Narratives of Joy and Failure in Antiracist Assessment

Asao B. Inoue is professor of rhetoric and composition in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. Among his many articles and chapters on writing assessment, race, and racism, his article “Theorizing Failure in U.S. Writing Assessments” 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. And 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.

Kristin DeMint Bailey, now an independent scholar, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, specializing in antiracist writing pedagogies and assessment. Her dissertation explores how students’ and teachers’ languaging in a Black culture center at a predominantly White institution cultivates Black students’ academic identities, creates community, and leads institutional antiracism in a historically hostile environment. Throughout the dissertation, she problematizes her own White subjectivity.