Megan McIntyre

Introduction

In response to a growing awareness of the oppressive foundations of educational institutions and our own discipline(s), literacy educators have turned to equitable, culturally responsive (Alim and Paris; Paris), and antiracist teaching and assessment practices to combat the inequities (colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.) on which our institutions are built. By antiracist here, I mean the combination of values and practices that creates a classroom in which students of color see their literacies and rhetorical practices supported and celebrated in the same ways that many of their white peers have experienced. This necessarily includes explicit recognition of the racial and cultural dimensions of all language and literacy practices. According to scholars including Geneva Smitherman (CCCC’s Role), Asao B. Inoue (Antracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, How Do We Language…), and April Baker-Bell, too often, traditional teaching and assessment practices perpetuate racist systems of ranking reliant on an imagined, monolithic academic English. Inoue argues that within literacy classes and programs, “Racism is an assessment problem, which can only be fully solved by changing the system of assessment, by changing the classroom writing assessment ecology” (Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies 15). Many faculty have worked to disrupt their classroom assessment ecologies by adopting grading contracts and other alternative assessment practices, many of which aim to separate feedback processes from course grades.

This approach feels particularly valuable in a graduate [1] pedagogy class designed to help support current and prepare future writing teachers because making such an intervention here has the potential to benefit both the graduate students enrolled in the course and their current and future students. Pedagogy courses and teaching practica are fairly common in departments in which graduate students teach first-year writing courses, and as Kathleen J. Ryan and Tarez S. Graban argue, “TA training is the primary site that conveys and creates writing program identity, and thus has far-reaching impact within and beyond individual writing programs” (278). These courses remain important formative moments for novice graduate instructors, through both the formal instruction of the course and the way that such a course operates in less formalized ways as a model for classroom and assessment practices (Ferris; Moos). That is to say, as Heidi Estrem and E. Shelley Reid note, novice instructors’ experiences as students (including as students in their graduate pedagogy courses) have an impact on their practices as instructors. As Linda G. Polin points out, though, if formal pedagogical training is at odds with their own experiences as students, novice instructors, faced with the choice of “rejecting their own experiential knowledge or rejecting what they hear in class,” may well defer to their experiences over their formal training (166). And as Andrew Thomas-James Moos observes, “clear separation between formal and informal training was challenging” for the novice teachers he surveyed and interviewed, but when formal and informal training were at odds, participants’ belief in their formal training was weakened (88). This suggests that creating supportive, antiracist graduate classrooms, particularly in pedagogy courses, can also be particularly impactful for the first-year students in graduate instructors’ classrooms. Though, as Jennifer Grouling finds, the pedagogy course can be a mixed bag in terms of its impact on graduate instructors’ development, and we need to better understand what happens after such courses as graduate student instructors further develop their identities as teachers.

In both my graduate and undergraduate classes, I have adopted a completion-based approach that emphasizes writing and thinking as processes and separates course and assignment grades (which depend only on whether a student submits a complete draft) from my formative feedback on student work. My feedback responds both to the assignment and, in the course I describe below, to parameters and guidelines developed by students in the course. I believe that the kind of co-creative assessment process I describe here is one way of working toward more equitable classroom assessment practices and ecologies. My understanding of co-creation as a potential step toward more equitable assessment practices comes, in part, from Inoue’s Community-based Assessment Pedagogy. In this piece, Inoue argues that the act of co-creation, in which students both create and reflect on the creation of assessment processes, tools, and/or practices, invites students to recognize the assessment ecologies in which they learn and to think more deeply about their assumptions about writing and language, assumptions that are likely rooted in racist assumptions about language and language variation.

