Cal  OER 25 Teaching in the Margins: Open Pedagogy, Radical Inclusion, and Reclaimed Narratives in English and History by Fairuze Ahmed Ramirez and Gregory Beyrer

CAL OER 2025 Reflections

Adding to this reflection, its 8/16 noon time:

When I asked our audience to consider what teaching in the margins means to them personally, it was an invitation for people to bring in their lived realities. One participant wrote: “As a disabled person, teaching in the margins means centering my experience and opening space for those who are ‘othered.’” I remember thinking, wow, okay—I am not the only one today who will be centering their personal experience. That feels good.

Later, the same person added: “Thanks to those of you who supported the spirit of my comment. Instead of ‘centering’ my experience, I wish I’d said ‘being grounded in the validity of my experience.” Reading that, I wondered if they felt it was somehow wrong to use their lived reality as a way to humanize themselves and shape how they interact with others who may also be othered.

Because I was facilitating and wanted to stay on track, I didn’t pause to affirm them in the moment. I now regret not saying out loud: It’s okay to center your experience—your experience matters. Especially when your experience is what makes you more humanized, more visible, and more connected to others in spaces where people are too often either silenced, erased, or made to be invisible. 

In preparing for the CAL OER presentation, I felt conflicted about sharing my personal narrative of navigating higher education as a Yemeni-Arab American woman, because I have often seen how personal stories are dismissed as less persuasive—while numbers, data, and statistics are what seem to carry weight. At the same time, I know that stories are powerful in humanizing abstract issues and making them real. That is why I chose to share my own experience alongside research, specifically a study that demonstrates how women of color disproportionately experience sexism and racism in academia, especially in relation to promotion and tenure outcomes. By pairing personal narrative with empirical evidence, I hoped to illustrate, not only that my experience matters, but also that it is part of a broader systemic pattern that data has already confirmed.

If I had a personal choice, I would have kept the presentation grounded solely in my own story. But my audience was an academic one, shaped by schools of thought that say, your personal story doesn’t matter—we need evidence to prove it. So, I tailored my message to the expectations of my audience. My hope was to demonstrate that even as I work to dismantle systemic inequities, I too am navigating them, and I too am bound to make mistakes.

For example, as an Yemeni-Arab American, I had not known until recently that the decolonial term for MENA is SWANA. That gap in my awareness is not accidental—it reflects the limitations of the “education” I have received, an education that has not been multicultural, that has not taught me the value of Arab scholarship and science. This is part of why sharing personal stories matters: they reveal the silences and erasures that statistics alone cannot capture.

One thing I neglected to do during our CAL OER presentation was remind the audience to hold their questions until the end. Our session was designed as a structured presentation, not a Q&A, and I also forgot to mention at the start that I welcome follow-up emails for anyone who wants to share constructive feedback or insights. Fortunately, I was able to slip that reminder in midway—right after receiving a particularly jarring question. I chose not to respond in real time, instead inviting the person to email me so I could provide a more thoughtful and transparent answer. In that spirit, here is exactly what I would have written, in response to that question. Before I get to that question--here is what I think: 

The way a question is framed often carries the imprint of the systems in which the asker has been socially and academically conditioned. This moment reminded me how even our inquiries can be shaped by the norms, biases, and boundaries of those systems--the systems we have ALL been conditioned to regurgitate. 

Another important point I failed to clearly articulate during my presentation—again, due, I recognize, to my own Eurocentric, academic social conditioning—is that the term MENA (Middle Eastern North African) reflects a Eurocentric, geopolitical framing rooted in colonial and Cold War-era cartography; however, SWANA (South West Asian North African) centers the region’s geographic relationship to Africa and Asia rather than Europe. The term (SWANA) emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s through the work of Arab American studies scholars, feminist activists, and ethnic studies organizations such as the Arab American Studies Association and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Its usage reflects a commitment to rejecting colonial mappings and affirming self-determined regional identification (Arab American Studies Association, n.d.; INCITE!, 2006). And finally, BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, People of Color)--during my talk, I misspoke and said Brown, instead of Black, that was not my intention. 

In short: naming and language matters. The language we use can either reinforce or resist the very systems we are trying to dismantle—and this was a reminder that I, too, am still unlearning.

Now About that The Jarring Question: 

"How do you hold students accountable for their writing work, if you focus their learning on qualitative aspects instead of quantitative ones? Wouldn't that make meeting writing tasks more difficult because the outcomes are vaguer and more open to interpretation?"

This is what I would have written with careful consideration to what I think, and to what other scholars have stated too: 

Thank you for your thoughtful engagement during my presentation at CAL OER. I’m writing to respond to the question you posed during the session. According to the downloaded chat history, your question was:

“How do you hold students accountable for their writing work, if you focus their learning on qualitative aspects instead of quantitative ones? Wouldn't that make meeting writing tasks more difficult because the outcomes are more vague and open to interpretation?”

This is an important question, and I appreciate the opportunity to expand on it. First, I want to say in writing that accountability does not have to rely on quantification, and qualitative approaches are not by default vague or less rigorous. In both research and assessment, I’ve seen how numbers can be powerful—helping us track patterns, expose inequities, and build cases for change. At the same time, I’ve also seen how numbers can flatten complexity, stripping away the cultural, historical, and political contexts that shape human experience—especially when it comes to how power influences language, identity, and expression.

