The Hidden Inequities In Labor Based Contract Grading

Current Arguments in Composition Series The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading intervenes in the increasingly popular practice of labor-based grading by expanding the scope of this assessment practice to include students who are disabled and multiply marginalized. Through the lens of disability studies, the book critiques the assumption that labor is a neutral measure by which to assess students and explores how labor-based grading contracts put certain groups of students at a disadvantage. Ellen C. Carillo offers engagement-based grading contracts as an alternative that would provide a more equitable assessment model for students of color, those with disabilities, and students who are multiply marginalized. This short book explores the history of labor-based grading contracts, reviews the scholarship on this assessment tool, highlights the ways in which it normalizes labor as an unbiased tool, and demonstrates how to extend the conversation in new and generative ways both in research and in classrooms. Carillo encourages instructors to reflect on their assessment practices by demonstrating how even assessment methods that are designed through a social-justice lens may unintentionally privilege some students over others.

Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times poses critical questions of representation, accessibility, social justice, affect, and labor to better understand the entwined future of composition and rhetoric. This collection of essays offers innovative approaches for socially attuned learning and best practices to support administrators and instructors. In doing so, these essays guide educators in empowering students to write effectively and prepare for their role as global citizens. Editors Rachel McCabe and Jennifer Juszkiewicz consider how educators can respond to multiple current crises relating to composition and rhetoric with generosity and cautious optimism; in the process, they address the current concerns about the longevity of the humanities. By engaging with social constructivist, critical race, socioeconomic, and activist pedagogies, each chapter provides an answer to the question, How can our courses help students become stronger writers while contending with current social, environmental, and ethical questions posed by the world around them? The contributors consider this question from numerous perspectives, recognizing the important ways that power and privilege affect our varying means of addressing this question. Relying on both theory and practice, Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times engages the future of composition and rhetoric as a discipline shaped by recent and current global events. This text appeals to early-career writing program administrators, writing center directors, and professional specialists, as well as Advanced Placement high school instructors, graduate students, and faculty teaching graduate-level pedagogy courses.

As societies strive for progress, the need to ensure equal access to education for all, irrespective of socioeconomic, ethnic, or gender backgrounds, emerges as a pivotal factor. In the thought-provoking book, Socio-Economic Implications of Global Educational Inequalities, the complex interplay between education and its profound impact on human capital, economic growth, and development is meticulously explored. The book delves into the multifaceted dimensions of education as a critical determinant of income and gender disparities, poverty levels, and financial sector advancement. Drawing on the expertise of professional researchers, this comprehensive work presents a panoramic view of the socio-economic implications of educational inequalities on a global scale. By examining the profound link between education and various societal aspects, the book opens avenues for insightful discussions and strategic policymaking. In addition to catering to scholars and researchers, this book addresses a broader audience, including individuals, managers, and governmental employees who recognize education's pivotal role in shaping economic, financial, and social landscapes.

In Schoolishness, Susan D. Blum continues her journey as an anthropologist and educator. The author defines "schoolishness" as educational practices that emphasize packaged "learning," unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries, resulting in personal and educational alienation, dependence, and dread. Drawing on critical, progressive, and feminist pedagogy in conversation with the anthropology of learning, and building on the insights of her two previous books Blum proposes less-schoolish ways of learning in ten dimensions, to lessen the mismatch between learning in school and learning in the wild. She asks, if learning is our human "superpower," why is it so difficult to accomplish in school? In every chapter Blum compares the fake learning of schoolishness with successful examples of authentic learning, including in her own courses, which she scrutinizes critically. Schoolishness is not a pedagogical how-to book, but a theory-based phenomenology of institutional education. It has moral, psychological, and educational arguments against schoolishness that, as Blum notes, "rhymes with foolishness."

