Welcome to my page devoted to equitable teaching strategies. In this page, you will find sections that feature my approach to a culturally competent curriculum and equitable grading practices to include:

• Cultural Competence in OLI
• Culturally Competent Readings
• Culturally Competent Assignments
• Equitable Grading Practices

Cultural Competence in OLI

Principle number one of the GSOLE Online Literacy Instruction Principles and Tenets states that “online literacy instruction should be universally accessible and inclusive.” Accordingly, my approach to OLI seeks to “engage the unique literacy features of communicating, teaching, and learning in a primarily digital environment” in ways that demonstrate and encourage cultural competence.

A culturally competent curriculum is crucial to effectively serving a diverse student population.  Teachers, I believe, are called to facilitate meaningful learning opportunities for students that are relevant to and affirmative of their lived-experiences and cultures.  We teachers have an obligation to facilitate and encourage student learning and success, first, in OLI.  

One of the most fundamental ways to support a diverse student population is to develop and deliver culturally competent and inclusive learning experiences. Not only does creating a culturally competent curriculum support the mission of championing diversity, such curriculum also improves the daily learning experiences of diverse students.  By contrast, failure to institute or even witness the necessity of cultural competence in the classroom negatively impacts students’ learning experiences.  As April Baker-Bell notes in her book Linguistic Justice, failing to respect diverse voices, especially in writing classrooms like my own, is “symbolic linguistic violence and spirit-murder that Black students experience daily in classrooms” (12).  I, for one, refuse to perpetrate Baker-Bell’s notion of “spirit murder.”  This is a tantamount reason why it is our professional and moral duty to institute learning experiences that validate students’ lived experiences in the OLI classroom.  Teachers must commit time and effort to address the “spirit murder” that we are guilty of committing when we only accept white heteronormative male understandings of knowledge and language. Furthermore, we are guilty of only telling a partial truth, as individuals of color have a long-standing history of resistance to and negotiation of institutions of white supremacy as it manifests in language and writing.  As instructors of OLI, I believe we are called to carry forward this long-standing history of linguistic resistance into digital literacies as well.

In short, I work to develop a culturally competent curriculum because I want to be a competent OLI instructor.  Furthermore,  I believe that developing a culturally competent curriculum is among the most effective means of teaching, supporting, and retaining our students in OLI environments. One way I do this is by centering Black Language in course readings and on assignment sheets for all major essays, both of which are shared digitally.

Culturally Competent Readings

To center Black Language, in course readings, I have curated the reading list below. Organized according to seven emphases of English Studies. The list below includes authors and scholars who demonstrate or explore some aspect of Black Language in writing. Each of these readings is available online or via our library website. In this way, the content not only centers Black Language but also is universally accessible to online students.

Resources in English Education: April Baker-Bell, Linguistic Justice; Linguistic Society of America, What is Ebonics? 

Resources in Professional Writing: Vershawn Ashanti Young, Should Writers Use They Own English?; Anandi Mishra, Why Do I Write in My Colonizers’ Language? 

Resources in Rhetorical Studies: Frederick Douglas, Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln; Fred Hampton, Political Prisoner; C-SPAN, President Obama’s Anger Translator 

Resources in Literary Studies: Arriel Vinson, Black Language Shouldn’t Have to Be Muted for White Readers; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark 

Resources in Creative Writing; Marlon Riggs, Black Is, Black Ain’t; Octavia Butler, Wild Seed; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Jamila Lyiscott, 3 Ways to speak English; Steven Willis, Ebonics 101

Resources in Journalism: Michael Harriot, #NotRacists Be Like; Chi Luu, Black English Matters 

Resources in Linguistics: Rickford and Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English; Vershawn Ashanti Young, The Problem with Linguistic Double Consciousness; April Baker-Bell, This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!; Walt Wolfram, The Grammar of Urban African American Vernacular English 

Culturally Competent Assignments

Furthermore, I have developed assignment sheets that encourage students to explore learning experiences that make explicit connections between these disciplines and various elements of Black culture. In my freshmen composition courses, all assignments may be approached in a way that affirms that Black Lives Matter.  All assignment sheets include a Black Lives Matter image from the creative commons.  In addition, each assignment sheet contains two options for writing that might explore or deploy Black Language.  For example, a student might conduct an interview with a friend in a dialect other than White Mainstream English, as per the expectations of journalism.  Another student might conduct research on Black Language, perhaps using Black Language to report on his/her/their findings, as per the expectations of professional writing or English education.  Still another student might argue for the rhetorical effectiveness of Black Language, as per the expectations of rhetorical studies. Finally, within each assignment option, students are encouraged to leverage their existing knowledges of digital and multimodal composing practices in completing the assignment.

As such, all students in my ENGL110C courses are able to demonstrate assignment expectations while focusing on some aspect of Black Language or the Black Lives Matter movement at large. Importantly, in each of these assignment sheets, students are explicitly told that code-switching is not mandatory in the course, as per April Baker-Bell’s Demand for Black Linguistic Justice.  Below is one example assignment sheet.

