Re-reading the title of Huot’s book, I’m reminded that in the first chapter, he indicates that assessment is not simply making a value judgment, but articulating it, which I take to mean elaborating on it, explaining it, relating it to its context—in a sense, acknowledging and fulfilling the inherently rhetorical aspects of an assessment. That makes me think of Peter Elbow and Nancy Sommers. Elbow essentially asserts, in “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking” that generating the kind of descriptive, narrative feedback that might go with a holistic score often causes the evaluator to reconsider that score. And Huot refers to Sommers’ article “Responding to Student Writing,” in which she contends that English teachers, having been trained to analyze literary texts, nonetheless carry expectations about student texts—expectations that lead them to find errors.
It occurs to me that, in the same way I could assert (or as Huot would say, contend) that T.R. Johnson’s anthology centers around authority, I could argue Huot’s book is entirely about expectations. Responding to a text for another class, I noted that knowing what to expect can be a powerful indicator that an environment is “safe.” And as I read Huot, or Elbow, (or for that matter, the quasi self-help book we’re reading in Creative Writing Pedagogy), it occurs to me that it’s safety that I’m struggling to define. I’m uncomfortable with the way authority has been defined in writing classes—as having the most knowledge, as stemming from nuturance, as coming from the creation of a “safe” environment. (What does “safe” mean? That there’s no risk involved? That it’s OK to look stupid? That violence won’t be done to you? For that matter, what is “violence”?)
Each of Huot’s chapters focuses on some aspect of assessment that can control what we expect of it, how the ensuing discussion will be bounded and in what direction it will move. (So in a sense, each of Huot’s chapters asks the reader to consider the question “Do I feel safe or not?”) His first chapter, before engaging on the typical “this is a summary of my book” move, focuses on the act of naming, perhaps the quintessential evaluative act. What strikes me about this act is how invested Huot was in the (Re) of his book’s title, and in the absence of an explicit admission of this “obsession” of his, I find myself wondering whether or not Huot realized how entrenched he was about the title of his book.
Huot’s second chapter focuses on identifying two viewpoints from which most people interested in assessment organize their conceptualization of assessment. A major part of this task is unpacking the assumptions that “situate” the “educational measurement community,” and those that situate the rhetoric and composition community. To do this, Huot focuses on historical accounts of assessment from each “school of thought.” I find myself interested in the way each field uses time to place boundaries around the topic of assessment, determining when it started and at what intervals it changed along with exactly what changed and why. In a sense, White, Moss, and Yancey have created 15th-century illuminated style maps of assessment, and at some point at either end along both axes, the map dissolves to the warning “Here There Be Monsters.”
Of course, along with the fifth chapter, the third chapter was the one to which I paid the most attention. I’ve been both congratulated and chastised for being a “risky” teacher, mostly because I teach often without a script. Often, I get the sense that my students don’t know what to expect next (which I’d equate with at least some sense of feeling “unsafe”). I think that’s what Huot comes up against when he tries to get his students to evaluate each others’ work descriptively, without using quantitative, rank-implying language—students know what to do with a statement that implies competence or failure. The next step after “This reads a lot like a letter to the editor of the school paper” or “I can close my eyes and see what this writing describes” isn’t always clear. Why? There’s no endpoint implied in a descriptive comment. Clearly, a student could actually send a letter to the editor of the school paper, or film a video representation of a visually-descriptive piece of writing. But they do that, in a sense, not knowing when they’ll fall off the face of the earth into the gaping maw of the F-monster.
In the fourth chapter, Huot unpacks the characteristics of what he would call particularly effective assessments. But here, Huot focuses on tightening the boundaries around an assessment—focusing, for instance, on an assessment instrument’s validity for a particular occasion, or in a certain context, while implicitly rejecting the idea that an assessment should be universally applicable the way the Stanford-Binet, ACT, SAT, and other such tests strive to be. It’s here that Huot monkeys most with the ideas of validity and reliability, thus putting those who rely on a definition of “assessment” that also relies on specific definitions of “reliable” and “valid” in an “unsafe,” risky position. But he does this carefully—any time Huot writes about reliability and validity, he seems to select his words more carefully. (It’s at these points in his book during which I think Huot feels the least “safe.”).
Chapter five focuses on the act of reading. I remember reading an article in Kairos called the “Lo-Fi Manifesto,” in which the writer noted that “literacy” is the ability to both consume and create in a particular discourse, with a particular tool, etc. That writer contended that the technical sophistication of many computer composing tools prevented many individuals from becoming fully literate by making it much harder to create electronic documents than to consume them. In a sense, that’s what Huot is doing here—arguing that teachers have neglected half of their own literacy. And what strikes me most about what he describes is the way his students create universes within which the writing they assess exist. In a way, his students are creating a “safety net,” a constellation of stars by which to navigate the process of providing feedback.
To me, Chapter six turns the whole power dynamic on its head. Rather than using assessment to confirm what teachers already know, Huot suggests that assessment is a tool by which people can investigate what they don’t know. But more interesting to me is the way he engages with the term “technology.” In asserting that assessment has become too driven by the technologies within which it has been developed, Huot asserts that assessment is itself a technology, one that drives teaching (a point that echoes Elbow’s in “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking”). What frustrates me most about the term “technology” is the way that term has become synonymous with “computer”—how many students realize that the Choose Your Own Adventure books they read are, in fact, hypertexts? Or that they are inherently multimodal beings? It’s refreshing to read someone who realizes that the ballpoint pen is as much a piece of technology as the Pentium chip.
I want to return to that theme of safety. I think that Huot’s ideas are unsafe, in the sense that they ask those who adopt them to be willing not to know what to expect. And I think that, whether it comes from, nature, nurture, both, or neither, humans want to know what’s coming next. In a sense, people are driven by a narrative impulse—a tendency to see events as connected by cause and effect, even when they aren’t. I think that teachers are particularly vulnerable to this way of thinking—after all, what is a lesson plan if it isn’t an effort to anticipate (and articulate) what the effects of a particular lesson might be? And that brings up a question for me: How could we (and why should we) train students not to know what to expect?
Works Cited
Elbow, Peter. 386 – 406. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment.” Reprinted in Teaching Composition: Background Readings. 3rd ed. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.
Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” Reprinted in Teaching Composition: Background Readings. 3rd ed. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 377 – 386.
