Writing for a Better World

On February 22, 2021, Write@UGA hosts “Writing for a Better World,” an online educational event featuring keynote speaker Asao B. Inoue, Professor and the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion for the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. 

Featured Events – Keynote Address

“What Does It Mean to Assess Writing for a Better World?”

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM (EST)

This talk engages with the question of what it means to assess and grade college student writing for a better, more antiracist world. It focuses not on people behaving badly or racist, but rather on the historical and structural ways that most academics judge and read language; teachers’ ways of assessing language; disciplines’ logics and ways with words; and most professions’ expectations of language use. It pays particular attention to the historical practice of grading in schools and universities. Inoue discusses how higher education generally promotes literacy practices through assessment ecologies that are White supremacist, and defines an antiracist orientation toward our teaching and assessing. 

Register Here: https://ugeorgia.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0VXDnAUKrYnTCux

Afternoon Workshop

“Bravely Challenging Our White Language Supremacy in Our Assessments of Student Writing”

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM (EST)

This workshop will challenge participants to bravely investigate their own classroom assessment practices, particularly their orientations toward student writing as embodied in their feedback to that writing. The workshop will consider habits of White language that inform assessment practices in our own classrooms as well as several “fast thinking” mind heuristics. We’ll pause to reflect upon sample feedback on a student paper that participants bring from a past course of theirs. Faculty participants should bring to the workshop one sample paper with their feedback or assessments to the student on it or attached. This should demonstrate the typical kind of feedback the teacher provides. This workshop asks participants to be brave in the ways that Arao and Clemens describe “brave spaces” for doing race work, especially antiracist work, and to be compassionate to themselves and their colleagues. Participants will get a handout of resources. 

Register Here: https://ugeorgia.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0VXDnAUKrYnTCux

About the Speaker

Asao B. Inoue is the 2019 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and has been a past member of the CCCC Executive Committee, and the Executive Board of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. Among his many articles and chapters on writing assessment, race, and racism, his article, “Theorizing Failure in U.S. Writing Assessments” in Research in the Teaching of English, won the 2014 CWPA Outstanding Scholarship Award. His co-edited collection, Race and Writing Assessment (2012),won the 2014 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection. His book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future (2015) won the 2017 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for a monograph and the 2015 CWPA Outstanding Book Award. He also has published a co-edited collection, Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and The Advancement of Opportunity (2018), and a book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (2019).