Failing Sideways is an innovative and fresh approach to assessment that intersects writing studies, educational measurement, and queer rhetorics. While valuing and representing the research, theory, and practice of assessment, authors Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole I. Caswell, and William P. Banks demonstrate the ways that students, teachers, and other interested parties can find joy and justice in the work of assessment. A failure-oriented assessment model unsettles some of the most common practices, like rubrics and portfolios, and challenges many deeply held assumptions about validity and reliability in order to ask what could happen if assessment was oriented toward possibility and potential. Working to engage a more capacious writing construct, the authors propose queer validity inquiry (QVI) as a model for assessment that values failure, affect, identity, and materiality. These overlapping lenses help teachers honor parts of writing and learning that writing studies faculty have struggled to hold onto in a world overly focused on quickness and efficiency in schools. Through programmatic and classroom examples, Failing Sideways privileges what is valued in the classroom but traditionally ignored in assessments. Reimagining what matters in the teaching and learning of writing and using assessment data differently, this book demonstrates what writing can be and could do in a more diverse and just world.

Classrooms as communities are temporary, but the racial effects can be long term. The biblical studies classroom can be a site of personal and social transformation. To make it a space for positive change, the contributors to this volume question and reevaluate traditional teaching practices and assessment tools that foreground white, Western scholarship in order to offer practical guidance for an antiracist pedagogy. The introduction and fifteen essays provide tools for engaging issues of social context and scriptural authority, nationalism and religious identities, critical race theory, and how race, gender, and class can be addressed empathetically. Contributors Sonja Anderson, Randall C. Bailey, Eric D. Barreto, Denise Kimber Buell, Greg Carey, Haley Gabrielle, Wilda C. Gafney, Julián Andrés González Holguín, Sharon Jacob, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Francisco Lozada Jr., Shelly Matthews, Roger S. Nam, Wongi Park, Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Abraham Smith, and Kay Higuera Smith share their experience creating classrooms that are spaces that enable the production of new knowledge without reproducing a white subject of the geopolitical West.

Reaching All Writers brings together decades of writing studies experience, research, and scholarship to help organize first-year writing courses around inclusive teaching practices and foundational concepts that support disciplinary learning for all college writers, including students who have been excluded from more selective higher-education institutions. Using threshold concepts and transfer as a foundation, the authors provide an invaluable resource for multiple contexts: instructors working off the tenure track and/or at multiple institutions; two-year college programs without a writing program administrator; and writing program graduate teaching assistant training courses. Each chapter includes an overview of a threshold concept, disciplinary background readings, practical teaching strategies, assignment and learning activity ideas, assessment principles, examples from student and instructor perspectives, and questions for reflection and discussion. Reaching All Writers describes effective teaching practices to help all college writing instructors, regardless of their institutional contexts, make changes that support equitable and inclusive learning opportunities—with a focus on teaching students whose backgrounds and learning experiences are different from those with more educational or economic privilege. Both new and experienced teachers adapting first-year college writing courses will find the book’s blend of practical strategies and disciplinary knowledge a useful companion for facilitating new classroom and program needs or designing new teaching assistant training courses.

Informed, in part, by sessions at the Assessment Institute in Indianapolis, the oldest and largest U.S. event focused on assessing and improving higher education, this second edition of Trends in Assessment is intended to encapsulate lessons learned from the recent past, reflect the current state, and inspire future directions for higher education assessment. Throughout the volume, organizers of the Assessment Institute contribute chapters framed around some of the major topics, tracks, and themes from the annual program. Each chapter provides important background and context with attention to the significance of the topic, describes current and enduring trends, and offers ideas about emerging trends and their implications for higher education. Chapters conclude with a summary of the main trends and questions for consideration and discussion. The volume is also influenced by the work of key Assessment Institute national-level partners, along with the substantial bodies of literature on student learning and development, assessment and improvement, and higher education administration. This book provides readers with information, strategies, and resources on assessment concepts and approaches across a broad and diverse mix of disciplines, institutional and organizational types, and levels of experience in higher education assessment. Designed to be incorporated into workshops, professional development programs, and courses, faculty and staff members, educational developers, student affairs practitioners, and graduate students of higher education administration will find the ideas and information presented in Trends in Assessment a useful resource on assessment and improvement in contemporary higher education.