Just a few days ago, I had an interesting experience. To begin a new class project involving the group creation of forums, I had brought several different examples of forums to class to help initiate a discussion of the concept of forum. Among these were two different newspapers, a bound graphic novel, the Mercury Reader, and a university literary journal. In groups of two to three students, I asked the class to answer two questions: What would I name this forum? And what characteristics or aspects of the example in front of me suggest that name fits this example?
As the class discussed the examples they had been given, they came up with some interesting definitions: a graphic novel was “a comic that isn’t funny.” A newspaper is “facts pulled together.” The ways in which my students tried to both make sense of the texts they were encountering and to articulate that sense to their classmates was fun to listen to, even educational. But one group’s analysis in particular disturbed me: the decision that the Southern Review, a literary journal of poems, stories, book reviews, and the like, was a “scholarly journal.”
Ali, Chadman, and Jamie made a good case. The publication came from a university-based press. The journal contained no advertising. The kinds of texts the group encountered in the journal were the same kinds of texts each member of the group was accustomed to seeing primarily in academic settings. And the biographical information provided about each text’s author more often than not announced that author’s affiliation with an academic institution, either as holder of an advanced degree, or as a member of a particular institution’s faculty. I noted the cogent, careful, and persuasive nature of the group’s case. Still, something tugged at the back of my mind, and I announced that as a class, we would begin the next session by returning to Ali, Chadman, and Jamie, and their assessment of the Southern Review.
The next day, I did just that. I decided to start the day by introducing my students to the concept of “situatedness,” the phenomenon whereby any claim or set of claims a person makes is informed (and limited) by the affiliations that person knits together into a sense of self. I disclosed that I belonged to several different communities that shaped what I thought of as my “identity”—I’m a son, a brother, an uncle, a student, a teacher, and a playwright, among other things. And then I revealed that my status as a playwright—and with it, some of the assumptions made by playwrights, and by “creative writers,” one of the bigger groups to which playwrights belong—had led me to place the Southern Review into an entirely different category of forum than the one into which Ali, Chadman, and Jamie had “situated” it.
How does that relate to Brian Huot’s ideas about assessment? To answer that question, I have to reveal what happened later on during that second class session. When we finally departed our discussion about individual forums, the class began a discussion about style. To better situate the class within one of the contexts I knew they would be aware of, and perhaps anxious about, I asked them to read the row of the Project Grading Standards pertaining to Structure and Style. In groups, I asked them to identify particular words, phrases, or sentences within that row that they either (1) found helpful, or (2) found unhelpful. For each instance of helpful or unhelpful language, I asked each group to explain (a) how they would react to the helpful language, or (b) what information they saw as “missing” from the unhelpful language that would make it more helpful.
Brian, a former student of mine who elected to take my class again, piped up that the example of how not to conclude an essay (i.e., by repeating or summarizing oneself) was helpful because it indicated to him that he should avoid a strategy with which he was familiar (and thus might easily adopt without realizing how it was valued). When I asked for an example of “unhelpful” language, Anna pointed out that “organic” didn’t help her because she didn’t understand what it meant—a reasonable explanation given the many ways in which “organic” might be taken, and the limited context within which she had encountered it.
What happened next is the key. Though we only had another minute left in class, and I was prepared to let the students grapple privately with the meaning of “organic” and come back to it on Thursday, Chadman’s hand shot up, and I couldn’t ignore it. “This definition comes from art,” he mused, “but it helps me understand what ‘organic’ might mean for a piece of writing.” He related that to artists, an “organic” piece springs from the artist’s inspiration, rather than from a set format. Though I felt the need to briefly re-phrase what he said in writing terms (i.e., that an organic piece of writing takes its structure from the writer’s purpose), I saw nodding heads throughout the room that indicated to me that Chadman’s understanding of the word “organic”—situated as it was in intersection with several different contexts, only one of which was writing—had answered their own, unvoiced questions about the concept.
