The chaotic nature of Inoue’s approach makes me slightly anxious; I would have difficulty relinquishing what I see as my pedagogical authority. I like “organized chaos” during class discussions of readings, but am hesitant to apply the same approach to assessment criteria. More importantly, though, I read the Inoue article through the contextual lens of being a grad student, and I find myself wrestling with the practicality of this student-driven assessment system.
Part of my reluctance to allow students a voice in the assessment process stems from my observations that freshmen lack the vocabulary and critical awareness to properly assess their own work. While I agree with Inoue that the function of a writing class is in part to train students to develop that critical language and self-awareness, I’m wondering the extent to which this is student-generated or heavily slanted in the direction Inoue wants the rubric to be formed. Additionally, Inoue seems to take a considerable amount of time helping students develop this vocabulary and self-criticism. This is not a critique of the intentions. However, this self-created assessment rubric seems like it would take weeks, if not the perpetual activity in class. Is it practical to spend this much attention on revision for a single piece (and I know that last comment seems a little ridiculous, I mean, after all it is a composition class and revision is integral…and we’re writers and we revise endlessly, so why shouldn’t our students)? Is there such a thing as slowing down the writing process too much?
Disposing the traditional assessment model seems like a hefty time commitment on the part of the instructor; in an ideal world, I would be happy to devote hours and hours per week to a single course, but as a grad student this model doesn’t seem practical. Certainly, there is an admiration for this dedication to continual conferencing, hands-on interaction with student papers, reading online commentaries regularly, etc., but is this feasible for me as a grad student? I’m not sure it is (or perhaps I’m just lazy).
I also had to wonder: does Inoue’s model work in a freshman composition course (this is piggybacking on the post Jes made)? The course discussed in the article is a 300-level (presumably Junior-year writing), not the introductory freshman comp. Quite honestly, I don’t see freshman engaging in this kind of intellectual rigor (though I’m willing to concede stretching them a bit and forcing them to do it isn’t necessarily a bad thing). My personal experience has shown that students need excessive amounts of close-reading before they can begin to develop the critical vocabulary and meta-cognition Inoue hopes to instill.
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