Abstract This article explores the impact of labor-based grading contracts on student attitudes and perceptions within multilingual First-Year Composition (FYC) sections at an R1 university. Data collected qualitatively and quantitatively examined correlations between labor-based grading contracts and shifts in student attitudes toward writing and overall learning experiences. Findings revealed that some students found labor-based grading contracts motivating, leading to improved attitudes toward writing, while others found themselves demotivated or stressed by the absence of traditional grades. The concept of fairness emerged as a key concern, challenging the assumption that labor-based grading contracts universally benefit students. This article underscores the need for nuanced implementation of labor-based grading contracts and encourages a student-centered approach to foster equitable and antiracist writing assessment practices. It acknowledges the potential benefits of labor-based contract grading, but also its associated challenges, and calls for a critical examination of grading contracts within local contexts to ensure they genuinely advance opportunities for underrepresented students.

AbstractWriting assessment and social justice rely largely on success-trajectory narratives, which sideline productive failure as a means of resisting normative futurity-based modes of education and policy. This essay offers an alternative perspective on failure in writing assessment and social justice by illustrating how relying on rhetoric as a hope and means for positive change can undermine aims of social justice and a critical education. By examining the queer (non)possibilities for assessment and acceptance without dependence on constant improvement and success, instructors may find more inclusive ways of thinking about the value of rhetoric's role in a generative acceptance of difference.

This article examines how faculty at one college respond to student writing, how students interpret that feedback, and how through collective self-evaluation and community-building workshops some faculty paved a path toward more productive response. The first part of the findings resonate with what scholars in the 1980s discovered: that teachers’ feedback strategies often operate at cross-purposes with students’ motivations and understandings. Asking why, after forty years of scholarship, such counterproductive strategies still prevail, the study suggests burdensome workloads, lack of training, rigid applications of rubrics and genres, and isolation from peers are to blame. It then profiles three teachers who, despite these obstacles, provide deep-reaching feedback. Although their pedagogies and backgrounds differ, they share common bonds, teaching authentically from who they are, an approach that is open to all teachers once they feel freed to adopt it.

Classroom writing assessment practices can interrogate white supremacy through the way readers judge student writing. Furthermore, writing assessments designed and engaged in as ecologies offer social justice projects that can explore judgment as a racialized discourse. The author demonstrates one application of an antiracist writing assessment ecology through a practice called “problem posing the nature of judgment and language” and discusses the problem posing of two ecological places in the class.

This article examines a central pedagogical dilemma within queer studies: with an increase in public attention to LGBT concerns (and an investment in the categories that comprise the LGBT rubric), how might we prioritize the complexities of queerness within a social context that tends to privilege discrete designations for identity?

Outcomes assessment is necessary in higher education partly because it can counteract courseocentrism, the assumption teaching naturally occurs in isolated classrooms that leave teachers knowing little about one another and that leave students vulnerable to confusingly mixed messages as they go from course to course and subject to subject.

The New York Times and others regularly implore us to raise the quality of teacher education. This essay explores why it is so difficult to do so, particularly at the urban, public institutions that produce many of our nation's teachers. It describes one such attempt to raise standards in writing. I document the process of building a new writing assessment program, including a writing assessment exam and a remediation program. I discuss our rubric and scoring procedures, samples of student work, and the poor score trends for our exam. I describe the difficulties in working without adequate resources, and I examine the ways in which our program posed a threat to the economics of the university. I conclude that efforts to raise program quality and produce higher-quality graduates are unlikely to succeed without fundamental changes to the economy of education generally and teacher education in particular.