselves and how we will hold ourselves to them. So if we decide not to have any attendance and most students do not show up for class, then it not only makes it difficult for me to design classroom experiences, but also difficult for them to have a good classroom experiences. We will not be setting up conditions that will help us achieve the goals of the class. We shouldn't be giving ourselves ways out of getting together, but finding ways to learn and practice language together, ways to engage meaningfully and purposefully together.
- Formalizing of the guidelines agreed upon. I like to do blind voting on any negotiations to our contract. We form any vote at a yes-no question, so students can vote either yes or no. And I prefer a 2/3rd majority for any decision. This way one person cannot decide the guidelines of the course, and most of the people in the course agree upon the guideline. If it is the start of the semester, I remind everyone that we'll renegotiate our contract at midpoint. If it is midpoint renegotiation, then I remind us that this is it. We will not be revising our contract.
This caring for each other is central to what I hear Erik asking about and what I've heard other teachers asking about in similar ways. The vast majority of writing teachers I've met (and I've met a lot of them) care deeply about their students. So helping our students care about each other and make decisions about how they can best engage with each other seems a good way to navigate any problems with attendance issues or any other aspect of a grading system.
Some Possibilities that Must Come from Your Students
So what options or possibilities have I seen or come across? I don't want anyone to think I'm suggesting these, and each requires some explanation, which I won't give, but for me, the magic is in the compassionate negotiations with students. Some ideas though likely will be in these areas:
- Students unable to attend class could participate in a missed session in other ways, or in future sessions. The key for me is in finding ways students might help be a part of the in-class discussions, postings, or activities they cannot attend.
- Several students who miss class could engage together in a group with its own process, outcomes, and timelines. Again, I'd want to feed whatever this group did back into the class sessions.
- Perhaps there are more open ways for a student to do the 50- or 90-minute in-class participation without being present in the session, such as engaging with Canvas posts from the class session after the session is over. But I'd want to ask students what they think their participation in a 50-minute class session is worth, and what might they expect from colleagues who cannot make it without it being something that feels and looks like a penalty for not being in class.
Mostly, I think, we are always on good ground when we start by having compassionate and mindful conversations with students about our values, our assumptions about how we will labor (and how we show that labor), and the unfair conditions we must work in that are outside of our control.
https://asaobinoue.blogspot.com/2020/04/white-supremacy-of-slos-and-grades-part.html
White Supremacy of SLOs and Grades -- Part 2 of 3
-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?
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| 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 Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. But in this blog post, I'll offer a shorter version of that longer answer.
The Unreliability of Our Quality Judgements
Here's the issue for many writing teachers and educators: If a teacher uses a labor-based grading system, they are not using a quality-based one, or one in which the teacher determines grades in the course by their own judgements of quality of student performances. Those judgements allegedly are an accurate enough measure of the standard for writing or communication set by the program through their SLOs. In short, using a labor-based grading system can mean not teaching to standards or outcomes established by a program or school. The result is that students do not learn what the course is meant to provide them.
But there is a hidden problem concerning judgement in this logic. And we gotta talk about it before we can even get to understanding SLOs. The two concerns are connected.
The problem is a classic one in psychological measurement. Can any teacher measure something like SLOs in their students' performances the same way as other teachers will in the same school or department? Additionally, can any single teacher measure their own students' literacy performances the same way every time? Can teachers be consistent in their grading of quality writing in classrooms? If you have a standard, and you say you use it to evaluate student performances, you better be consistent, or you'll be unfair to your students. These are questions of reliability.
What the research shows is that we teachers of writing, like everyone else, are not that reliable when it comes to evaluating literacy performances, no matter the standard used. This is how human judgement and literacy work together. It's also paradoxically why it's a good idea to get lots of responses or feedback on your writing before you finish it. The more people who give you feedback, the more kinds of judgements you'll get, and this means, you'll have richer and more valuable information to make changes. But in a situation where grades and evaluations mean granting or withholding opportunities from students, then this unreliability or inconsistency in how people evaluate language is a problem of fairness. It's also a problem of learning too, since why would any smart or savvy student listen to their peers' feedback when the teacher is the only one grading their final drafts?