In what follows, I share a process for co-creating feedback guidelines in a graduate literacy and pedagogy course as well as graduate students’ responses to that co-creative process. The process described below offers graduate faculty, particularly those of us who teach pedagogy and teaching practica courses, a practical approach to negotiating grading and writing processes with students while demonstrating a commitment to supporting diverse language practices in their classrooms. This practice repositions the locus for language judgments from the teacher to the class as whole and asks students to think about language via the work of a diverse set of literacy educators and scholars (see also Adsanatham). It also works, following calls for “composition pedagogies that embrace multilingualism, multimodality, and accessibility simultaneously,” to “acknowledg[e] and honor the multiple, intersecting identities of multilingual writers” (Gonzales and Butler). When combined with readings that name and critique Habits of White Language (Inoue, The Habits of White Language (HOWL)) and celebrate complex language practices from a diverse set of scholars and writers, this writing assessment approach works to empower graduate student writers, particularly graduate student writers of color, because it clearly and explicitly invites them to write about questions/concerns that matter to them using language practices of their choosing. In short, making clear––as frequently and as concretely as possible––that graduate students are the authority on their own rhetorical and literacy experiences and choices is the goal. As Alana M. Nicastro and Patricia Geist-Martin argue, one of the hallmarks of Black and intersectional feminist pedagogies and pedagogues is that they “recognize that disenchantment in academe for students often results from the ebbs and flows between feeling empowered and muted, validated and denied, included and marginalized, or visible and invisible” (1). Among the goals of the co-creative assessment practices described here is to provide a space that consistently seeks to make students, particularly students of color, feel seen, heard, and validated in conversations about language and literacy as part of the assessment ecology and as a model for how they might do similar work with their own students. In other words, I see this approach to assessment as an equitable pedagogical practice because it decenters instructor authority in productive ways while also valuing the lived experiences and embodied language practices of the students in the course, practices we explore both via personal reflection and via the work of scholars like Carmen Kynard and Geneva Smitherman (Talkin’ and Testifyin’), who name and explicate the value of the language practices and literacy histories of Black students, activists, and scholars.

This process felt particularly vital to me as a white woman teacher who has long seen her own experiences represented by the curricula of language arts classrooms, from elementary school to college to graduate school, while many of students of color have had the opposite experience.[2] My own classroom literacy experiences were certainly complicated by my position as a first-generation, rural, working-class student, and I found myself excluded by the language habits of the academy at times. Yet I also recognize learning how to assimilate into upper- and middle-class white language practices was significantly easier because of my whiteness, a theme I explored in a recent chapter on positionality and writing assessment practices (McIntyre). Given this positionality, I have looked for ways to (1) interrogate my language expectations, (2) articulate the connections between particular language performances and racial habitus and racism, (3) center a broad set of language experiences and practices, (4) create space for students to pursue questions and concerns that matter to them and express those concerns using language practices of their choosing.

Co-creating guidelines for feedback with my students, when combined with other equity-based assessment practices and readings that offer a wide range of approaches to literacy and language, allows me to do each of these things, with varying degrees of success. I do not mean to suggest that the practice I describe in the next section allows me to fully overcome the kinds of racist notions that are often silently embedded in writing assessment practices. As Nicole Gonzales Howell, Kate Navickas, Rachel Shapior, Shawna Shapiro, and Missy Watson argue in their article Embracing the Perpetual ‘But’ in Raciolinguistic Work: When Idealism Meets Practice,

Acknowledging, teasing out, and embracing the many gray areas of raciolinguistic justice work. Because each rhetorical situation is different, because we work within inherently racist institutions, because harmful attitudes about language and race are unlikely to be dismantled on a large scale any time soon, because we are committed to honoring students’ and colleagues’ agencies, and because we remain steadfast in our pursuit to combat harmful language ideologies, this work requires a willingness to engage the many “buts” we uncover as effectively and ethically as we can.

Like these authors, I do not believe my approach (or any approach) can allow me to “solve” the problem of linguistic injustice, but I do believe that this approach––when combined with equitable classroom policies and readings that allow me to facilitate such conversations with students––may be one step toward more equitable assessment practices, particularly in graduate classrooms that serve as training grounds for current and future literacy educators. The pedagogical processes I describe in the following sections bring long standing conversations about equitable assessment into graduate classrooms, a valuable step in and of itself. Additionally, the course I describe in this study also served as a part of the training for current and future graduate teaching assistants and high school writing teachers. Using more equitable assessment approaches in classes like this may expand the impact of this approach from the graduate students enrolled in this course (or any course that similarly attends to equitable assessment practices) to also include the students who take classes with these current and future educators.

Methods

Students in the course that produced the set of guidelines below in Table 1 and another iteration of the course in Spring 2020 had a lot to say about this process and its value. To better understand students’ experiences beyond brief, informal conversations after class or during office hours, I interviewed nine graduate students (who have selected the initials they wished to be used in publications and presentations about their experiences) during the summer of 2020. (This study was approved by our campus IRB in early spring 2020.)

This study reflects a feminist qualitative methodology, which I understand to be based on ethics – and a duty – of care and commitment to communities. Working from Virginia Held’s work on an “ethics of care” and Malea Powell’s (2012) and Andrea Riley-Mukavetz’s (2016) work on relationality, this study recognizes that knowledge-making is a deeply relational and community-based endeavor that reflects on experiential knowledge and honors the contributions and the lived experiences of both researchers and participants/informants. Riley-Mukavetz articulates her commitments to relationality and community this way:

To practice All Our Relations is to move away from the model of individuality and into the communal, the collective, and relational…It’s messy to live and love within a system of interconnecting constellations while negotiating an additional system that profits off of what appear to be strict categories. It takes practice, time, and understanding. Sometimes, you’ll fuck it up. But, that’s okay. We all make mistakes. We are all learning–remembering.

