High-Impact Practices
- Critical, informed self-reflection that helps make biases visible to faculty
- Ungrading (e.g., contract grading, specifications grading, student self-assessment)
- Culturally responsive instructional design and especially alignment of objectives, rubrics, and comments
- Translingual frameworks that recognize and value diverse linguistic backgrounds
- Including student voices in developing (and revisiting) literacy cultures, statements, and policies
Critical, Informed Self-Reflection
Practices of critical, informed self-reflection could perhaps be seen as forms of teacher research. In short, they are ways of making naturalized practices—especially those centered around feedback and assessment—seem strange or distant enough that biases become visible to the teacher. It’s often the first step in realizing the kinds of harm that writing instruction can do and what can be done about it.
If you’re short on time
- How to Stop Harming Students: An Ecological Guide to Antiracist Writing Assessment (Inoue & Poe, 2020)
- Coding Your Written Feedback (from Morrison & Tonry, 2021)
If you have some more time
- Engaging in Resistant Genres as Antiracist Teacher Response (Wood, 2020)
- “Racial Methodologies for Composition Studies: Reflecting on Theories of Race in Writing Assessment Research” (Inoue, 2012), chapter 10 of Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies
Ungrading
There are a range of writing assessment practices we might call “ungrading,” including labor-based grading contracts, student self-assessment, and specifications grading. Grades can have negative effects on all students, but unconscious bias and institutionalized racism in education can make grades particularly harmful to students of color. Since individual teachers often can’t fully circumvent the requirement to input grades, ungrading practices are ways of transforming assessment criteria to be more transparent and less subject to bias.
If you’re short on time
- Grading Contract for First Year Writing (Inoue, 2019)
If you have some more time
- How to Ungrade (Stommel, 2018)
- What Labor-Based Grading Contracts Look Like (Inoue, 2019)
- Examples of Specs-Graded Course Designs (Nilson, 2015)
Culturally Responsive Instructional Design
David Gooblar (2014) notes that effective teaching habits—that is, structuring classes with scaffolded work, adopting a growth mindset, and aligning grading with learning goals—result in better outcomes for students of color especially. In addition, model readings from diverse writers and culturally responsive assignments that are designed to be inclusive of diverse students have an important role to play in antiracist writing pedagogy.
If you’re short on time
- Writing Across Borders — watch up to 4:07 at least (video transcript)
If you have some more time
- Designing and Assessing Effective Classroom Writing Assignments for NES and ESL Students (Reid & Kroll, 1995)
- WAC: Closing Doors or Opening Doors for Second Language Writers? (Cox, 2011)
Translingual Frameworks
Dominant educational paradigms tend to treat difference as deficit and condition writing instructors to believe their job is to “correct” difference. Translingualism positions diversity as asset and encourages instructors to consider language variation as personal and meaningful choices rather than transgressions that need to be erased.
If you’re short on time
- Linguistic Justice (Baker-Bell)
If you have some more time
- Toward a Pedagogy of Shuttling between Languages: Learning from Multilingual Writers (Canagarajah, 2006)
- Should Writers Use They Own English (Young, 2010)
Including Student Voices
Antiracist efforts intended to benefit students should include students. The process of involving students in antiracist projects can help to change the literacy culture in a community to be more inclusive. Examples of such projects include developing linguistic justice statements, inviting students to share or publish literacy narratives, and getting student input on class policies or departmental curricula. Such practices are scalable: capable of happening on the local level of a classroom or the wider context of a university.
If you’re short on time
If you have some more time