Twenty-sixth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

Rubrics serve a necessary and oftentimes contentious purpose. Simplified, these tools for assessment provide instructors, students, and schools with a way to quantify student products and learning. Complicated, rubrics can be viewed more productively through other frames. For example, Peter Gallagher (2012) conceives of rubrics as an “articulation” between institutional constraints and writing program aims whereas Asao Inoue (2016) argues for assessment that acknowledges the racialized and politicized hegemonic underpinnings of traditional assessments of student writing. This paper addresses the needs of educators to develop rubrics that help us to assess the diversity of students and their work in the social milieu of today’s diverse society. Each academic quarter, writing program directors critique and revise the program rubrics to ensure that the rubrics assess program’s objectives for student writing. Yet, these rubrics show that MCWP has privileged a “white racial habitus” (Inoue 2016) that determines what we value in writing. Therefore, in order to better support student writers, rubric revision needs to address the following: In what ways do our current rubrics discount the experiences of students? How have we advantaged or disadvantaged students by holding them accountable to how well they learn to work within a potentially racist framework? Put another way, how can programs design fair and equitable rubrics that reflect an “articulation,” of the institutional pressure to meet a valued hegemonic ideal and the role race plays in the development and assessment of what constitutes “good” student work in today’s increasingly globalized societies.