In particular, the goal of the present research was to understand the experiences of students from a variety of backgrounds and to honor those experiences as vital knowledge that should inform my own – and potentially others’ – teaching and assessment practices.

To do this, I used 30-minute semi-structured interviews. As a starting point, I had a list of five questions:

• How would you describe ENGL 587?
• What, if anything, do you remember about the way we did assessment for the synthesis papers?
• How did you feel about that process?
• Are there things we read during the course that you would connect either to the way we talked about assessment or the way you felt about that process?
• What connections do you see between how we approached and discussed assessment and how you’re practicing or plan to practice assessment in your own classes?

These questions emerged from numerous informal conversations and post-assessment reflections (which I talk about a bit more in the next section) over the course of the spring 2019 and spring 2020 semesters in which students shared not just what they thought about the assessment process we’d undertaken but how it made them feel. This focus on affect, then, is a direct result of how students had framed their own experiences prior to the formal study.

Once I developed my questions and received IRB approval for the study, I put out an open call via email to all students who’d taken ENGL 587 during spring 2019 and spring 2020. (Students in the spring 2020 section of the course were invited after final grades had already been submitted for the course.) Each of these students had successfully completed the course within the last eighteen months. Five of these students identify as Black, Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islander, and/or Indigenous. Eight of these students identify as women. Interviews were conducted and recorded via Zoom and then transcribed. All quotes used in the sections that follow were checked with participants to ensure accuracy and clarity. Throughout the interview process, I kept a researcher notebook in which I noted themes and connections that might be useful for me when I coded the data as well as specific language that participants used to describe themselves and their experiences. After completing and transcribing all interviews, I read through transcripts making notes to myself. The codes found in the “Findings” section below emerged from these two sets of notes.

I also want to pause here to acknowledge that there are specific limitations of the kind of teacher research that I engaged in for this study. In Michael Huberman’s 1996 discussion of the emergence of teacher research as a key facet of English language arts scholarship in the 1990s, Huberman notes that teacher research shares a lineage with action research and other forms of applied research and might provide important insight in situations in which teacher-researchers “might see patterns that others might not discern” (125). He also notes, that applied research, particularly when the researcher is a key (or the only) decision-maker/creator/evaluator of the process that is being researched, presents specific challenges: “Introspective research immediately raises, for example, issues of preconceptions, distortions, and self-delusions” (128). Classroom power dynamics further complicate versions of teacher research that rely primarily or entirely on interviews with students conducted by their former instructor. There is always a danger, I believe, that students in such circumstances may be more likely to tell their former teacher what they believe they want to hear. Still, I find studies like this one useful in exploring the impact of specific pedagogical and assessment choices in particular contexts. Talking to Shane Wood about her book Race and Writing Assessment (co-authored with Asao B. Inoue), Mya Poe argues, “I think that students’ lived experiences are some of the most powerful evidence we can have. Students’ stories are also some of the most undervalued evidence in assessment research” (Wood). So, despite notable limitations, I believe the value of adding student voices to our pedagogical conversations makes studies like this one important and useful.

Teaching Context: Co-Creating Feedback Guidelines in a Graduate Seminar on Composition History and Pedagogy

The course under discussion here, ENGL 587, is a graduate level course on pedagogy that is offered every spring semester. The course serves two main purposes and attracts students with two sets of needs or goals. First, the course is the only graduate course in rhetoric and composition or English education offered by the English department on this campus. Although MA students may select an emphasis on Rhetoric, Composition, and English Education as part of their degree program, the course options for those in this emphasis are limited to directed readings and this course. Secondly,the course is also a required prerequisite for working as a graduate teaching associate (GTAs) teaching first-year composition for the department. So, students might enroll in this course because they are interested in the disciplines of rhetoric and composition and English education or they might enroll in the course because it’s a requirement for working as GTA. (And certainly some students fell into both categories.)

