Toward an Antiracist Assessment Ecology

Abstract

Through our language standards and judgements, white language dominance is encouraged because they stem historically from a white racial formation in the Western world. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the discussion of how these habits of white language (HOWL) are found in traditional writing assessment practices and feedback. This chapter focuses on deconstructing and reconstructing Brown's approach to instructor-student conferencing (ISC) as feedback to student writing and reframes the ISC conference through an antiracist and dialogic pedagogy where student conferences become a space that decenter HOWL and emphasize students' rights to their own language and languaging. This chapter presents a dialogic framework and critical reflection questions for writing instructors that aims to promote more equitable writing assessment and feedback via the dialogical writing conference.