Made Not Only in Grades: Multimodal Assessment in the Social Justice Turn
Editors: Gavin P. Johnson, Ashanka Kumari, and Shane A. Wood
Multimodal Assessment With Clips.mp3Abstract
Title and Abstract.mp3Assessment is central to contemporary writing studies praxis. Regardless of our areas of expertise, pedagogical approaches, or institutional contexts, all teachers engage with writing assessment—be it formative, informal, peer-to-peer, teacher response, programmatic, etc. Scholarship on writing assessment, multimodality, and justice-oriented practices has increased over the past two decades; however, each of these respective discourses have gaps. Writing assessment continues to be challenged by issues of individual approach, fairness, and validity. Multimodality and antiracist writing assessment overemphasize the alphabetic text (linguistic mode) as opposed to various modes of communication (e.g., visual, oral, gestural, spatial). This collection seeks to address gaps in research and works to dismantle the manufactured separation of multimodality and antiracist practices in writing assessment.
Background
Background.mp3The title of the collection is a callback to Kathleen Blake Yancey’s 2004 Conference on College Composition and Communication Chair’s Address “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key,” which brings attention to changes in literacy practices and writing instruction in the midst of shifting technologies and “tectonic change” in rhetoric and composition (p. 298). At the same time, another conversation began to emerge on writing assessment. In 2012, Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe published Race and Writing Assessment, one of the first collections of scholarship to explicitly address the role race and racism play in our evaluations. A year later, Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young co-edited a special issue in Across the Disciplines on antiracist activism. That same year, in 2013, Heidi A. McKee and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, published the born-digital edited collection Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation (2013). Bringing together 40 scholars for the first collection of its kind, McKee and DeVoss demonstrated the need for assessment methods tailored to the unique affordances and constraints of digital and multimodal writing. Computers and Composition published a special issue on Multimodal Assessment in 2014 in which guest editor Carl Whithaus (2014) explained, “All that surrounds multimodal writing assessment is indeed a complex set of questions and practices. [M]ultimodal writing assessment is informing––and building upon––ongoing discussions in writing studies about interaction, instruction, and the types of texts we hope to help students create” (p. vi). Scholars like Poe and Inoue, Condon and Young, McKee and DeVoss, Yancey, and Whithaus, have encouraged the field to take up new writing assessment practices in the 21st century. We agree and believe that more can be done to address multimodality and justice-oriented assessment practices.
The social justice turn in writing studies examines forms of oppression and inequities within and across institutions, systems, policies, and classrooms. In 2016, Poe and Inoue wrote, “If social justice is about creating certain kinds of relationships, distribution of resources, and decision-making along four axes, it is this last point––decision making––where we may find a toehold for the project of writing assessment as social justice” (p. 121). Teacher-scholars have attended to disability, race, gender, and economic privileges, and their intersections. For example, Jay Dolmage, Stephanie Kerschbaum, M. Remi Yergeau, Christina V. Cedillo, J. Logan Smilges, and Margaret Price have intersected disability studies with writing pedagogies, advancing antiableist policies and practices in the field. Andrea Riley Mukavetz, Angela Haas, Lisa King, Rose Gubele, and Joyce Rain Anderson have written extensively on Indigenous rhetorics as decolonial praxis. Jacqueline Rhodes, Jonathan Alexander, V. Jo Hsu, GPat Patterson, and Travis Webster have written on the normalizing forces of cis-heteronormativity through queer and trans rhetorics. Michelle F. Eble, Laura Gonzales, Natasha N. Jones, Cecilia D. Shelton, and Temptaous Mckoy have focused on social justice and technical communication, especially regarding race and linguistic difference. Most recently, Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole I. Caswell, and William P. Banks (2023) have connected queer rhetorics and writing assessment. Of course, this list is non-exhaustive and most of these teacher-scholars cross manufactured lines, but, what becomes clear, is that the social justice turn is not a monolithic endeavor but rather one that spans intellectual traditions to compose antioppressive practices within and beyond the classroom (see also Kumashiro, 2002).
While some work has been published on multimodality and the social justice turn (Poe, 2013; West-Puckett, 2016; Teston, Previte, & Hashlamon, 2019; Johnson, 2021), we need more research addressing the intersections of multimodality and justice-oriented writing assessment. It is time to expand this conversation.
Call for Born-Digital Texts
Call for Born Digital.mp3Made Not Only in Grades: Multimodal Assessment in the Social Justice Turn, a born-digital collection, calls for scholarly, pedagogical, and programmatic insights on the intersections of socially just and antioppressive assessment and the evaluation of digital and multimodal writing. We invite born-digital texts that not only discuss the intersections of multimodality, assessment, and social justice but also demonstrate this thinking through mediated arguments. We hope to elevate both popular and more experimental ideas using social justice as a framework through and within multimodal assessment. Using video, audio, images, and other interactive composing tools and modalities, authors might consider the following questions:
How might teachers use social justice frameworks to multimodally assess student texts that enact social justice in ethical and equitable ways? How does the emergence and convergence of digital and multimodal composing with social justice-oriented pedagogy impact, expand, or even nullify traditional elements of assessment (e.g., fairness, validity, reliability, holisticism, etc.)?
How do we amplify multimodal assessment practices that are already happening in the writing classroom as well as practices that are less(er) known in scholarship? What connections between multimodal curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment are necessary to promote and practice social justice in the classroom?
