To illustrate, imagine that we are Olympic-level sprinters, and we’ve been tasked to bring together all the athletes from the Olympic games in order to determine how good of an athlete everyone is by measuring how fast everyone runs a 400-meter sprint. We use this measure because it seems a good measure to us. We are conscientious and caring. We really are trying to be fair-minded to all so we judge everyone by the same standard, but we only know how to judge a 400-meter sprint. It’s what we know. Sure, we will do fine. Sprinters will be judged highly, but what of those curlers, or the snowboarders, or the swimmers, or the archers, or the skiers, or the tennis players, or the water polo players, or the wrestlers? You get the idea. In the name of finding a consistent (i.e., fair) way to judge everyone by the same standard, we have made an unfair assessment of athletic prowess by narrowing our definition of what it means to be an athlete, by ignoring the diversity of athleticism. Racism in the writing classroom often works in similar ways. We define “good” writing in standard ways that have historically been informed by a white discourse, even though we are working from a premise that attempts fairness.
In fact, when writing classroom assessments do not account for whiteness or the dominant discourse’s relation to various racial formations in the class, and that discourse is used to make judgments on writing and writers, racism is bound to happen. It is systemic that way. Consider Huot’s closing words on using assessment to teach writing:
Using assessment to teach requires the additional steps of having students apply discussions of writing quality to their individual texts or compile criteria for individual papers that they can discuss with a teacher or peer group. Students can only learn the power of assessment as they can other important features of learning to write—within the context of their own work. Learning how to assess entails more than applying stock phrases like unity, details, development, or organization to a chart or scoring guideline. Students and teachers can use these ideas to talk about the rhetorical demands of an emergent text, so that students could learn how to develop their own critical judgments about writing. This creation of a classroom pedagogy for assessment should provide students with a clearer idea about how text is evaluated, and it should work against often nebulous, underdeveloped, and unarticulated ideas they have about why they like a certain piece of writing or make certain revisions. (2002, p. 78)
Certainly, this is a good way to understand writing assessment in the classroom as pedagogical in very tangible ways, important ways, ways that as I’ve mentioned above I’ve been inspired by. I’m invested in this kind of pedagogy of assessment. I do not knock this aspect of Huot’s ideas: that we teach students how to understand the nature of judgment in informed ways, ways that begin with their own writing, but the above articulation avoids discussing race as an important part of the student’s subjectivity as a reader and writer, and thus as an important part of the inquiry into the nature of judgment.
Given this, I pose a question: when students discuss writing quality or compile criteria for a rubric, when they use ideas like “unity, details, development, or organization” to “talk about the rhetorical demands of an emergent text” as more than “stock phrases” —all excellent things to do—how will they negotiate the ways that any “text is evaluated” against a dominant white discourse? How will they confront the fact that most of the time evaluation, whether it’s a teacher’s or students’, in a writing course means a set of hegemonic dispositions toward texts? How will they understand past or present evaluations of texts, of their own texts, as more than an individual’s failure to meet expectations or goals, but also as a confluence of many other structures in language, school, and society, forming expectations they (and their teacher) have little control over?
While I do not think Huot means for this to happen, I can see how a class that engages in such a pedagogy can easily turn into a class that asks students to approximate the academic dispositions of the academy (whatever that may mean for that class) without any explicit way of interrogating the system that asks for such texts, or such evaluation of texts. I can see the course missing important opportunities to interrogate the dominant discourse as normative, or interrogating the hegemonic ways of evaluating texts in classrooms, some of which are rhetorical in nature. It is one thing to investigate how a judgment is made and how to articulate one’s judgments in order that they may help writers in some way, but it is an entirely different reflective process to investigate the ways judgments on our writing, and the judgments we make, participate in larger normative discourses that have uneven effects on various groups of people, that privilege some students over others. And it is yet another thing to link these ways of judging to the historically reproduced dispositions of whiteness.
Huot’s good theorizing misses these opportunities, which leaves open the chance for racist effects in the writing assessment. He seems to be more concerned with students’ inability to articulate their judgments of texts in ways that are rhetorical (again, a good thing to focus on in a classroom), but this is at the expense of seeing those rhetorical ways of judging as hegemonic, as historically connected to broader dispositions toward texts that are not necessarily universal but rather are part of dominant white academic discourses, which sets up a hierarchical system of privileging through the valuing of texts. The hierarchy, while not intended to be, turns out often to be racist.
To his credit, Huot does not ignore racism in writing assessment altogether. In Chapter 5, Huot centers on the most important process of any classroom writing assessment, reading and forming feedback to students about their writing or themselves as writers. Through a look at the literature on response, he notes that the field has no formal theory of response. What we have are various accounts, as good as they are, of how to respond to student writing, such as Straub’s important work (1996a; 1996b; 1997; 2000). He concludes about the literature of the field: “the focus is once again only on practice, with little attempt to see response within a theoretical, pedagogical, or communicative context” (p. 111). In his move toward a theory of reading and response, a start at filling this theoretical gap in the literature, Huot discusses Arnetha Ball’s (1997) very good study on the reading practices of African-American and European-American teachers, which turns out to be different along racial lines. He admits that at least in this case, “teachers with different cultural orientations saw very different things in student writing” (2002, p. 117). This, however, is the end of his comment. He moves from summarizing Ball’s study of race in a writing assessment, which he reads as culture, to talking about Sarah Freedman’s (1984) work, which talks about the culture of schools generally, how they construct roles and expectations for students and teachers. After Freedman, he discusses Faigley’s (1989) important essay, “Judging Writers, Judging Selves,” which helps him identify the ways that readers are situated historically and so have historically changing tastes that affect the way we read and judge student writing.
Huot’s transition from Ball to Freedman is telling in the way he treats race, and by implication racism. He says, “[i]t’s important in talking about the influence of culture in teacher response that we not forget that school itself is a cultural system bound by specific beliefs and attitudes” (2002, p. 117). True enough. No argument here. But what about racism, isn’t that an historical set of beliefs, tastes, and practices too? There is no connection to race or racist practices. Ball’s findings do not come up again. It is important to note again, however, that race is not real, but racism is. And it’s racism that must be considered first.
This avoidance of any deep treatment of racism in his discussion becomes more problematic near the end of this otherwise fine chapter. Huot builds to a very intriguing model for teachers and students for “moving toward a theory of response” (2002, p. 132). There are five elements to the model, but there is no explicit way to interrogate or understand racism in practices in the model. The model offers as its most important term, “context,” which is informed surely by the work of Ball and his earlier discussion. Not surprisingly, context is the center of the visual model, and the other four elements revolve around it, influencing it. Context is described as: “Particular writer, particular moment of a particular work in a particular curriculum, particular institution, particular issues, and particular audiences” (Huot, 2002, p. 132). With all these particulars, one might think that teachers shouldn’t ever think in terms of larger social patterns or effects, or should treat every reading and response scene as one in which we cannot judge it next to others.