Our students enter the writing classroom with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and needs. They face struggles and experience triumphs in their families, communities, workplaces, and social circles as they navigate their identities within complicated power structures, like our schools. It is our responsibility to ensure that how we teach writing does not create additional barriers to learning and success, especially for students who are marginalized. But how do we carry out this obligation in the face of rigid standards, shrinking budgets, and political and educational systems that fear resistance, reward homogeneity, and place less and less value on critical thinking?
At the 41st Annual Spring Conference on the Teaching of Writing, we will explore how we, the teachers, can work together to ensure that ALL students have opportunities to succeed not just regardless of, but in recognition and celebration of, “important axes of identity, such as such as gender, race, class, physical and mental/emotional abledness, spirituality, and age” (Alexander & Wallace, 2009, p. 301). Building off of last year’s conference theme of “Difficult Conversations,” we ask that participants enter not just with passion and expertise, but grace and humility as we do the difficult work, together, to make the conference truly inclusive for all.
Our keynote speaker will be Asao B Inoue, Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. He is the 2019 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. He has been a past member of the CCCC Executive Committee, and the Executive Board of the Council of Writing Program Administrators.
Among his many articles and chapters on writing assessment, race, and racism, his article, “Theorizing Failure in U.S. Writing Assessments” in Research in the Teaching of English, won the 2014 CWPA Outstanding Scholarship Award. His co-edited collection, Race and Writing Assessment (2012), won the 2014 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection. His book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future(2015) won the 2017 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for a monograph and the 2015 CWPA Outstanding Book Award. More recently he has continued his scholarship in socially just classroom writing assessment through a co-edited collection, Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and The Advancement of Opportunity(2018), and a book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (2019).
