Applying Critical Pedagogy to Assessing Writing Today: Ideas from Ira Shor

I know I am still at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to knowing the factors that affect assessment of writing, particularly multimodal compositions. Aside from considering the elements of such compositions--such as sound, visual images, document design and layout, interactivity, and content--I'm particularly interested in underlying pedagogies relating to assessment.

While studying pedagogical approaches in graduate composition studies courses, I was  interested in critical pedagogy stemming from educators including Paolo Freire, bell hooks, Henry Giroux, Doug Kellner, Ira Shor, and critical theory about social power and authority from Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. 21st Century Schools, an organization that provides educational staff development and curriculum design resources, provides a detailed flow chart of how critical pedagogy developed since the days of Plato and Aristotle. An overriding theme in critical pedagogy is commitment to empower the powerless and transform conditions which perpetuate injustice, i.e. discrimination in education. 

For my current research on critical pedagogy, I explored Ira Shor’s 1996 book, When Students Have Power. This text exemplifies his ideas as a proponent of teaching democratically and sharing power with students versus a traditional, patriarchal, patronizing approach of teachers being the source of knowledge who pour information into students. I hoped to find ideas about grading and assessments that could be applied to the 21st Century classroom. 

I simplify Shor’s ideas about quantitative and qualitative assessment for the sake of space in this blog. But I do want to share a quote that underscores critical pedagogy in the writing classroom, that shapes his choice of quantitative and qualitative grading methods.  He introduces his pedagogy by disclosing his own journey as a teacher: “A teacher who draws from a trust-me, I have your best interests at heart when it comes to grades is an infantilizing attitude.” Shor had, in the past, fallen back on ethos, or his sincerity, ethical posture, his identity as a dead-serious teacher, his face and voice radiating fairness, competence, good intentions, and so on.  He admitted that this infantilizing attitude had been a way to maintain his authority by giving a paternal, mysterious response to a reasonable, direct student query about what deserves an A, B, or less. 

      
“Politically, unilateral authority benefits from infantilizing the students if a traditional teacher talks down to them as if they are children, then that makes the teacher papa, the boss. This personalizes the power relations in a patriarchal way.  Now, students hate to be patronized, commanded, or manipulated, which is what paternal vagueness about grading does, by mystifying the power relations of the classroom into unspoken subjective standards of judgment exercised by an elder whose authority must not be questioned.” (p. 81).

Thus, he developed what he calls democratic teaching, a method that emerged as a result of critical theory in education, where teachers share power and authority with students in classrooms. He differentiates between quantitative and qualitative assessments, which I find to be immediately applicable to writing assessments today.  Before reading his work, it had not occurred to me that using quantitative assessments could be construed to be discriminative against students who may be of a lesser income bracket and work more than one job, thus having little time to do school work. Quantitative assessments award numbers (numbers of words, pages, exercises written). Many in this bracket don’t own their own computers and have to go to a computer center or library to do assignments. This is in contrast to the environment of wealthier students who may receive support from parents, have higher paying jobs, own not only a desktop but possibly also a laptop and other mobile devices through which they can do volumes of assignments more easily.
 

Shor contrasts his quantitative grading to his reasoning behind qualitative assessment methods, wherein he uses rubrics and “contract grading.” In his qualitatively-graded assignments, he employs activities such as open-book essay tests and take-home exams which ask students to think through substantive issues.  I draw a parallel to this in today’s classroom by having students take home tests that require them to do in-depth research online to find various sources of information that cause them to substantively think through answers.

Shor designs rubrics for assignments that he grades qualitatively, and gives the rubrics to the students in advance to use as they develop their work. This gives the students the opportunity to self-assess their work as they go, enabling them to progressively work toward improvements. I have seen this type of grading method used in graduate level classes, but not at the undergraduate level. 

Shor's ideas raise questions for me about today’s classrooms: Would it be discriminative, then, to use quantitative assessment methods, such as number of blog posts, number of pages written, word counts, attendance, absences, and other quantitative factors in grading?  Shor draws from Meier’s 1989 text, “The Case Against Standardized Achievement Tests” that Terry Meier wrote for Rethinking Schools. His research found that standardized test scores also correlate with race and with family income, being biased against students from working, poor, and non-white homes.  I plan to find contemporary research on this that reflects 21st Century statistics so I can make comparisons.

As a note, Ira Shor is a Professor of Rhetoric/Composition at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island/CUNY (as of 2010). He gave a keynote address, "Can Critical Teaching Change the World?" at the Alternative Education Resource organization Feb. 20, 2010.  Watch this video of his talk.  In it, he raises these questions:  "Can critical teachers indeed change the world for the better? Can classrooms inviting students to question the status quo, to consider inequality and injustice in society, to probe the ethics of power and the civics of knowledge–transform a cynical, conservative, test-tormented age into a new progressive era?"

His questions are relevant to any digital writing classroom where students become engaged in analyzing current issues and exercising critical thinking skills.