In a famous 1961 ETS study conducted by Paul Diederich, John French, and Sydell Carlton, the researchers found that the correlations among English teachers evaluating and grading the same set of college first-year writing papers was .41, which is quite low (that's not good reliability). This number identifies the amount of agreement among readers. In statistical terms, it is a measure of linear association on a scatter chart of all plotted grades to all papers in the study. If you square this number, you get a percentage that represents the response variable variation that is explained by your linear model (the scatter chart). What does this mean? It means this percentage is the amount of agreement in your model.
How much did teachers agree? In this case, squaring .41 turns out to be .1681 -- that's just under 17%. So what these researchers found was that when they gave the same 300 papers to 10 English teachers, those readers only agreed about 17% percent of the time on grades given to all those papers, while the full set of 53 readers had even lower correlation of .31, or about 10% agreement. So, even if a group of teachers are off by a small margin in how they evaluate student performances in their classrooms, the results can be quite large in effect when measured across many students and graders. But disagreement is often quite large when it comes to language. What the Diederich, French, and Carlton study show is that agreement among readers who are not normed to each other, even when they are highly specialized and trained in a discipline, like English teachers, are quite random in their evaluations of literacy.
Few Schools, Departments, or Programs Assess Their SLOs
The above problems with the reliability of teacher judgement makes the use of SLOs -- which demands that judgements in classrooms be uniform and consistent if those classrooms are fair and accurate -- dubious and dangerous. I've yet to meet a college writing program, or a high school English department that had installed processes that could reasonably assure that the SLOs they have for their courses are measured reliably. And I'm putting aside the problems with where those SLOs come from, who they privilege, and who they harm. I'm simply talking about using them responsibly and ethically in the ways we say we use them. Usually, from what I can tell, programs use SLOs to say they are doing their job, but having SLOs and assessing them are very different things. The first is easy to do and means very little. The second is very hard to do and very expensive.
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| Photo by Sandy Duncan Rudd, "Future Uncertain" |
If a school or classroom is gonna use SLOs to say they are holding students to particular standards of language, then they better have formalized ways to validate whatever decisions they make from classroom grades of writing quality. What does this mean? It means, you need a number of things outside that classroom to assure that what's happening in it is fair. Below is one of the simplest sets of requirements I can think of, and it should illustrate why such procedures are not done in most schools and how costly and time-intensive they are.
- a set of three outside readers (outside of each classroom) who are also teachers or know the curricula and discipline well will read and grade a significant sample of student writing
- a number of norming sessions for those outside readers will occur before the readings happen
- statistical analyses run on the grades given by the outside readers and the grades from the teacher of record (this will produce the correlations)
- a process of getting teachers together to discuss and make any curricular and teaching changes to their classrooms, assignments, etc.
Without some version of the above assessment elements happening regularly, the use of SLOs is very dangerous. Why? Beyond the unreliable or inconsistent grades and outcomes that likely will occur in a system that is predicated on the opposite, SLOs end up hurting particular groups of students for no good reason. The students are whom you'd expect: students of color, multilingual, and those students who do not come to the classroom already using the language standards and habits in the SLOs. SLOs create a funnel and filter of opportunity, one takes a large group of diverse people and rewards a few of them. A few make it through the funnel and filter. This is how white language supremacy operates.
The White Supremacy of SLOs
But we can also argue against the very idea of SLOs by looking at where they come from, who is in charge of judging for them in student performances, what their training is, who benefits, and who is likely disenfranchised from all these patterns. And there are patterns, ones you likely can anticipate. These patterns are classed, raced, and gendered because our educational systems, our ways of training teachers, our classroom pedagogies, our society and all that it produces is based on a white supremacist set of assumptions, rules, and habits which reproduces such patterns in teachers and administrators.
In this case, what gets reproduced in the use of SLOs are the habits of white, middle- to upper class, monolingual English language users (see this post and this one to read more about this), which then reproduces people with just those language habits in future teachers and administrators. Just to give a quick sense of one side of this problem, here's a graph from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) that shows the demographics of full-time college faculty in the U.S. in 2017.
Now, this represents only 1.5 million full-time teachers from across all disciplines, which are only 53% of all faculty who teach at the postsecondary level. So while these numbers will likely look different in that part-time group, and in English departments and Writing programs, my sense of visiting many writing programs and English departments over the last fifteen or twenty years is that they represent the kind of racial and gender disparities that affect who judges those SLOs in writing classrooms.
