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Articles Conference Reviews |
2010C18Wingard(:title C.18 Social Responsibility in Writing Assessment) C.18 What’s Love Got to Do with It?: The Multifaceted Nature of Emotions and Social Responsibility in Writing Assessment All the presenters, one of whom was session chair, were graduate students at Kent State University; although, speaker 2 was also an instructor at Cuyahoga County Community College. It should be said at the outset that by “writing assessment” the presenters meant something closer to evaluation of individual pieces of student writing rather than program assessment or the assessment of student learning outcomes across a multi-section course. Had the word “evaluation” been used instead of “assessment,” I think the thrust of the session would have been clearer. I will use “assess” and “assessment” because the speakers did, but readers should understand those terms as equivalent to “evaluate” and “evaluation.” The first speaker and session chair, Nicole Caswell, cited the work of Antonio Damasio on emotion in biological and neurological terms, as opposed to feeling, which is an awareness of the presence within oneself of an emotion that manifests itself physiologically. She said she was interested in how assessors use emotion in their work. In this regard, she cited the work of Andy Hargreaves on teaching as emotional practice, by which she meant not just teachers’ emotions but the stimulus of emotions in students. From this perspective, writing assessment is an emotional practice as well. Caswell offered a model that first requires that a teacher realize that assessment involves emotions and from that realization researchers can develop a framework of emotions. With such a framework, writing teachers can check their emotional reactions as they read for assessment as well as what results from those emotions. She showed a chart that differentiated the assessment environment, the assessment description, the stimulus (in the form of student papers), the assessor’s feelings, and the assessor’s responses. This scheme, she said, could help individual teachers see what the trends are in their own work and help them navigate their emotions as they work. Speaker two, Ashlee Brand, reported on her study of the emotions of two-year-college faculty as they do writing assessment. She cited a joint NCTE-TYCA statement of “effective two-year college faculty” and noted a significant gap between the stated characteristics of “effective faculty” and the actual practices, at least at her institution, that the statement does not describe. Then she moved to the questions of “What is socially responsible assessment and what are its characteristics?” and “How does knowledge of socially responsible assessment change teaching practices?” She contrasted what she called typical negative reactions toward assessment on the part of faculty and contrasted that with characteristics of socially responsible assessment, which she named as involving 1) rigorous validity inquiry; 2) recognition of the role of ethics beyond “fairness” in grading; 3) reflective practice as knowledge-making; 4) faculty-driven professional development; and 5) contextual, local, and humanistic decision-making. She said she wanted to use this scheme to counteract her colleagues’ negative attitudes toward assessment and the perception of assessment as a top-down operation. My summary of what she said is, “It’s about being conscientious” about and with assessment. The third speaker, Courtney Werner, picked up Brand’s presentation by saying that, overall, the academy does not practice socially responsible assessment of student writing. She cited the results of a survey she administered via the WPA listserv earlier this year in which a tiny minority of respondents named social responsibility as an important value in their own assessment practices. She distinguished between ethical and socially responsible assessment: ethical assessment might be limited to the notion of “fairness” in assessment, particular where grading is concerned, whereas socially responsible assessment tries to go beyond mere fairness and consider the context of that which is being assessed as well as the artifact of writing itself. Finally, she issued a challenge to composition teachers to figure out how to do assessment in a socially responsible way. Despite what I took to be the misuse of “assessment” where “evaluation” was meant, people in the audience seemed to catch on to what the speakers meant by the former term. There were a number of interested questions from audience members, indicating their engagement with the topic of the session. There was considerable general discussion involving the audience and the panelists about the role of emotions or the likelihood of avoiding emotions when a teacher is commenting on student writing. A number of perspectives on commenting were offered, making this session an especially rich one. |