Header image: KF in Dall-E
Inoue, Asao B. (2019). Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom.
https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/labor/
- designing fair and meaningful grading practices is about cultivating with our students an ecology, a place where every student, no matter where they come from or how they speak or write, can have access to the entire range of final course grades possible.
Grading, because it requires a single, dominant standard, is a racist and White supremacist practice.
- Grading is almost always employed in order to control students (and sometimes their teachers), force students to be accountable (and sometimes their teachers), and measure or rank students (and sometimes their teachers), either against each other or against a single standard. Each of these purposes for grading in writing classrooms is detrimental to learning generally, and more harmful to many students of color and raciolinguistically diverse students. This is because “diverse students” means “not White students,” or students who use varieties of English that are not the standardized version used in the schools.
Let me pause for a moment and explain why I will be using the terms, “White supremacy” and “White language supremacy,” since I know they can be triggers for many, especially White people.
- …I want you to feel uncomfortable because it can help you feel the problem, not intellectualize it, or see it, or hear it. You need to feel it if you want to change systems.
- In fact, this tactic itself is one way I resist the rhetorical pull to produce a text that both assumes a cool, calm, and rational tone and expects its readers to have the same disposition as they read.
- So, I’m compassionately asking you, my reader, to feel something as you read, even if that feeling is anger, defensiveness, or guilt. I ask this of you because I believe we all can come to great insights and knowledge about ourselves and others through this kind of discomfort, if we sit long enough in it, and interrogate why we feel the way we do about terms like, “White supremacy.”
But I have another reason for using these trigger words. It is compassionate to suffer with others, like the suffering that so many of our students feel when a standard that is not of their own is used against them. Staying a while in your discomfort that my use throughout this book of the terms “White language supremacy” and “White supremacy” bring is an important part of a critical, Freirean, problematizing practice that I’ll discuss in Chapter 1.
- You think you’re misunderstood? You think you are unfairly judged because you are an ally in the struggle for racial equality? What do you think your students of color feel? Suffer with us.
It is not my job to make you comfortable. In fact, I believe it is quite the opposite.
- But my use of these terms in this book is also meant to be a compassionate invitation to all readers to sit in discomfort with your complicity to unfair systems, to urge you to feel seriously about changing those systems.
- White privilege is a set of “unearned advantages and benefits that accrue to White folks by virtue of a system normed on the experiences, values, and perceptions of their group”; furthermore, these invisible privileges are “premised on the mistaken notion of individual meritocracy and deservingness (hard work, family values, etc.) rather than favoritism . . . [and are] deeply embedded in the structural, systemic, and cultural workings of U.S. society” (Overcoming 137).