That’s where qualitative approaches matter. They make space for meaning, for story, for the voices and experiences that numbers can’t always illustrate. They help us understand not just if change is happening, but how it unfolds and why it matters. When we rely only on what we can measure, we risk missing the deeper truths: the resilience, the struggle, the forms of knowledge and expression that resist being reduced to data points. For me, the most honest and rigorous forms of accountability come from holding both—quantitative tools that reveal broad patterns, and qualitative approaches that honor the nuances, the complexity and the lived experience. To intentionally honor this complexity, academia must stop treating qualitative stories as “secondary.” They are not an afterthought but a necessary and complementary form of knowledge, affirming the depth and meaning that only lived experience and narrative can reveal. 

What I didn’t have the chance to share during my presentation is that every semester I ask my students: What is the most accessible form of communication? Without fail, they always say poetry and music. I hold onto that because it reminds me that accessibility and meaning often come through story, rhythm, and expression—forms that resist easy quantification. And so, I’d like to challenge the assumption that accountability must depend on numbers, or that qualitative approaches are somehow vague or less rigorous. In my experience as a critical literacy educator and active reader who stays engaged in scholarship within and beyond my field, I see the most meaningful and enduring forms of accountability in writing emerge from reflective, process-based, and contextually grounded evaluation between students and instructors. These approaches, in my observation, prioritize growth, critical thinking, and rhetorical awareness over static metrics. 

For instance, approaches such as narrative feedback, self-assessment, conferencing, and portfolio evaluation can, in fact, make expectations more transparent. Each of these practices creates opportunities for dialogue and mutual understanding, inviting students to see writing not as a static product but as a recursive, relational, and rhetorical process. As Asao B. Inoue (2015) reminds us, “quality is always judged, never measured” (Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, p. 21). What matters, then, is how we structure those judgments—and qualitative frameworks can be deeply structured, equitable, and rigorous, especially when that rigor is co-constructed, relationally sustained, and dialogically negotiated between instructors and students (Hahn, 2021). 

Similarly, Jesse Stommel (2020) emphasizes that “grades are a distraction from learning,” arguing that accountability rooted in trust, dialogue, and reflection often produces more engagement and more authentic learning than traditional grading. Affirming this, too, is Susan D. Blum (2020), who critiques grading as a mechanism of control, rather than a support for student agency. Both scholars advocate for “ungrading” as a way to re-center the learning process—an approach especially vital in writing classrooms, where experimentation, revision, and rhetorical risk-taking are key.

I also shared during my presentation that I routinely ask students what they value more: grades or the ability to articulate their learning. Their responses reveal nuance and complexity. Students are not simply “grade-chasers” or “intrinsically motivated learners”—they are both constantly negotiating a system that often conflates performance with learning. Many value grades for practical reasons (like scholarships or transfer requirements) while also deeply appreciating their growth as writers. Personally, I have observed when grading systems shift toward ungrading, some students experience profound benefits, especially in terms of confidence, self-direction, and agency. And for me, that is the heart of my work as an educator.

Portfolios and reflective writing practices—as advocated by Kathleen Blake Yancey (1992), Peter Elbow (1997) offer structured, flexible systems that ask students to take ownership of their choices, revisions, and learning journeys. That’s not vagueness—it’s a higher bar of accountability, one rooted in reflection and responsibility rather than compliance. 

Adding here too, the book I mentioned in my presentation, written by a more contemporary scholar, Felicia Rose Chavez--I cant put her book down. Its part memoir, part pedagogy ( thanks Linda Sneed for gifting me this book) and her work, while critical of English traditional teaching methods, its very clear and guiding. For instance, she has a chapter dedicated to how to co-create in away that holds students accountable to their learning and writing, a re-defining of what rigor can look like in an anti-racist, decolonized writing classroom. 

Finally, I want to note, qualitative assessment enables me to resist reductive, one-size-fits-all standards and instead honor diverse ways of writing, communicating, and knowing. This commitment is especially important if we care about educational equity, as traditional grading often reinforces dominant cultural norms and inequitable power dynamics (Inoue, 2019).

In short, qualitative assessment doesn’t reduce accountability—it transforms it into something more authentic, relational, and just.

Thank you again for your thoughtful question.

And thanks for reflecting with me, 

Fairuze

How to cite this piece: 

Ramirez, F. A. (2025, August 13). CAL OER 2025 reflections [Blog post]. Fairuze Ahmed Ramirez Teaching Blog. https://sites.google.com/view/far-rosie-teachingportfolio/home 

Scholars I cited in this response:

Blum, S. D. (Ed.). (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press.

Chavez, F. R. (2021). The anti-racist writing workshop: How to decolonize the creative classroom. Haymarket Books.

Elbow, P. (2000). Everyone can write: Essays toward a hopeful theory of writing and teaching writing. Oxford University Press.

Hahn, E. (2021, October 15). Asao Inoue’s antiracism and the limits of undialectical thought. Composing Culture. https://composingculture.com/2021/10/15/asao-inoues-antiracism-and-the-limits-of-undialectical-thought/

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. (2006). The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex. South End Press. https://files.libcom.org/files/incite-the-revolution-will-not-be-funded-beyond-the-nonprofit-industrial-complex-2.pdf

Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future. WAC Clearinghouse. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2015.0698

Inoue, A. B. (2019). Classroom writing assessment as an antiracist practice. Pedagogy, 19(3), 373–404. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7531464

Stommel, J. (2020, January 13). Why I don’t grade. JesseStommel.com. https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/

Yancey, K. B. (1992). Portfolios in the writing classroom: An introduction. National Council of Teachers of English.

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