Each year, the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program invites all faculty and staff to our featured speaker series. Leading scholars in writing studies present on a range of topics to enhance the teaching of writing at Carthage.

Professor Asao Inoue (Arizona State University) will give this year’s WAC keynote workshop: “Labor-Based Grading and Responses to Student Writing as Antiracist Practices.”

Date: Tuesday, Aug. 22
Time: 1-3 p.m.

Attend the session on Zoom

This faculty workshop focuses on labor-based grading as an antiracist classroom assessment practice for faculty across disciplines who teach WI courses. Prof. Inoue will begin by briefly offering an ecological theory of assessment (i.e. classroom assessment as a complex system) that frames and explains the ways in which labor-based grading can be an antiracist classroom practice. Such a theory offers designable elements for teachers to explicitly create antiracist assessment practices in classrooms. Participants will engage in an activity that introduces students to labor-based grading in classrooms. The final portion of the workshop will engage participants in some reflective exercises and discussions that center on this question: How might your responses to student writing, its purposes, goals, and methods, change in a gradeless classroom? The workshop will end with a short Q&A period and offer all participants a handout of resources.

About the Keynote Speaker

Asao B. Inoue is professor of rhetoric and composition in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. His research focuses on antiracist and social justice theory and practices in writing assessments. He is the 2019 chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and has been a past member of the CCCC Executive Committee and the Executive Board of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. Among his many articles and chapters on writing assessment, race, and racism, his article “Theorizing Failure in U.S. Writing Assessments,” published in Research in the Teaching of English, won the 2014 CWPA Outstanding Scholarship Award. His co-edited collection “Race and Writing Assessment” (2012) won the 2014 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection. His book, “Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future” (2015) won the 2017 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for a monograph and the 2015 CWPA Outstanding Book Award. He also has published the co-edited collection “Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and The Advancement of Opportunity” (2018) and the book “Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom” (2019). All royalties for his newest book, “Above the Well: An Antiracist Literacy Argument from a Boy of Color” (2021), are donated to the Asao and Kelly Inoue Antiracist Teaching Endowment at their alma mater, Oregon State University.