In the introduction to “Teaching and Writing Across Communities: Developing Partnerships, Publics, and Programs” in Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook, Deans, Roswell, and Wurr offer a brief history, key critical frameworks, and current trends within the field of service-learning. They frame their analysis of community-based pedagogies around a key question: “What does it mean to teach college writing?” (1). Exploring this in various contexts, they outline the book’s content according to “What Teachers of Community Writing Need to Know” (4) and “Agendas for Further Research on Community Writing: Process, Products, and Participants” (8). Overall, they bring considerable resources to the hands of teachers interested in community-based pedagogies. However, the discussion about service-learning assessment does not provide comprehensive assessment criteria or detailed approaches to issues of writing proficiency in these pedagogies. Although the public turn in college composition is addressed in terms of potential positive impacts, teachers of writing who embrace these pedagogies should use reflective components to situate assessments of writing proficiency that rely on evidence of social interaction.
Deans, Roswell, and Burr acknowledge the difficulty of assessing “the effects of participation in community-engaged courses on students’ writing proficiency” (9). Kendrick and Suarez conclude that it did not improve student writing quality, while Astin et al., Feldman et al., and Wurr discovered the opposite. The researchers used different assessment criteria, which bring up a key question for those interested in community-based writing courses: How is student writing assessed in these courses? Or, as the authors ask, “what makes good writing?” (1). This problem faces teachers with a dilemma of how to structure assessments. Certainly, grading a student based upon a portfolio of her writing seems reasonable, but because community-based writing inhabits a nexus of interrelated aims, the teacher must carefully select key outcomes that she wants the student to accomplish.
It is rightfully pointed out “that literacy learning is a social and ideological process rather than simply a textual transaction” (5). This, too, brings up another dilemma. Textual transactions are relatively straightforward to assess, at least in theory. The teacher looks for key determinants, usually surface in nature, that signify the student has met a learning outcome. For instance, piece of writing might be analyzed for command of grammar, syntax, and meaningful sentence structures. Even when one applies a higher-order concern of thesis or focus, these can be found within the communicative act of the writing itself. However, assessing a student in terms of how well they engaged with a community is a trickier proposition. It brings up more sophisticated questions of authority and ideology. By this I mean if a student writes about community experiences they have spent a considerable amount of time developing, how does the teacher judge the quality of that interaction, in terms proficiency?
Deans, Roswell, and Wurr contend, “Rarely, however, do we invite community participants to reflect on or document their learning or transformation” (10). Scholars of community literacy have long employed reflective practices to ground their research because they help to bring their diverse experiences into writing. Students who become community participants in service-learning environments should be given the same opportunity to engage this practice. Moreover, reflective writing should be an articulated goal of the service-learning course, a goal based in the recognition that community-based writing creates a complex and nuanced social interaction among participants. Writing proficiency assessment emphases should reflect this aim, even if it is initially difficult to imagine. Through practice and refinement, however, teachers can create assessment criteria with community participants to realize this goal of complex and nuanced social interaction. Thus, teachers of writing should employ a similar community-minded consciousness in their grading by making reflective components designed to assess writing proficiency along these lines a mainstay of service-learning courses.
Works Cited
Deans, Thomas et al. Introduction. Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Thomas Deans et al., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010, pp. 1-12.
Writing Etc. 