The course is organized as a seminar, with a focus on composition history, theory, and pedagogy. The reading list ranged from disciplinary histories (Ruiz; Sano-Franchini; Smitherman; Villanueva, for example) to composition theory (Cedillo; Inoue; Roeder and Gatto; Young) to writing and literacy pedagogies (Baker-Bell; Freire; hooks). The course has two major assignments: a series of three synthesis papers and a culminating project that took the form and covered a topic of the students’ choosing. Here’s the specific of the assignment for the synthesis papers:

Synthesis Papers (3; 15% each): Compose and deliver 3 papers to the class. Papers will be one page, single-spaced. They can be no longer. And they shouldn’t be much shorter. Beyond providing summary, these papers will focus on putting course readings (you may include both required and further reading if you wish) into conversation and tracing relationships between the various thinkers and commentaries studied in class. What themes or ideas are considered across texts? What connections seem important? What kinds of disagreements emerge? What key terms do one or more thinkers highlight?

And here are the steps we take when designing our class guidelines for feedback:

1. Weeks 1–2: Along with introductory readings about the history and disciplinary identity of Writing Studies, I also make time to talk about expectations for writing in our class. This work is well-supported by our reading of Vershawn Ashanti Young, Victor Villanueva, and Jacqueline Jones Royster in these early weeks. We also talk about writing as a process and the centrality of student agency, identity, and choice. All of these discussions are meant to expand notions of what writing can look like and encourage students to consider what it might mean to see themselves in their writing.
2. 2 weeks before the first synthesis paper is due: We craft both the guidelines for feedback on the synthesis papers and the explanations/descriptions for those guidelines. This process involves individual reflections/contributions, small group work in offering a first draft of various guidelines and their explanations, and whole-class discussion of the draft guidelines and explanations.
3. During the class meeting before the 1^st synthesis paper is due: We revisit the drafted guidelines and anyone can offer revisions, deletions, or additions to the document.
4. At the end of the class meeting where students read their synthesis papers aloud (aka, “Paper Day”): I ask students to reflect on the guidelines we drafted in view of their first complete synthesis paper. What guidelines seem to work well? What guidelines may we need to revisit?
5. During the class meeting following that first “Paper Day”: I invite students to share suggested revisions/deletions/additions from the reflections at the end of the last class.

We repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 in the class meetings surrounding subsequent “paper days.”

Table 1 contains an excerpt from the guidelines that we drafted for our Synthesis Paper assignment in Spring 2019:

Guideline	What does it look like to do this well?	What does it look like to do this adequately?	What does it look like to do this inadequately?
Traces relationships between thinkers	Identifies commonalities and makes connections between works with relevant evidence/support.	Identifies common themes, “scratching the surface,” but perhaps doesn’t delve into deeper understanding /explanation of connections between thinkers.	Incorrectly identifies relationships or themes. Shows a lack of understanding. No evidence/support for claims.
Reads generously not just for critique across the readings represented in the paper	Reads the texts closely, yet respectfully; interacting with the arguments dynamically.	Reads the texts closely but without offering substantial generosity. Shows proficient understanding of the arguments, yet may rely heavily on critique.	Reads the texts without generosity, focusing solely on critique, over-generalizations, and/or summary; inserts criticism or arguments as opposed to offering a nuanced understanding.
Organized thoughtfully	Structure is appropriate for the argument. Ideas or thinkers or topics or themes, etc. flow logically or in a way that shows thoughtfulness. Fully engages the audience.	Not complete randomness. Attempt to connect ideas, but fails to fully engage audience.	Completely random structure. Attempts to make connections but fails to make those connections clearly or adequately. Fails to engage audience.

I recognize the table here is set up in a way that mirrors rubrics, with its three categories and the emphasis on “well,” “adequately,” and “inadequately” as descriptors. I have since moved to a bulleted list/definition format to avoid that framing. To be clear, the table organization was one that the students themselves suggested; at the beginning of our conversation, we made a list of guidelines in a bullet point form. But during subsequent conversations, students suggested the bullets didn’t give them enough information, which was when we settled on this organization. Because of the earlier feedback about needing more extensive explanations and because I find the rubric organization limiting and hierarchical, in subsequent iterations of the course in 2020 and 2021, I resisted this table organization and opted to instead ask students to write more expansive descriptions of the guidelines rather than the succinct versions represented here.

