Making our invisible racial agendas visible: Race talk in Assessing Writing, 1994–2018

Hammond, J. W.

doi:10.1016/j.asw.2019.100425

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 44 publications

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“…As explained by Banks et al (2018), "Historical analysis of purportedly meritocratic systems associated with student advancement can be used to reveal structures of power that result in both group and individual disenfranchisement" (p. 380). In particular, the recent work of Hammond (2018Hammond ( , 2019, Harms (2018), and Molloy (2018) illustrates how writing assessment scholars can better engage with unjust histories of assessment. Critical insight into the past of composition matters, as "exposure and examination allows for analysis and critique of the ways that present conditions are manifold" (Poe et al, 2018, p. 28) while also allowing us to better orient the past, present, and future of writing assessment with justice work (Hammond, 2019, pp.…”

Section: Historicizing Opportunitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Injustice of Opportunity: Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, Articulation, and the Inter-Institutional Ecology of Writing Assessment

Moos¹

2021

Journal of Writing Assessment

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Because writing assessment's present is bound to its past (Elliot, 2005;Poe et al., 2018), scholarship has pointed to the need for more critical inquiries of local "assessment ecologies" (Inoue, 2015) to better understand the effects of past injustices (Hammond, 2018;Harms, 2018). In understanding how opportunities are allocated unjustly within processes like articulation, compositionists must be willing to understand how postsecondary ecologies have systematically attempted to deny opportunities for certain student groups. This article does so by examining the 1935 Michigan Committee on the Articulation of High School and College English, a committee in charge of redefining readiness for first-year writing across the state of Michigan, led by Professor Clarence DeWitt Thorpe of the University of Michigan. The work of Thorpe's committee has been an under examined component of historical assessment ecologies in the Midwest and beyond. Under Thorpe's guidance, this committee shaped assessment to function across numerous institutional spaces. Utilizing this historical example, this article illustrates that narrow emphases on the ways local ecologies shape opportunities are insufficient for identifying how opportunities are structured. Instead, scholarship should be more attentive in understanding how any given local ecology is situated within a broader system of interinstitutional ecologies that define the boundaries and formations of opportunity within the space.

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