Educators strive to create “assessment cultures” in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators discover and negotiate the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad’s 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on assessment practice is beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches. For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM experience provided not only an authentic assessment of their own programs, but a nuanced language through which they can converse in the always vexing, potentially divisive realm of assessment theory and practice. Of equal interest are the adaptations these writers invented for Broad’s original process, to make DCM even more responsive to local needs and exigencies. Organic Writing Assessment represents an important step in the evolution of writing assessment in higher education. This volume documents the second generation of an assessment model that is regarded as scrupulously consistent with current theory; it shows DCM’s flexibility, and presents an informed discussion of its limits and its potentials.

Educators strive to create “assessment cultures” in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators discover and negotiate the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad’s 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on assessment practice is beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches. For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM experience provided not only an authentic assessment of their own programs, but a nuanced language through which they can converse in the always vexing, potentially divisive realm of assessment theory and practice. Of equal interest are the adaptations these writers invented for Broad’s original process, to make DCM even more responsive to local needs and exigencies. Organic Writing Assessment represents an important step in the evolution of writing assessment in higher education. This volume documents the second generation of an assessment model that is regarded as scrupulously consistent with current theory; it shows DCM’s flexibility, and presents an informed discussion of its limits and its potentials.

In Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, Asao B. Inoue theorizes classroom writing assessment as a complex system that is “more than” its interconnected elements. To explain how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to literacy learning, Inoue incorporates ideas about the white racial habitus that informs dominant discourses in the academy and other contexts.

Economies of Writing advances scholarship on political economies of writing and writing instruction, considering them in terms of course subject, pedagogy, technology, and social practice. Taking the "economic" as a necessary point of departure and contention for the field, the collection insists that writing concerns are inevitably participants in political markets in their consideration of forms of valuation, production, and circulation of knowledge with labor and with capital. Approaching the economic as plural, contingent, and political, chapters explore complex forces shaping the production and valuation of literacies, languages, identities, and institutions and consider their implications for composition scholarship, teaching, administration, and public rhetorics. Chapters engage a range of issues, including knowledge transfer, cyberpublics, graduate writing courses, and internationalized web domains. Economies of Writing challenges dominant ideologies of writing, writing skills, writing assessment, language, writing technology, and public rhetoric by revealing the complex and shifting valuations of writing practices as they circulate within and across different economies. The volume is a significant contribution to rhetoric and composition’s understanding of and ways to address its seemingly perennial unease about its own work. Contributors: Anis Bawarshi, Deborah Brandt, Jenn Fishman, T. R. Johnson, Jay Jordan, Kacie Kiser, Steve Lamos, Donna LeCourt, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Samantha Looker, Katie Malcolm, Paul Kei Matsuda, Joan Mullin, Jason Peters, Christian J. Pulver, Kelly Ritter, Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Tony Scott, Scott Wible, Yuching Jill Yang, James T. Zebroski

In this book, authors Murphy and O’Neill propose a new way forward, moving away from high-stakes, test-based writing assessment and the curriculum it generates and toward an approach to assessment that centers on student learning and success. Reviewing the landscape of writing assessment and existing research-based theories on writing, the authors demonstrate how a test-based approach to accountability and current practices have undermined effective teaching and learning of writing. This book bridges the gap between real-world writing that takes place in schools, college, and careers and the writing that students are asked to do in standardized writing assessments to offer a new ecological approach to writing assessment. Murphy and O’Neill’s new way forward turns accountability inside out to help teachers understand the role of formative assessments and assessment as inquiry. It also brings the outside in, by bridging the gap between authentic writing and writing assessment. Through these two strands, readers learn how assessment systems can be restructured to become better aligned with contemporary understandings of writing and with best practices in teaching. With examples of assessments from elementary school through college, chapters include guidance on designing assessments to address multiple kinds of writing, integrate reading with writing, and incorporate digital technology and multimodality. Emphasizing the central role that teachers play in systemic reform, the authors offer sample assessments developed with intensive teacher involvement that support learning and provide information for the evaluation of programs and schools. This book is an essential resource for graduate students, instructors, scholars and policymakers in writing assessment, composition, and English education.

Writing the Classroom explores how faculty compose and use pedagogical documents to establish classroom expectations and teaching practices, as well as to articulate the professional identities they perform both inside and outside the classroom. The contributors to this unique collection employ a wide range of methodological frameworks to demonstrate how pedagogical genres—even ones as seemingly straightforward as the class syllabus—have lives extending well beyond the classroom as they become part of how college teachers represent their own academic identities, advocate for pedagogical values, and negotiate the many external forces that influence the act of teaching. Writing the Classroom shines a light on genres that are often treated as two-dimensional, with purely functional purposes, arguing instead that genres like assignment prompts, course proposals, teaching statements, and policy documents play a fundamental role in constructing the classroom and the broader pedagogical enterprise within academia. Writing the Classroom calls on experienced teachers and faculty administrators to critically consider their own engagement with pedagogical genres and offers graduate students and newer faculty insight into the genres that they may only now be learning to inhabit as they seek to establish their personal teacherly identities. It showcases the rhetorical complexity of the genres written in the service of pedagogy not only for students but also for the many other audiences within academia that have a role in shaping the experience of teaching. Contributors: Michael Albright, Lora Arduser, Lesley Erin Bartlett, Logan Bearden, Lindsay Clark, Dana Comi, Zack K. De Piero, Matt Dowell, Amy Ferdinandt Stolley, Mark A. Hannah, Megan Knight, Laura R. Micciche, Cindy Mooty, Dustin Morris, Kate Navickas, Kate Nesbit, Jim Nugent, Lori A. Ostergaard, Cynthia Pengilly, Jessica Rivera-Mueller, Christina Saidy, Megan Schoen, Virginia Schwarz, Christopher Toth

This book explores the relevance of institutional mission to writing program administration and writing center direction. It helps WPAs and writing center directors understand the challenges and opportunities mission can pose to their work. It also examines ways WPAs and writing center directors can work with and against mission statements and legacy practices to do their best work.