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​I. General Bid'ness 
  • Next session, Grace presents.  ​
  • Our next UNBanned Books session will be on November 13 with Kelly and Victoria.
  • Please remember that you don't need to do an RR during your presentation week.  Your slides (canva or google slides) will also reboot on the website any time you revise, no matter which presentation version you email.​
  • The subpages for this semester have been moved around a bit.  Hopefully, this makes the weekly agendas easier to find.  
II. Announcements & Opening Writing: 
Take some time to do an anonymous google survey that will ask you some questions about ending the semester.  Click here for the link or type right into the survey below.  Feel free to just write N/A for anything that you don't wamtto answer.

All The Hype... from Nicole

Hype - Nov 6th by Nicole K Griffin
III. Discussion: Assessment and Its Outcomes 
"My experience as a writing program administrator (WPA) and an assessment consultant for several English departments and writing programs suggests that OA harbors each of the tendencies Dewey mentions. In many programs, outcomes become isolated, over time, from the ongoing activities of teachers and students. Whether administrators and faculty begin with great enthusiasm or great skepticism (or, most likely, a mix), outcomes, once expressed, often stay in place for years, even as programs change. Teachers may dutifully reproduce those outcomes on a syllabus or assignment, and students may dutifully provide evidence that they've achieved them in their work products, but rarely do the outcomes become a meaningful and intimate part of teachers' and students' experiences. In these programs, outcomes—whether the hard-won result of intense consensus building or an administrative hand-down—tend to become enshrined in the bureaucratic machinery. Though some proponents of OA are careful to suggest that outcomes be revisited and perhaps revised regularly, many institutions and programs—whether out of ennui, conflict aversion, or a less than fully developed assessment process—ignore this recommendation. Rather, outcomes statements take on an aura of finality, of achieved and unimpeachable institutional authority. Thus, the outcomes on the books remain the central focus of assessment and documentation efforts, with little attention paid either to the always-evolving context in which those aims are pursued (shifts in student demographics, staffing policies, institutional resources, and the like: what OA enthusiasts sometimes derogatorily identify as "inputs") or to unforeseen and unexpected results of unfolding educational experiences. Under these conditions, teachers and students merely receive the outcomes; they experience them as imposed, whether they were formulated by a distant regulatory body, a professional group, or some earlier incarnation of the local faculty.... Measuring, documenting, and reporting outcomes—pegged to bureaucratically defined units (courses, programs, courses of study)—serves prevailing academic management priorities such as accreditation reporting and other forms of public accountability, strategic planning, and the identification of "programs of excellence." As Shari Stenberg and Darby Arant Whealy suggest, outcomes function within an "efficiency model" that privileges measurement for institutional purposes, often at the expense of inquiry for pedagogical purposes (684). Moreover, the insistence among proponents of OA that we shift our attention from "inputs" to "outputs" clearly serves the interests of academic management."
~Chris Gallagher, "The Trouble with Outcomes: Pragmatic Inquiry and Educational Aims" (2012) 
IV. LX Justice and Writing Assessment
In rhetoric-composition studies, we treat writing assessment as a technology of racism in the ways that it sorts, categorizes, grades, and rewards according to what Baker-Bell calls White Mainstream English and what we would also call white, western rhetorical traditions.  We'll focus specifically on writing assessment and lx justice today.
Part I: Rubric Review
What here is at odds with anti-racism, decolonization, lx justice, and/or anti-ableism? (note: the rubrics at MSIs were WORSE)
Part II: Charting LX Justice
  1. Show or explain---Why are racism, anti-blackness, and language centered in lx justice work?  How/why does April Baker-Bell center Black Language in LX justice?
  2. How might writing assessment and LX justice collide?
  3. Find/create--- what is an image or expression that grounds your whole chart/visual? 
V: Gallery Walk & Discussion