I originally wrote most of this post, particularly my personal family connection to Asao Inoue’s book, as a review blog post on February 7, 2019 for a seminar on Computers and Writing with Professor Michael Salvo. I’ve written this piece with the intent that it is accessible and relevant to my family and friends as well as my academic colleagues.
Professor Asao Inoue and his wife, Kelly, recently established the Asao and Kelly Inoue Antiracist Teaching Endowment at Oregon State University to fund an antiracist teaching conference, summer workshops, and eventually scholarships for students who wish to focus on antiracist approaches to teaching. Donations to the fund can be made through the OSU Foundation, and on his website, Inoue explains the endowment in greater detail. If, like me, you have benefitted from his work, I hope you will consider donating.
My Original Reflections on Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies
Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future by Asao Inoue (2015) is published open access by the WAC Clearinghouse and can be found for free here. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies won the 2017 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. It was also the winner of the Best Book Award from the Council of Writing Program Administrators in 2017.
I was initially drawn to this book because I had been thinking about variation in the English language, particularly as I was taking a seminar on World Englishes. At the end of 2018, my work began to focus on hybridity both in terms of culture/language and also in terms of composition with computers. These features coupled with my ongoing interest in and commitment to antiracism and awareness of bias attracted me to this book. In the context of computers and writing, I was interested to see how digital spaces and composition both support and challenge antiracist writing assessment.
This book is rich in many ways. What follows is a brief synopsis of a few points I found to be highlights, some illustrative quotes, and a significant personal connection I made while engaging the text.
The research question: “How does a college writing instructor investigate racism in his classroom writing assessment practices, then design writing assessments so that racism is not only avoided but antiracism is promoted?” (pg. 3).
The Existing Scene: There has been lots of writing assessment research published on race and the ways in which students of color are often measured as performing at a sub-par level compared to their white peers. But this is limited view of the overall story of what’s really going on in writing classrooms.
Filling the Gap in the Existing Scene: Existing scholars have not yet developed an antiracist pedagogy directed toward system-wide changes. While individual shifts in behavior are acknowledged, we need theory and praxis that can effect changes to the system. Inoue uses the theories of Paolo Freire, race theory, whiteness theory, Buddhism, and Marxian philosophy to develop a theory of the classroom and broader writing assessment as ecology. From this theory, Inoue offers extensive examples of pedagogy he has developed and shares sources and resources for free use.
Inoue’s Project: “This book attempts to theorize and illustrate an antiracist writing assessment,” (pg. 9). Further, his “tendency is to have a larger ecological purpose-product established in the ecology” (pg. 293). In order to confront any racism, students should experience a problematizing of pre-existing theory for the college writing classroom by “theorizing writing assessment as an ecology, a complex system made up of several interconnected elements” (pg. 9).
White Racial Habitus, Ecology, and Sangha
While many academic considerations of race in writing classrooms focus on minority perspectives, this book develops a sustained analysis of the dominant white racial habitus that has traditionally steered standards of learning by imposing unchecked norms. Habitus shares the same root as “habit” and can be thought of as the particular way a person or group of people percieve and react to the world. Habitus was heavily theorized by Pierre Bourdieu and Inoue draws on it to help teachers notice how white habitus in the classroom “seems invisible,” maintains power by appearing as “unraced” or neutral and presents as “non-political” (pg. 47). White racial habitus simultaneously “defines and denies difference” (pg. 47) and while it often leads to racist effects in the classroom, its terminology is often covert.
The idea of habitus also invites us to consider ecology. In developing notions of ecology as metaphor for the classroom, I was stuck by the way Inoue turns to Buddhist teachings and the notion of Sangha (pg. 102). Sangha can be understood as meaning community. Sangha also means that we practice writing and learning socially, that is, we write and learning as part of a community. Somehow after decades of being in classrooms as a student and teacher, and also being a Zen buddhist practitioner, I had never once thought of the classroom as sangha until reading this book. Having to oppourtunity to read to scholarship that makes draws references Buddhism as a theory of community was refreshing and affirming.