What I want you to notice is that in the instructor and lecturer categories, the groups of faculty most likely to be teaching first-year writing courses, between 76%-80% are white, more are women, and very few are black males. These are the folks who teach writing in college, and it should include all those part-time faculty not in the above graph and graduate teaching assistants but it doesn't. I've visited 36 different college and university writing programs and English departments in just the last two and a half years for various reasons, without exception, their writing teachers are predominantly white and female. Their grad students are the same. The above graph likely doesn't look that different if you included all those who teach writing courses in college. In fact, it very well may be even more skewed toward white teachers.
Of course, being white and female ain't a bad thing and it doesn't tell us one's linguistic proclivities, but it does suggest patterns that are real. It also suggests a few things about one's relationship to language and to the educational structures in the U.S., things beyond good intentions and ideals of fairness to all. How do you think one gets the privilege of being a writing teacher, even a graduate teaching assistant? You demonstrate the habits of language and judgement that are common in the discipline, in academia, and in the groups who established those places, namely white, middle- to upper-class, monolingual English speaking men. This means that no matter how wonderfully stated your SLOs are, they likely will be used as a white supremacist tool. It's how the system works. It's unfair to a significant number of students.
Grades vs. SLOs
Oxnard College offers a clear explanation of SLOs verses grades, which illustrates both the attraction to SLOs by departments and programs and the problem I'm describing above.
In fact, grades often are a problem in classrooms that are dictated by SLOs. As the Oxnard page tries to make clear, teachers get confused between grades and SLOs. That is, when a teacher uses grades of quality, they often can be fooled into thinking that they are measuring outcomes, but that is not necessarily the case. And since SLOs and grades are not the same things, a teacher can be using SLOs in their classroom, but grading students based on their own privatized objectives (that likely are not fully clear to the teacher). So if you care about SLOs, then you should be more inclined to get rid of the confusing practice of grades.
The easiest way to understand this distinction between grades and SLOs is to think of grades as a teacher's objectives and these objectives are measured typically by a number or grade. SLOs are outcomes, or the products of learning in a system or course understood or seen in students' performances. So SLOs tend to be quite specific actions or products, much more so than objectives, since objectives are actually subjective -- they are the teacher's understanding or judgement of the results they (think they) see in a group of students. Grades as objectives are like the teacher's translation of the essay that they read. Grades ain't the essay, but what the teachers thinks of the essay. SLOs are the student's essay.
And because there are many paths to any final course grade, grades are not compatible with SLOs if those grades are mean to be some measure of SLOs. So my first concern about the unreliability of individual teachers is often what makes grades so problematic. In short, grades are a horrible measure of course or programmatic effectiveness, especially if SLOs are used to define such terms. And SLOs, because they are more specific and require very particular products to be demonstrated in student performances -- think the funnel and filter -- they too are a problem. They are white supremacist.
WPA Outcomes Statement and White Supremacy
SLOs embrace white habits of language and judgement in how they get used, or how they have to be used by default in classrooms. Remember who gets to be writing and English teachers, where they come from, and what they must demonstrate in order to be teachers. Who do you think creates the SLOs for any course or program? Cycles of reproduction.
The most commonly used outcomes for writing programs in colleges and universities is the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition. Developed by a distinguished group of writing researchers working under the auspices of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), it was first published in 1999 and has been revised two times since then. Its most current version was updated in 2014. Many programs use the Outcomes Statement either as their writing program outcomes or as a starting place to develop their own. I'll offer just one example from the Outcomes Statement to illustrate how such a document has a hard time escaping the white supremacist outcomes it inevitably reproduces, even when good, smart, ethical people use them.
Here's one set of outcomes from the first-year writing program at my institution, ASU. While I'm not a member of that department or program, I know everyone. The web page that offers their program goals references the WPA Outcomes Statement and clearly it has influenced their SLOs. Rhetorical knowledge is the goal, and what that means in terms of outcomes that students will do is listed below it.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with these SLOs. I don't find their articulation to be white supremacist. It is in how they are judged and used in classrooms that makes them so. If writing teachers come from mostly white, middle- to upper-class, monolingual English speaking places, and they require such habits of language to be bestowed the privilege of teaching writing at a school, then how do we think something like "use heuristics to analyze places, histories, and cultures" will be understood, seen, and evaluated in a writing course? It's up to the teacher to decide what exactly this slippery outcome actually looks like. The funnel and filter is still in place, even if you don't use grades.
How teachers understand what these outcomes look like in student performances is crucial to the maintenance of white language supremacy. And most of the time, teachers do not realize they are participating in white language supremacy. In fact, the reproduction of white language supremacy requires that teachers NOT realize they are doing it. If they did, most would stop and do something else.