How does institutional context allow or disallow socially just multimodal pedagogy and assessment? How is multimodal assessment taken up across institutions such as Historically Black Colleges & Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Two-Year Colleges, Tribal Colleges and Universities, private universities, public universities, and K-12 classrooms?
How does “template-driven design” (Arola, 2010) impact the assessment of rhetorical choices? How do templates allow or disallow certain engagements with social justice concerns?
How does the rise of public-facing AI, which include technologies capable of not only text generation but also image, video, and sound generation, impact our assessment practices? And how will we develop antiracist, ethical, equitable, and socially just heuristics in response to this?
How might scholars' emphasis on the linguistic mode (e.g., alphabetic text; written language) limit the ability for holistic adoption of antiracist assessment practices?
How might current, transnational activism on college campuses engaging multimodality inform our assessment practices within and beyond the classroom? Yancey (2004) highlights that a great deal of composing happens outside of formal education settings. In turn, what socially just multimodal assessment practices occur outside formal educational settings?
How are joy and coalition essential in the work of assessment, especially at the intersections of social justice and multimodal frameworks?
Editorial Commitments
Editiorial Commitments.mp3As editors, we (Gavin, Ashanka, and Shane) are committed to the heuristic set out in the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices. We will insist authors and reviewers engage in antiracist reading and reviewing practices and demonstrate through citational practices a commitment to a range of diverse perspectives and expertise. In addition, as editors adopting the heuristic, we will:
Recognize a range of expertise and encourage citation practices that represent diverse canons, epistemological foundations, and ways of knowing.
Identify, intervene in and/or prevent harmful scholarly work—both in publication processes and in published scholarship.
Establish and state clear but flexible contingency plans for review processes that prioritize humanity over production.
Make the review and publishing process transparent.
Value the labor of those involved in the review process.
Commit to inclusivity among reviewers and in editorial board makeup.
To these points, as editors, we are committed to an editorial pedagogy enacted through our availability to meet with contributors, provide revision-oriented feedback, and account for the various circumstances that may make publishing difficult for contributors, especially those from marginalized communities.
Submitting Proposals
Submitting Proposals.mp3Please submit a project proposal in the form of a 2-minute video/audio clip, detailed infographic, or one page of text that details your argument, research question, and deliverable. Your proposal should address your goals and purposes and how your project will be “born-digital.”
For our purposes, born-digital means the argument is mediated in a way that cannot easily be produced in traditional publishing venues (e.g., print collections or journals); that is, using video, audio, images, and other interactive composing tools and modalities. Please review recent publications from Computers and Composition Digital Press and the journal Kairos for examples.
Project proposals should be submitted no later than August 16, 2024 using the Google Form below. You may send inquiries or schedule a meeting to discuss your ideas with Gavin, Ashanka, and Shane by emailing multimodalassessmentcollection@gmail.com.
Timeline
Timeline.mp3Proposals Due: August 16, 2024
Decisions: Mid-September 2024
Full Drafts: March 2025
References
Arola, K. L. (2010). The design of web 2.0: The rise of the template, the fall of design. Computers and composition, 27(1), 4–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2009.11.004
Cagle, L.E., Eble. M.F., Gonzales, L., Johnson, M.A., Johnson, N.R., Jones, N.N., Lane, L., Mckoy, T., Moore, K.R., Reynoso, R., Rose, E.J., Patterson, G., Sànchez, F., Shivers-McNair, A., Simmons, M., Stone, E.M., Tham, J., Walton, R., & Williams, M.F. (2021). Anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices: A heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic
Condon, F. & Young, V. A. (Eds.). (2013, August 7). Anti-racist activism: Teaching rhetoric and writing [Special Issue]. Across the Disciplines, 10. Retrieved from https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/special/race
Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. The WAC Clearinghouse; Parlor Press. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/inoue/
Inoue, A. B., & Poe, M. (Eds.). (2012). Race and Writing Assessment. Peter Lang.
Johnson, G. P. (2021). Grades as a technology of surveillance: Normalization, control, and big data in the teaching of writing. In E. Beck and L. Hutchinson Campos (Eds), Privacy matters: Conversations about surveillance within and beyond the classroom. (pp. 53–72). Utah State University Press.
Kumashiro, K. (2002). Troubling education: Queer activism and antioppressive pedagogy. Routledge.
McKee, H. A., & DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.). (2013). Digital writing assessment & evaluation. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State UP. https://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae
Poe. M. (2013). Re-framing race in teaching writing across the curriculum. Across the disciplines, 10. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2013.10.3.06
Poe, M., & Inoue, A. B. (2016). Toward writing as social justice: An idea whose time has come. College English 79(2), 119–126. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44805913
Poe, M., Inoue, A. B., & Elliot, N. (Eds.). (2018). Writing assessment, social justice, and the advancement of opportunity. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi. org/10.37514/PER-B.2018.0155
Teston, C., Previte, B., & Hashlamon, Y. (2019). The grind of multimodal work in professional writing pedagogies. Computers and composition, 52, 195–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2019.01.007
West-Puckett, S. (2016). Making classroom writing assessment more visible, equitable, and portable through digital badging. College English, 79(2). https://lead.nwp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WestPuckett-WritingAssessmentBadging.pdf
West-Puckett, S., Caswell, N. I., & Banks, W. P. (2023). Failing sideways: Queer possibilities for writing assessment. University Press of Colorado.
Whithaus, C. (Ed.). (2014). Multimodal assessment [Special issue]. Computers and Composition, 31.
Yancey, K. B. (2004). Made not only in words: Composition in a new key. College Composition and Communication, 56(2).