Findings, Discussion, and Analysis

Across the nine interviews I conducted in the summer of 2020, a few themes emerged:

• Taking risks/being creative: participants discussed the ways that the process of creating their own feedback guidelines encouraged or enabled them to be creative in their work for the class. The process of co-creating the feedback guidelines reassured them that they would not be penalized for experimenting with genres, styles, or approaches that might be considered outside of traditional academic writing (or, at least, outside of their previous understanding of what was acceptable and/or appropriate for writing in academic contexts); it also affirmed that the boundaries for their work in the class were malleable and expandable in ways that they hadn’t previously experienced. All 9 of the participants discussed something related to risk-taking and/or creativity in their answers.
• Feedback as a supportive process: Participants also emphasized how the process of co-creating feedback criteria changed how they viewed the feedback process itself. Rather than a set of value judgments on their writing or themselves as writers, many participants came to see the process of writing, reflecting, getting feedback, and giving feedback as a supportive one that was characterized by generosity as well as critical questions. All nine participants talked about the co-creation of guidelines as, at least to some extent, a supportive process that had an impact on their broader beliefs and assumptions about feedback, grading, and assessment.
• Making space for themselves as students and teachers of color: As I noted in the Methodology section, five of the nine students I interviewed self-identified as students of color (defined here as Black, Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islander, and/or Indigenous). All five of those students talked specifically about the ways that having the chance to co-create the feedback criteria allowed them to make space for themselves and their voices as students of color. As H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman note, in academic settings, “White Mainstream English and White ways of speaking become the invisible—or better, inaudible—norms of what educators and uncritical scholars like to call academic English, the language of school, the language of power” (171). For students whose languaging [3] comes from somewhere outside of those “white mainstream norms,” finding a place to express their multiple approaches to languaging within academic settings is difficult or even impossible. So, for these students, having a say in how they get feedback on their writing in our class allowed them to more confidently language in the ways that were meaningful to them without worrying about the strictures of so-called “academic writing.”
• Impacts on their own current or future teaching: All of those who participated in these interviews were current or future writing teachers, and the second part of the interview focused on how their experiences in our class impacted their own teaching or their future plans for teaching. However, even in their responses to questions that didn’t focus specifically on their teaching, participants made connections between the process of co-creating feedback guidelines and their own approaches to antiracist writing pedagogies. Eight of the nine participants in this study specifically discussed the impact of the guideline creation process on their own current or future teaching choices.
• Centering their own voices and/or interests: As with the theme above, participants discussed how the flexibility of the guidelines and their agency in creating them encouraged them to center their own voices and language in the ways that were meaningful for them. It also gave them the freedom to explore topics and participate in conversations that were meaningful to them without having to consider whether they’d do harm to their class grade or their standing with their instructor, who might also be their future academic mentor or teaching supervisor. 7 of the 9 participants explicitly discussed their decision to center their own voices or concerns in their writing for our class in their answers.

Risk Taking and Experimentation

Of particular note, all nine students I interviewed said that the process of co-creating these guidelines gave them permission to try new things, be creative, or take risks: As CD, a working-class white woman student, said, “I think maybe it made me feel a little more free in the way that I approached the writing because I knew that the parameters were negotiable and so that made me feel more free to take risks with what I was doing and not feeling like there would be…a grade penalty as a result of taking those risks.” A number of students said they felt freer to try things and to fail and try again because of the flexibility afforded to them by this process, which I used because I hoped it might remove any sense of objective, teacherly judgment, a judgment we might replace with the consensus of the classroom community it was produced within. The ongoing conversations about feedback, our discussions of Ellen C. Carrillo’s (2018) “generous reading,” and students’ sense of ownership over the process itself all acted as a permission structure for students to try new things, to experiment, and to push the boundaries of what they initially thought it meant to write in a graduate class.

And because this is a class about writing studies and writing pedagogies, our attention to diverse literacies and histories supported students as they considered how they might respond to the course assignments. In particular, we read work by:

• Geneva Smitherman (CCCC’s Role…) on students’ rights to their own language and the 1974 Conference on College Composition resolution of the same name,
• Asao B. Inoue (How Do We Language…) about the relationships among language, literacy, assessment, and racism, and
• April Baker-Bell on white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and language pedagogy

Each of these readings invited students to think deeply about their own internalized assumptions about language and literacy and what it means to be a both a writer and a writing teacher.

Agency and Connections to Previous Writing Assessment Experiences

A number of students talked about how the process made them feel like they had agency over their own assessment in a way they hadn’t experienced before. IS, a first-generation, working-class white woman student, makes this point a number of times in discussing her experience in our class: “It’s the first time that I have ever had agency in my own grading process as a student, and it was refreshing to the point that I decided to incorporate it in my own pedagogy as a teacher.” IH [4] agreed, “I felt appreciated. I felt like my voice was being heard. I felt like I was being appreciated as an intelligent voice in the classroom.” IH’s emphasis on “intelligent” in this answer is particularly telling: she had long felt that she didn’t belong in graduate school, particularly graduate school in English, because of her status as a first-generation and multilingual student. IH’s undergraduate literacy experience had been particularly traumatic and had nearly resulted in a decision to change majors from English to something “less writing intensive.”