There is a lot more to talk about. I could go through the WPA Outcomes or any set and discuss the ways white habits of language both influence those outcomes or how teachers must use them from their own white habits of language and judgement, but I'll hold off here. I'll say that judgements that lead to grades usually are the key to white language supremacy.
I'll end by saying that SLOs and grading often work together to produce white language supremacy, and unfairness in classrooms. There are good things to see in SLOs, but lots of bad stuff too. Labor-based grading contracts do not solve all of these problems, but they do make for a classroom ecology without grades, and they offer students a choice to be funneled and filtered, or not. I think, that is important in producing a fair enough classroom ecology.
https://asaobinoue.blogspot.com/2020/04/what-is-rigor-in-writing-course-part-3.html
What is Rigor in a Writing Course? -- Part 3 of 3
-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 mean that their course is rigorous, nor does it mean that the standards being imposed or how they are applied in those grading practices are rigorous either.
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| Photo by Gaetan Bourque, "Nocturnal" |
What is rigor though? I mean, if we want to question rigor in a labor-based grading system, we should figure out what we are asking about first, then we'll know how to understand better the answers we come to. We'll also know better how rigorous any course grading system is -- and what we really mean when we say that.
We should keep in mind that being a hard grader, limiting the frequency of the highest grades in a class, does not automatically mean a course is rigorous. It could mean that the course is unfair. That is, being a "hard grader" does not make you a rigorous grader. It may mean you're just creating unfair conditions for your students.
Rigor in Conventionally Graded Ecologies
In a conventionally graded writing classroom, grades circulate in the ecology in at least a few important ways:
- Grades offer a simple assessment of how well a student has done on something (according to the teacher's estimation of things) and communicate this simple assessment to the student, even though most of the time, students tend to overly-focus on the grade and not other more formative feedback usually attached to the grade.
- Grades offer a simple, linear expression of learning for students, but they do not express what students have learned, nor what they still need to learn, making grades only administratively helpful in the classroom and not pedagogically meaningful.
- Grades offer external motivation to students, despite the fact that most research shows that intrinsic motivation is better for learning.
In conventionally graded classrooms, rigor is often formed by how grades circulate, how they are used to communicate how well student do, how much they've learned (or need to learn), and how much they push or motivate students. Put simply, grades tend to be the prizes and penalties teachers dole out to students.
And rigor is often associated with how frequent penalties are distributed in a grading ecology. The more penalties, or lower grades, the more rigorous the course is assumed to be. This also assumes that all rigorous courses give fewer prizes than penalties to students. This kind of grading ecology is often silently toxic to students and their ability to learn. Rigor often means, "toe the line," "do what I (the teacher) says," or "follow these orders." I think, we can be more creative and imaginative with our conceptions of rigor, especially in the highly diverse and creative space of a literacy classroom.
It is difficult, though, for a teacher to imagine what their courses, and their rigor, would be like without grades. How will students know how well they are doing? How will I push them to do better? How will I motivate them? Good questions, but not ones that I believe need to be accomplished in a system that coerces students. Still, it's hard to imagine that other classroom. Most of us have few experiences of any other kind of formal learning environment than a graded one.
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| Photo by BJ Enright, untitled |
Then one day someone gives you a bowl of chili with beef in it. Now, this may not even look like food to you. You may not even know what to do with it. Remember, your whole life, all you've known as food was a turkey and Swiss sandwich. You may be tempted to ask yourself what you should do with this -- it's not a meal. But that other person tells you that, no, this too is food, and it has things that your turkey and Swiss does not have. Try it! But you ask: How turkey is it? How Swissy is it? It's neither of those things. It's something else that is also edible. It offers a different nutritional profile. It's a different kind of meal with different affordances.
My point is, conventional grading ecologies create a certain kind of turkey-and-Swiss rigor from the elements that are available in that kind of ecology, like those grades and a teacher's habits of language used to make judgements that are then used to form grades. In short, turkey-and-Swiss rigor is made in ecologies by the circulation and use of grades, as the list above shows. Chili rigor is made differently because it uses labor to generate course grades, and removes quality-based grades on all papers and performances, thus it's rigor is about time on task, and engagement in tasks. It affords students opportunities to resist, take risks in language, and attend differently to the same quality-based feedback on their writing. The real question is: Which kind of rigor do you prefer? What kind of rigor is best for students and their learning?
