Absences Late Assigns . Missed Assigns . Ignored Assigns .
A 4 or less 5 0 0
B 4 or less 5 0 0
C 5 6 1 0
D 6 7 2 1
F 7 8 or more 2 2 or more
Note that the assumption in my bookkeeping is that all students are doing the work appropriately and adequately. My assumption was, and I said this to the class, everyone will do the work, or is doing the work, to earn a “B.” It is only when someone doesn’t turn something in, or turns in something incomplete, that a mark in my grade book is recorded. Items #4, #5, and #6 in the contract explain the differences between a late, missed, and ignored assignment.43 In es- sence, the main differences lie in how much time goes by before the assignment is turned in. In addition to the above table, the contract stipulates a “plea” or a “gimme,” which amounts to a get-out-of-jail-free card. A student can use one plea at any time in the course to erase an absence, a late assignment, a missed (which becomes a late) assignment, etc.
Note that there is no difference between an “A” and a “B” course grade on this grid. This is because in this course, the number or quantity of assignments for students striving for “As” was technically the same as those who were okay with a “B,” but if a student wanted an “A,” then her two projects would have to be twice the length and depth as her peers shooting for a “B.” This roughly amounted to 10 academic sources researched and incorporated into each proj- ect’s final document and that document needed to be around 10-12 pages in length.
Negotiating the grading contract moved students away from focusing on grades, and refocused their attention on their labors, in particular on the pro- cesses of reading, writing, and assessing their own and others’ drafts. My hope was that focusing on the processes of writing assessment in the course, processes
I was largely absent from (except in their design), would also reorient students to other kinds of purposes for their writing and emphasize other ecological prod- ucts. Thus the assessment of writing framed the course at large through the contract, the writing group’s primary activities, and the projects’ activities. This re-orienting to new processes of assessment, assessment products, and purposes for writing and its assessment did seem to occur, and I consider it important to any antiracist writing assessment ecology.
Reorientation in the environment can be productive, unproductive, helpful, ambiguous, or harmful to students, but I argue that some kind of reorientation always occurs. And it affects the culture of the classroom and students’ learning. In the next section, I discuss the way students oriented themselves in our writing assessment ecology, particularly through the renegotiation of the contract at the midpoint of the semester. The absence of grades and refocus on labor was central to this reorientation.
Most students reoriented themselves in the ecology by rethinking the nature of their labor, not the perceived quality of their texts. The labors of the ecology, of writing and reading (judging), are fundamentally ontological acts that con- nect us to places in the ecology, as well as to other people. It is through our labors that we experience inter-being, which help us negotiate the problematizing in the borderlands of the ecology—in fact, one critical labor is problem posing. Robert Yagelski (2011) offers a good way to understand the labors of writing as a way of (inter)being by describing his own act of writing:
As I write, I am—but not because of the writing; rather, the writing intensifies my awareness of myself, my sense of being, which is prior to but, right now, coterminous with this act of writing. And if I attend to my awareness—if I become aware of that awareness, as it were; if I focus my attention on my attention during this act of writing, as I am doing right now—it is not my sense of self as a separate, thinking being that is intensified but my sense of self as existing in this moment and at the same time “inhabiting” the physical place where I am sitting as well as the scene in the coffee shop that I am imagining and trying to describe, a scene removed from me in time and space at this moment; thus, I am connected to this moment and those other moments I have been trying to describe and indeed to all those other selves I’ve mentioned and many I have not mentioned and the things around me now and those that were around me then and even you, the reader I am imagining who will, I think, at some point, really
be a reader of this text and thus be connected to me as well in a very real way through your act of reading at some future date, which means that this moment of writing right now somehow encompasses that future moment, too.
It is in this sense that I am as I am writing. The writing does not create me, but in the act of writing I am; by writing I reaffirm and proclaim my being in the here and now. The act of writing, in this sense, is a way of being; it is an ontological act. (p. 104)
I wish I could say that I showed my class this passage when dscussing what labor means in our class, but I didn’t. What I hope you can hear or see in Yagelski’s rendering of the act of writing as a way of (inter)being in the world is that place is vital to a writer’s or reader’s inter-being. Place is vital to the ontological mean- ing of the labors we do in the class. I wanted students to see that the labor of writing, for instance, is the only access we have to writing. And if our goals are in some way to write more self-consciously, more critically, more problematical- ly—to do more than write right now—then we must have access to ourselves as writers in the act of writing, and we must see the places in which those labors are done as part of that access, part of the labors of writing and judging. Thus is the nature of the inter-being of labor and place, of writing and one’s acts of being that inter-are with where we write and who we write for.
And why is the notion of labor as processes of inter-being important to an antiracist writing assessment ecology? Because it allows locally diverse students and teacher to share in the ontological essence of others’ writing, no matter how different that writing is from our own writing or from our expectations of it. It allows us to access place as part of the labor of writing and its judgment. It allows us to realize that no matter who you are, another reader, a very different per- son, can inter-be with you, and in fact, must inter-be with you, which provides grounds for compassionate problematizing, posing tough questions that come from a place of shared essence. It helps us feel as we judge. This inter-being of place, people, and their labors connects us in tangible ways through our labor, our work, our doing of things, through our bodies, not just our minds. Oth- er’s writing and its success and failure, then are our own successes and failures. When students share in the ontological essence of locally diverse writing, they have a good chance at confronting difference from a white racial habitus and posing problems about the nature of judgment to each other.
Still, you may be wondering why “labor” as the central metaphor for our grading contract and the classroom writing assessment ecology? Why not “work” or “process”? The idea of labor as valuable isn’t that strange for most students.