IH’s experience was one echoed by a number of the graduate students of color I interviewed for this project, particularly the ones who were also multilingual: they could each recall moments – in both their undergraduate and graduate experiences – when they’d felt their languaging was unwelcome in their English classes. TM [5] agreed. As TM told me, “The feedback I was getting, like in writing on my papers and in my classes, too, made me feel like I didn’t belong there. I almost quit so many times. So many times.” TM said, “It was mostly empowering when you first asked us what we wanted to be graded on.” “Mostly empowering,” she says, because it was a new experience and because her previous literacy classroom experiences had conditioned her to believe that her own judgments of her writing were unsound or untrustworthy: “I, in that moment I realized I was just so conditioned to believe what is important. And in that instance, I kind of had to decipher what was important to me…I do feel like I produced better work under that circumstance…I was able to use my own experience and it felt valued…it held value in the class.” A theme in TM’s responses was her sense of value and its relationship to her languaging (both in terms of writing and in terms of speaking). Previous feedback and grading processes had left her with the sense that her languaging wasn’t valuable in academic spaces, or at least wasn’t as valuable as standardized, or what I’ll call White Mainstream English, [6] following both Baker-Bell and Alim and Smitherman. She got this message from the languages modeled by her faculty and the texts they assigned; she also got this message even more directly via the feedback she got on her writing and speaking work in those classes. So, when I asked her and her classmates to think about what they valued in the work we were doing in our class, she had to sort through how her perceptions of her writing and its value had been shaped by these previous assessment experiences.

Centering the Lived Literacy Experiences of Students of Color

My interviews with students from these graduate classes revealed something else: all five of the students of color I interviewed connected the guidelines-building process to feeling seen, empowered, and supported specifically as students of color. FT remarked on this experience. FT is a first-generation immigrant student and one of 5 BIPOC students interviewed as part of this project. He is also multilingual and grew up speaking both English and his heritage language in his home. As FT noted, the feedback process, “in a way, it made it clear that you wanted to hear our voices, to see us in our work.” KM agreed. KM grew up working class and is one of 5 BIPOC students interviewed as part of this project. Over the course of our discussion, KM frequently returned to her previous experiences in literacy classrooms and how our approach to assessment asked to her to renegotiate her role in the classroom and her expectations about what successful communication and literacy look like:

So all of my education, it was like, don’t do this, get rid of this. You can’t do this. You can’t say that, that’s wrong. That’s wrong. And I didn’t like the way it made me feel. It made me feel that I needed to not be who I was. And part of the problem with feeling that way is, is that to become something other than who you are creates disconnections from family…[But] when we did that [creating the criteria for our synthesis papers], it was like, yeah, of course. And why do we write, why do we speak? We speak to communicate with each other. And if the communication is successful, isn’t that successful, right?

Similar to the response from TM that I highlighted in the previous section, KM’s experiences with language judgments and assessments in previous literacy classes taught her to doubt the value of her language practices, and she changed the ways she wrote and spoke in response. But those changes created distance between her and the communities she loved. So often, KM said, the ways her languaging had been graded have “created silences.” As she explains, “you don’t want to say anything ‘cause you don’t want people to think you’re stupid, right? So you don’t say anything, you don’t get as much from the class. You don’t offer a different perspective because you’ve internalized that feeling. I can’t say this acceptably, so I’m not gonna say anything.” KM’s responses often returned to the ways she’d felt forced to either silence herself or to change the way she used language because of her experiences in literacy courses, particularly the kinds of feedback and assessment she experienced in those literacy courses. As Alana M. Nicastro and Patricia Geist-Martin (2022) argue, we have a responsibility to intentionally disrupt the circumstances and practices that silence students. KM’s experience of this co-creation process indicates to me that the discussions we had about feedback and assessment and the process of co-creating feedback guidelines was able to do that, at least for her.

I intentionally assigned readings that spoke to the harms of single-standard language judgments and offered models of languaging beyond White Mainstream English. Because we read scholars like Ruiz, Villanueva, Baker-Bell, Inoue, and Young—who all talk about the ways that standardized language practices have harmed and silenced students, writers, and rhetors of color – and because our first principle was to read and give feedback generously – KM felt like our approach to feedback and assessment removed the kinds of judgment that had silenced her in other classes:

I think the lack of judgment is a big piece that doesn’t get talked about. Celebration, affirmation, generous reading doesn’t mean you don’t get feedback, but it does mean that that feedback doesn’t come from some greater understanding of all communication that we pretend to have sometimes as teachers, but rather from a place of generosity of empathy and of like genuine questioning, what does your audience know this thing? And sometimes, you know your audience way better than your, you know, teacher or other reader does…And you get to be the authority in your own experience.

