Now, I turn to discussing the seven ecological elements that constitute an- tiracist classroom writing assessment ecologies, elements that can be used to critique or transform ecologies as revolutionary antiracist projects in order to do more productively the Freirean problem-posing I’ve already discussed. In my discussion of each ecological element, I will attempt to offer ways that it can be a focal point to design and engage in antiracist writing assessment ecologies, particularly engaging students in problematizing their existential writing assess- ment situations. My larger argument in this chapter is to show how thinking in terms of these seven elements can help writing teachers develop antiracist class- room writing assessment ecologies that are more critical, sustainable, and fair for everyone. There may be other elements at work in local writing assessment ecologies, but these appear to be the seven basic elements that writing teachers can consider when understanding their own assessment ecologies and turning their efforts toward antiracist purposes.
The seven elements of antiracist writing assessment ecologies may seem com- monsensical to many, but not many consider them holistically and interconnect- ed when designing, engaging in, or investigating classroom writing assessments. Furthermore, I discuss them in terms of their potential to explain or aid in antiracist assessment agendas. Because they are inherently interlocking elements, because they inter-are, because they are more than what they are, often sharing in each other’s essences and transforming into each other, it easier to discuss them separately, particularly when explaining or designing antiracist classroom writing assessment ecologies. The seven interconnected and holistic elements are: power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products, and places.
Before I discuss each element separately, it is important to consider their complexity as a whole and interconnection to one another. In a recent article in which she argues that agency emerges from actions and reactions among people in the world, Marilyn Cooper (2011) uses complexity theory to ex- plain the system of rhetoric and people, one more nuanced than the writing ecology she explained in 1986. She says that “agency is an emergent property of embodied individuals,” and is “based in individuals’ lived knowledge that their actions are their own” (2011, p. 421). Emergent rhetorical agency is “a response to a perturbation that is shaped by the rhetor’s current goals and past
experiences,” but it’s also an “enactive” system—that is, individuals act without knowing exactly what they are doing or that they may be changing the system (Cooper, 2011, p. 426). Using complexity theorists, Cooper explains the way agency emerges, a process of “structural determination” very similar to Marxian determination in which changes in the system, such as persuasion, may be instigated by a person who employs rhetoric but whose specific effects on the system and the individuals who make it up are “determined by the structure of
the disturbed system’” (2011, p. 426). Thus large-scale or systemic changes may
not directly affect individuals’ behaviors, say changes in writing practices of a student in a classroom. The system is not a linear system, a one-to-one causal system. For instance, it is not always the case that when we give good feedback to a student, the student’s draft gets better. Rather, Cooper argues, complexity theory says that it is a circular causal system, termed “structural coupling,” in which one person’s actions affects others’ and those others react, adapting, which continues the chain of mutual adapting. All the elements in any writing assessment ecology work the same way. Change one, and the others change through mutual adapting.
Furthermore, reading these ecological elements as a part of a complex system is important—that is, they are more than the whole of the ecology, but this does not capture all of the complexity Cooper is suggesting. Cooper offers this defi- nition of the way complex systems can be understood:
Complex systems (an organism, a matter of concern) are self-organizing: order (and change) results from an ongoing process in which a multitude of agents interact frequently and in which the results of interactions feed back into the process. Emergent properties (such as agency) are not epiphenomena, nor “possessions” in any sense, but function as part of the systems in which they originate. And causation in complex systems is nonlinear: change arises not as the effect of a dis- crete cause, but from the dance of perturbation and response as agents interact. (2011, p.421)
Thus the complex system of an antiracist writing assessment ecology is an as- semblage of dancing elements, only one of which is people in the system, that interact and mutually adapt because of the perturbations in the ecology. Con- sequences (or products, as I’ll discuss later in this chapter) occur because of the ecology or complex system, not because of individual actions by students or a teacher or a rubric alone. They may be instigators, causing perturbations in the system, but it is the system, the ecology as a whole, that determines what possible outcomes, effects, changes, or products there will be. Thus any learning
or educational benefits to students one might hope from an antiracist writing assessment ecology will be a product of the dance of perturbations and response of elements in the entire complex system.
So while I discuss each element below separately, I hope you will see the complexity in which they inter-are. In one simple sense, all elements create any one given element. People and purposes, for example, help construct the places of the ecology, just as places, power, and processes create people. Likewise, the elements below always work in concert to create a complex system that contin- ually evolves the limits and pressures that form what it determines as outcomes or products.