Pedagogy 8 (3): 2008

Using Assessment to Introduce Incremental Change, Lynne Rhodes, USCA

Big Brother. Boss Compositionist (Sledd 2001). Writing Program Administrators usually take great pains to avoid these pejorative titles. Those of us who administer and direct various writing programs and assessments tend to describe ourselves as coordinator instead of director, seeking to foster programs instead of prescribing mandates, relying on core statements such as program goals and student learning outcomes instead standardized syllabi or directed assignments. We recommend instead of require, and we tend to sample instead of report. Even though we conduct our work at a wide range of institutions and thus deal with a multitude of various kinds of institutional directives and boundaries, as a group a “similar set of aims prevails” (Durst, in a WPA review of Haswell’s Beyond Outcomes: Assessment and Instruction within a University Writing Program, Spring 2007, p. 138).

Even though I work at a relatively small college, I have been able to model my assessment duties based on those at Washington State University, by using an assessment tool commonly called a Junior Writing Portfolio. Like my mentors at WSU, as the WPA who coordinates an assessment which involves a “varied cast of characters and positions” (Durst, p. 139), I have witnessed how assessment can be used to make incremental changes which favor faculty development in writing pedagogies. Yet the recurrent allusions to totalitarianism and slavery invite us to reconsider the intellectual qualities of our work as WPA’s, particularly those of us who also must argue that our work is as much scholarship as service, housed in English departments whose specialized others focus the research on a range of literary and cultural texts, for whom the teaching of composition has long been associated with dreary standardization, duties and drudgery. We also must explain ourselves to our own families and neighbors, who often recall experiences with “bonehead English classes” (as my own neighbor typically does) and who exclaim with mock concern that they had better “watch their English” around us. As WPA’s many of us must regularly confront the fact that we are part of an academic bureaucracy, and we seek ways to collaborate and confound that same bureaucracy, especially when “assessment” is the job at hand.

Assessment is more often associated with testing (often standardized), and it’s difficult to make the case that program and institutional assessments of student writing can also be seen as scholarship, as a justifiable area for research, and perhaps even more difficult to make the case that as a WPA, I can “use” assessment practices for faculty development, for mentoring, for fostering collegiality. I suspect that my practices would be more difficult to implement at a flagship research institution. But at small colleges and universities, assessment practices can be employed for these alternative activities. In my own small department of a baker’s dozen teachers - equally represented by full time instructors and tenure/tenure track professors – assessment of student writing has become an essential tool for faculty development, both within the department and across the campus community. Given that our institutional missions stress effective teaching and campus service, I have found that my colleagues have – generally speaking – welcomed my coordination of student assessments and faculty development. Given my long tenure and my evolving roles at my institution, I’ve been able to take a long view of the ecosystem, and since I have been about this job for some time now, I want simply to give the gist of my experiences, following a timeline of writing assessments that I have found generatively useful for promoting positive incremental changes.