Equitable Grading Practices

At the Spring Conference on the Teaching of Writing at ODU in 2020, Asao B. Inoue shared the following message with teachers on the topic of grading.  Inoue notes that “The scholarship on grading is almost unanimous about the unreliability or inconsistency and subjectivity of grades and just as much research shows how grades de-motivate and harm students and their abilities to learn anything.”

I created the graphic (below) to illustrate how I tend to view such traditional grading practices.  

Notice the arrow at the top in which a student has demonstrated a high amount of effort. We might understand this student as arriving in our classrooms with knowledge and lived experience which the academy has not traditionally view as culturally compatible. They must traverse more cultural ground, as it were, to reach A territory.  The second student from the top by contrast might be said to have had much experience in privileged contexts. This student need not exert the same amount of effort as the former student to earn that A. This student’s linguistic background and educational experiences already reflect the habits of writing and learning that are oftentimes privileged by the academy. In short, in the traditional assessment of writing, there is an issue of inequity that must be addressed by the field.

 An emergent practice among teachers of composition is the implementation of labor-based grading contracts. As stated by Inoue, our own implicit biases and subjectivity inhibit our ability to objectively grade student writing.  Put another way, our implicit biases can sometimes manifest as Anti-Black Linguistic Racism, especially in grading practices.

To combat implicit bias, Inoue advocates for quantifying the writing labor a student demonstrates, correlating that labor with a grade.  As all students are assessed based on the amount of labor they demonstrate, white students and their linguistic practices are no longer privileged in essay writing, at least in terms of how their grades are impacted by teacher evaluation.

By contrast, this additional graphic (above) offers a comparable illustration of how contracted grades are earned.  For example, all students are guaranteed a C in the course for demonstrating the minimum amount of effort.  Additional effort is required however to earn an A and is available to all students, regardless of their cultural background.

To develop my grading contracts, I first considered how to best maintain course rigor.  Arguably, a course is rigorous if students are challenged to meet disciplinary learning outcomes.  Still, how can a student’s meeting assignment expectations and disciplinary outcomes be quantified in a grade contract?  I asked myself, how can I name and quantify the outcomes of English Composition?  How can I quantify how students demonstrate these outcomes?

Below, I offer a graphic that illustrates the interconnectedness of outcomes, assignments, and how they relate to my developing grading practices. 

Next, I considered four major learning outcomes of ENGL110C, which are rhetorical knowledge, information literacy, writing as a process, and knowledge of conventions.  

Accordingly, I created quantifiable goals for each of the aforementioned outcomes, which translate into assignment expectations and ultimately my own grading practices.  I hope the sequencing of outcomes to grades creates a more transparent and equitable assessment practice. A listing of these quantifiable  gradable value, which students may now select from, is provided below.

For example, students are given various options as to how they might demonstrate rhetorical knowledge, which include.

1. Write a minimum number of words total.
2. Create a multimodal feature to the written assignment such as a graphic organizer with Google drawing, a meme, or some other kind of digital image which interprets or supports the written assignment.
3. Develop clear transitions between all sections of the resource.
4. Draft an introduction and conclusion for the Resource.
5. Embed at least one link to an outside resource, perhaps of their own writing. 

To demonstrate outcome of information literacy, Students might

1. Find a reputable resource on the web to support their position. 
2. Find a source from the library website to support the content of the Resource project. 
3. Triangulate the genres of sources they find (e.g. scholarly articles, websites, popular magazines).
4. Find a source online of questionable integrity.  Practice a critical reading of this source for its academic merit. What about this source is misleading or erroneous. 

To demonstrate writing as a process, students might

1. Book a conference with the instructor or attend office hours for help getting started. Write about this experience.
2. Book a conference with the instructor or attend office hours for feedback on a draft. Write about this experience.
3. Get someone you know to read your writing and provide you feedback. Write about this experience.
4. Revise an assignment for an improved grade.

To demonstrate conventions for grammar and citation style, students might

1. Format the resource and any citations to MLA documentation conventions.
2. Write about a grammatical construction about which you’ve received feedback this semester.
3. Intentionally break grammatical rules for rhetorical effect. 
4. Demonstrate competency in a language other than SAE.
5. Demonstrate competency in SAE.
6. Explore the citation style of your major. 

Not all assignments can capture all of the outcomes I have listed.  In fact, I present students with a collection that is idiosyncratic to the assignment they are working on. Regardless of the assignment, however, I present labor goals to students which are tangible and measurable, from the students’ perspective. These goals might be selected, or rejected, by students.  In short, this assessment method progressively approaches anti-racist grading practice.  

Accordingly, in my practices of both assigning and evaluating student writing in contexts of OLI, I hope my curriculum encourages and demonstrates cultural competence, so students can experience intersections between OLI and social justice. Not only do students experience and perhaps themselves produce content validating Black Language, but they are also met with grading practices that neither pathologize nor punish the knowledge or expression of Black Language.