Principles for Assessing Writing: Whose Views Become the Standard?

My post of March 19 touched on my interest in critical theory/critical pedagogy and how I might apply it to a digital writing classroom.  While searching for others sources to make connections between critical pedagogy and assessment of digital writing, I found, "The Relationship Between Critical Pedagogy and Assessment in Teacher Education." 

The article addresses my question in my last post about assessment methods that could be construed as discriminatory (from the perspective of critical pedagogy), and offers some principles I am considering applying in my writing classroom. The text I pulled from the article is listed as a principle in bold, and my comments follow:  

• "To achieve a critical approach to assessment, it must be centered on dialogic interactions so that the roles of teacher and learner are shared and all voices are validated."

I find that dialogic interactions between myself as instructor with my students would be a natural aspect of qualitative assessments, but not with quantitative assessments. Short-answer essays, contract-based grading, and the like, encourage the voice of the student and a writer/audience relationship between teacher/student. 

• " It must foster an integrated approach to theory and practice, or what [Paolo] Freire would preferably term as praxis - theory in action."

Theory in action could include the teacher working with students to develop critical consciousness--help them to develop the ability to define, to analyze, to problematize the economic, political, and cultural forces that shape their lives, and to see that these forces do not completely determine their lives. Using blogging in the writing classroom is a great way to do this.  KSU graduate student David Caudill's idea of using Twitterfall at the beginning of class as a freewriting tool for students to write responses to news events, is another.  Assessment of this type of writing would need to be qualitative and designed with the goal of building the student's language usage that leads toward the student becoming an agent of action. 

• "It must value and validate the experience students bring to the classroom and importantly, situate this experience at the center of the classroom content and process in ways that problematize it and make overt links with oppression and dominant discourses."

My comment to the above post relates here as well.  Another idea is to get students to write (blog, perhaps) about life experiences around themes such as family life, work, marriage, social interaction, that represents students' perceptions of the world. The instructor could orient the students to look at the presence of a dominant ideology that may be present, determine the source of it, look at how it is reproduced, decide whether it needs to be disrupted. This would make for some great writing exercises. My assessment of this type of exercise would be qualitative, centered on the student's degree of focusing in on the theme, their representation of it, the support of it through the body of the text, etc., using basic rhetorical principles.  

• "It must reinterpret the complex ecology of relationships in the classroom to avoid oppressive power relations and create a negotiated curriculum, including assessment, equally owned by teachers and students. Such an approach no doubt creates challenges and discomfort but opens up creative possibilities for the reinvention of assessment."

I like Ira Shor's idea (March 19 post) of using contract grading, or, with having students review my proposed rubric and then modifying it, so they could have a voice in its creation.  I've seen Dr. Laura McGrath do this in my Digital Technology in the Writing Classroom, when it came time to establishing an assessment tool for our class's collaborative statement on the class wiki. I enjoyed having the option to participate in this; however, I did not give my input as I wanted to observe how other students responded to the rubric without my comments included.

Some questions I raise now, as I did during my study of critical pedagogy last semester, are: Does critical pedagogy impose interpretations and ideas about oppression? Who determines what is oppression and who the oppressors are? Are we using doublespeak as we look at "emancipatory authority" of the instructor?  And what do our students have to gain from a scrutiny of values and conditions that work to ensure their privilege (the privilege of many)? These are points to be considered while designing assessments for writing exercises.