This last sentence is absolutely key: the goal of asking students to create the guidelines used to give them feedback is all about making sure students remain the authority on their own experiences and choices as humans, readers, writers, and thinkers.

As I reflect on the process I undertook and the responses from these nine students, I recognize that, though I did seek to offer students resources to explore their own internalized assumptions about language and correctness, I also should have explicitly built that reflection into the process of co-creating guidelines. One way of doing such work would be to utilize Sarah Johnson’s approach. In her article, From Tacit Myth to Explicit Lurking: Using Discourse-Based Interviews to Empirically Confront the Mythologized *Standard English Eel, Johnson proposes an approach to assessment the emphasizes students’ awareness and articulation of their rhetorical choices:

It may be possible to assess not against [White Standard English] (*SE) but rather around it, centering the assessment on the student’s rhetorical awareness of *SE. This rhetorical awareness of *SE may be one way of operationalizing a synergized translingual/anti-racist approach to *SE in the context of assessment. That is, assessing students’ awareness of *SE represents a shift from *SE to SEW [synergistic English work] since instructors can raise students’ awareness of *SE as a form of raciolinguistic discrimination and then assess students’ rhetorical awareness of their linguistic choices rather than students’ ability to meet or not meet *SE.

Given the centrality of reflection to my own pedagogical and assessment decisions, this approach would fit nicely into this process and center our attention on the reasons for particular rhetorical and linguistic choices in the context of students’ racialized experiences with language and language assessments.

Still, particularly in light of the responses above from students of color, I believe that specific conversations about the Habits of White Language (Inoue), disciplinary histories and their exclusions of the work of scholars, writers, and students of color (Ruiz, Smitherman 1999), and Black linguistic justice (Baker-Bell) helped lead us toward a more equitable view of writing effectiveness and writing assessment.

Takeaways

For those who might wish to co-create feedback guidelines with their own students (whether in advanced undergraduate or graduate pedagogy courses) as part of a wider approach to more equitable approach to writing assessment, I’d encourage them to consider the following suggestions:

• Co-creation doesn’t work in isolation: The addition of this practice to a class without other significant changes (including to assignments, assessment practices, course policies, and course content) will almost certainly lead to a set of guidelines that simply reinforce the Habits of White Language (Inoue 2021). Instead, consider the class holistically: when I began designing ENGL 587, I decided from the beginning that I wanted the class to both be about equitable teaching and be equitable. For me, this meant: Interview participants consistently acknowledged that the other things we did in class (particularly the readings we discussed but also the ways we talked about course assignments and policies) informed their understanding of our assessment practices and helped them feel comfortable throughout the process. All of this does require, of course, a certain amount of control over the curriculum and policies of the course. For folks working in more constrained environments, I recommend considering where there is room for adding readings, shifting assignment focuses/types, and being transparent about both constraints and goals.
  • Changes to assignments (incorporating multimodal and open-ended assignments rather than solely assigning essays);
  • Course policies (including attendance, participation, and late work policies);
  • Assessment practices (the aforementioned move to separate course grades, which are based on completion, and feedback, which is frequent and capacious); and
  • Course content (which represents a diversity of scholarly interests, identities, backgrounds, grammars and writing styles, including work from bell hooks, Christina Cedillo, Iris Ruiz, Victor Villanueva, Malea Powell, Sharon Yam, Aja Martinez, Vershawn Ashanti Young, among others).

• Interview participants consistently acknowledged that the other things we did in class (particularly the readings we discussed but also the ways we talked about course assignments and policies) informed their understanding of our assessment practices and helped them feel comfortable throughout the process. All of this does require, of course, a certain amount of control over the curriculum and policies of the course. For folks working in more constrained environments, I recommend considering where there is room for adding readings, shifting assignment focuses/types, and being transparent about both constraints and goals.