What Rigor Really Is
The term "rigor" has Latin roots meaning "stiffness." Rigor mortis means "stiffness of death." So in one old sense, when we claim our courses, or teaching, or grading is rigorous, we draw on a Latin term that is actually describing something as stiff, unbending. That may not be a problem for everyone, but in a diverse society like the U.S., in changing contexts and environments, in dynamic societies of flux, in places that requires teachers to be compassionate and open-minded, I find the opposite a better way to frame my own ways of judging and assessing students. I'd rather be bendable, open, engaged, flexible than stiff and unbending. Things that bend are less likely to break. Things that are stiff, are more easily broken.
Additionally, rigor is also a code word for white racial habits of language since all literacy teachers have been trained and certified in white supremacist educational systems and academic disciplines. Teachers work in educational systems that demand they follow or mimic such linguistic codes. If rigor means unbending, then when you grade rigorously, you are less willing to bend from your standard, from the one you know, which comes from your training and histories of language use. And what are those histories? White supremacist.
But why buy into the turkey-and-Swiss rigor, or rigor as unbending? The main reason I can tell is the assumption that grades help the teacher control students and what is passable writing "quality." If I as the teacher do not approve of your languaging, then you will get a lower grade, and that shows me that I have a standard, and when I can enforce it in this way, I know my class is rigorous, tough, stiff, unbending. I hold my standards, and those standards are the sign of my stiffness. I am doing my job very well.
Notice the hierarchical language, a sign of white supremacy. Forming hierarchies out of other things, like language -- or rather someone's judgements of language -- is a racist and white supremacist practice that began as soon as race became a concept that was socially important in identifying people and their qualities in history. Rigor in conventionally grade classrooms is simply another way to do racism without being racist. It's a code for a single standard that comes from and is controlled by the same group of language users that have always controlled such things in the world: White, middle- to upper-class, monolingual, English speaking men. Only now, many people of color and women have been colonized by the language of this group (usually out of necessity), and have become the taskmasters and gatekeepers of it, most notable are writing teachers.
Rigor, then, is synonymous with a white standard of language because it means a classroom or teacher is stiff and unbending, acknowledging only the language practices that they understand as good and right. It is a parental orientation to students and their learning. There is only one group on the planet who has assumed a near universal, parental, we-know-what-is-best attitude toward everyone else: White, European groups of people. This has always resulted in that group's dominance over others.
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| Photo by Bill Satterfield, "Bowl of Chili (Delicious)" |
Rigor in Labor-Based Grading Ecologies
Rigor in labor-based grading ecologies can be different because there are no grades circulated, so those three elements listed above are not present in the classroom. Other things are. And the various kinds of labor of students are all valued more than a teacher's judgements of quality, or that teacher's idea of the standard as the main way to go. In labor-based classrooms, rigor is more easily defined by:
- How much labor students do (in terms of words written or read), regardless of what that labor produces, even though what it produces is the focus of feedback and discussions.
- How engaged or intense any session of labor is as an educative practice, which offers ways for students to consider their own individual learning, motivations, histories, and goals about their work in the course.
- What meaning the student makes from their labor through reflections on their labor practices and sessions, which provides some way to take control of what they learn and flex it, or bend it to present and future purposes that they control.
A more ideal reason to revise, in my mind, would be the product of a process of gathering information from rich feedback from multiple readers, all taken together by the writer. As I like to say, good writers make decisions; they don't follow orders. But in order to be a good writer, you also need the right ecology that allows you to be able to make decisions and not force you to follow orders by those who mean to punish you if you do something else. Labor-based grading ecologies allow the former, while conventional ones allow the latter.
A labor-based grading ecology allows writers to learn through their own exercising of agency and control, not through a teacher's coercing them by withholding grades. Rigor in labor-based grading is not centered on the teacher's language practices and how they judge others by them. It's based on how students work, how they labor, and what meaning they draw from such laboring.
Regardless of the classroom ecology, students learn exactly what they can learn in this moment in the course, no more, no less. Grades give students lots of reasons to follow orders, but very few reasons to make critical and brave decisions as writers and learners. I want the rigor we create in my classrooms to be the kind that helps them be brave, critical, and ethical, to be open, bending, and flexible, and not stiff, unbending, or grade-grubbing sheep that just follow orders in racist systems.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2106.08 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2167 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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