Ecology as a metaphor allows for a simultaneous recognition of individual students’ backgrounds and capabilities while understanding that students always operate within broader systems including the classroom and university. Ecology recognizes that were are all products and producers of our educational environments.
Pedagogical Heuristic: Labor Based Grading Contracts
Principle One: “How much labor you do is more important to your learning and growth as a reader and writer than the quality of your writing”(pg. 187).
The bulwark of Inoue’s practice is a movement toward involving students in their assessment and basing course grades on the effort and labor that they put into the class, not necessarily the composition the produce. This is a way of circumventing assessment that holds all work to standards which are usually developed (often unknowingly) from white racial habitus. This is not, however, to say that there are no standards. Contract grading has existed for decades and has flourished as a tool for teachers and students to facilitate better learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the professional working world, I’ve experienced a version of labor-based grading contracts when I was asked to evaluate myself before reading my supervisor’s evaluation.
The main points here is that labor-based evaluation is a tool that teachers can use to promote better antiracist learning communities. By involving student learners in their evaluation, they become part of the process that assesses their growth and performance.
My Personal Connection
Beyond my connection as a writing instructor and student of Buddhism, I share another personal connection with Asao. My family name, two generations back, is also Inoue (though we spell it “Inouye;” the variation is an effect of Romanization of a Japanese name). My maternal grandmother, Gloria Kazuko Inouye, spent nearly three years of her life as a high school-aged girl incarcerated in the internment camp at Tule Lake, California (1942-1945). She, like many others, was an American citizen and was incarcerated without due process, targeted by racist policy.
For generations, our family has remained largely silent about Japanese internment, so I asked my mom if it would be okay for me to share this story in the context of the newly formed Asao and Kelly Inoue Antiracist Teaching Endowment Fund and she told me “educate the world so that it doesn’t happen again.” So here’s a story we’ve been sitting with for a while.
Several years ago, I was helping clean my grandfather’s home and came across a small brown booklet with a handwritten label on the cover reading “Autograph.” It’s about the size of a large check book and is bound with a folded metal clasp. Inside are pages of recycled paper. On the pages are farewell wishes and autographs that my grandmother’s friends wrote to her when they were all released from the camp in 1945. It reads a lot like a high school yearbook, and in some ways, for her it was. Some of the handwriting is in English and some is in Japanese. One striking page includes a sketch of Mount Shasta (visible from the camp), text in Japanese, and in quoted English the phrase “Where there is a will there’s a way.”
While I’ve kept this booklet packed away, this course in computers and composition and reading Inoue’s book prompted me to take digital photos to archive the book. Images of the cover, signature page, and page depicting Mount Shasta are attached below .
I see this autograph book as an example of antiracist multimodal composition. Given the limited resources that were available in the internment camp, an environment imbued with white racial habitus, this synthesis of available materials became the only material link I’ve ever know to this chapter in my family history. The Japanese term, “Gaman” is roughly translated as “perseverance” and more carefully as ” patience, tolerance, and suffering through the unbearable stoically while maintaining dignity.” Gaman was a common term people mentioned in the camps as way to encourage one another through a political ecology that none of them chose; it sets the bar for labor-based contracts unfathomably high. While much of their composed and embodied experience has been silenced, it is not forgotten. Mira Shimabukuro details the many different ways Gaman was used (eg. to express solidarity or to express dissent) in what she calls the “contested rhetorics of gaman” in a 2011 article in College English (I can provide access to this article, if you need it).
But at some point patient endurance breaks into bold action.
That I felt comfortable sharing this piece of my family history in an academic context was due largely my supportive colleges and professor in that seminar, but without the third voice and the textual ethos of Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, I’m almost certain that it would have never surfaced. Whenever we take calculated risks, it’s important to notice and appreciate how taking those risks is often made easier because of someone else’s hard work. I’ve benefitted much from Professor Inoue’s work, so I’m supporting the Asao and Kelly Inoue Antiracist Teaching Endowment Fund.