• The reading the class does before the first discussion about feedback guidelines really matters: As I mentioned above, I assign a wide range of diverse authors which is a cornerstone of the class. But I paid particular attention to the things I assigned in the first section, prior to our first discussion about creating specific feedback guidelines. In those first few weeks, I want to make sure students are grappling with the fact that academic English is a myth: there’s no single standard “academic” version of English. Rather, disciplines have a variety of conventions and grammars, which are far too often closely aligned with white middle- and upper-class English. To get at these ideas, we read Tara Yosso’s Whose Culture has Capital?, the “Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity” section from Naming What We Know, James Baldwin’s If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?, the Students Rights to their Own Language resolution from the Conference on College Composition and Communication as well as Geneva Smitherman’s history of the resolution, Vershawn Ashanti Young’s Should Writers Use They Own English?, and Victor Villanueva’s Maybe a Colony, all of which allow us to explore histories and practices that push back on the myth of monolithic academic English. And as shown in the interview responses, these readings helped shape students’ understanding of the assessment process we undertook.
• Consider pairing this process with other assessment practices that don’t punish students for experimentation and failure: Among all the other reasons I like alternative assessment, [7] one of the benefits of taking grades out of the equation is that it frees students to try new things (tackle new topics and experiment with modes or genres that are unfamiliar), write in voices and grammars that have previously been unwelcome in their classrooms, and generally experiment with ways of thinking, writing, and creating that they may not have felt comfortable doing in previous academic experiences, as CD and KM both note.

Conclusion

There is no panacea for the harm that standard language ideologies do to students whose language practices fall outside the so-called standard. And if, as Andrew Thomas-James Moos and Heidi Estrem and E. Shelley Reid suggests, there’s a correlation between graduate instructors’ experience as students and their decisions as novice teachers, then instantiating antiracist classroom and assessment practices in graduate courses – particularly those about pedagogy – is vital for creating antiracist undergraduate teaching. And it can be particularly impactful on undergraduate courses like college composition, which tend to be widely taught by graduate students in English and related disciplines.

Given the potential impact of pedagogical and assessment choices in graduate pedagogy classes on the students in those classes and the undergraduate or K-12 students in their current or future classrooms, researchers might consider the following questions that seek to build on the findings of this study:

1. How do TAs’ and instructors’ experiences as students impact their classroom choices?
2. How do assessment choices in pedagogy courses impact current or future teachers’ choices about assessment?

Specific to this study’s focus on supporting linguistic variation and fostering student agency in assessment, graduate teachers might consider how their assessment approaches, classroom policies, and reading/writing assignments reflect disciplinary commitments to linguistic justice and equitable assessment.

As IC notes, these practices might also serve as models and tools in classrooms beyond college composition courses. In fact, I would argue these equitable assessment approaches are most important in graduate classrooms because graduate students have even more extensive experiences with feedback and assessment practices that reinforce the supremacy of White Mainstream English. These practices are also important in humanities and hard sciences graduate classrooms because graduate students in such disciplines are more likely than not to be teaching their own courses or leading their own discussion sessions. In both cases, they are also likely giving feedback on and assessing undergraduate student work, and they’re using their experiences as students as models for how they interact with and assess their own students. Shifting our practices in graduate classes, then, has the potential to impact not only the students in those courses but also the students they interact with in their own classrooms.

Acknowledgements

A special thank you to the graduate student interview participants who offered their insights and experiences. I am deeply indebted to you.

Notes

[1] I will note here that much of the assessment work in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies focuses – either explicitly or implicitly – on undergraduate classrooms.

[2]I pause here to note that this reality (in which white literacy practices are standard classroom literacies and their connection to whiteness is rendered largely invisible) is one of the features of Inoue’s (2021) Habits of White Language.

[3] I use “languaging” intentionally, following scholars including Inoue (2019) and Bloom and Beauchemin, who argue that the term emphasizes the dynamic and in-process nature of writing, speaking, and all language usage.

[4] IH is a second-generation immigrant student; her family is working-class. She is also multilingual and grew up speaking both English and her heritage language in her home. She is one of 5 BIPOC students interviewed as part of this project. She is also a first-generation student.

[5] TM is a first-generation immigrant student; she’s the first in her family to attend college, let alone graduate school. She is also multilingual and grew up speaking both English and her heritage language in her home. She is one of 5 BIPOC students interviewed as part of this project.

[6] I use the term here because it articulates the largely unarticulated relationship between race and standardization and helps us better understand how students whose language varieties fall outside of the so-called standard are harmed by writing assessments that require them to fundamentally change their language practices to be successful in academic spaces. As Baker-Bell (2020) argues, “I use the term White Mainstream English in place of standard English to emphasize how white ways of speaking become the invisible – or better, inaudible – norm” (p. 3).

[7] I’ve purposely avoided the term “ungrading” here, though many of the assessment practices I discuss in this article might fall under some definitions of the term. For more on why, please see Fernandes, Brier, and McIntyre.