Towards Socially Just Assessment: Inviting International Students to Belong After 2020
While teaching my freshman writing course in the spring of 2020 at DePaul University, I watched a similar situation unfold for each of the international students: no on-campus job, no income due to visa restrictions, unpaid tuition, likely eviction, and thus, the rush to buy a one-way ticket home.
Though President Trump backed down on his administration’s proposed international student policy in July, the aftermath intensified for international students, still labeled as aliens in US higher education. Although international students would not need to leave the country if they were enrolled in online-only coursework at their US institutions, the earlier turmoil around this proposal triggered a domino effect that impacted many international students’ lives. In the New York Times article “‘My World is Shattering’: Foreign Students Stranded by Coronavirus,” Caitlin Dickerson lamented this quandary. The ones that decided to return temporarily to their home countries feared being banned from continuing their education at all.
Being a non-tenure track, ‘contingent’ faculty member in a United States university on a work visa myself, I related to my international students’ plight. How could they find resilience and belonging in the country where they, regardless of their “alien” status, lived and learned?.
Already discouraged by their plight, the events of spring quarter of 2020 intensified the turmoil for me, as their writing instructor. I could not assign writing and grade these students “as usual.” Questions rushed through my head: How legitimate now is my approach to teaching? How can I continue to preach about the value of education in the face of my students’ educational, health, social, financial, and cultural crises? What value do the assignments even have at this point? How do I negotiate my power as a teacher when I assess their work in this time of crisis?
For Al, a student enrolled in my writing course last spring, the situation got worse day by day. I could sense his fear and frustration as he emailed me about losing his dorm room, looking for a new apartment amid the pandemic, seeing his roommate move out unexpectedly, buying an air ticket to his home country, being locked down for two weeks to quarantine. I read each line of email correspondence through tears. Again, I thought: how can I assess his work at a moment such as this?
I found the answer in my own backyard, so to speak — there’s a pedagogy of belonging and justice to be found in approaches to teaching and assessment in my own academic field.
A sense of belonging brings power, yet that sense of belonging is constantly changing for many of us. In Belonging: A Culture of Place, bell hooks narrates a book-length story of her growing sense of belonging in rural Kentucky and observes what meaning is created — “the making of lives that we feel are worth living.” hooks writes, “Again and again as I travel around I am stunned by how many citizens in our nation feel lost, feel bereft of a sense of direction, feel as though they cannot see where our journeys lead, that they cannot know where they are going.”
During my own journey as an international graduate student in the USA — from 2011–2017 — I’ve been invigorated, as a teacher and as a student, by understanding how unlearning my own privileges triggers a sense of learning to belong to the world. It’s been therapeutic for me to revisit these teachings, personally as well as professionally. I’m no longer a stranger to feeling out of place.
Finding how to belong to the US academic culture, with its insistence on standard academic English and one rhetorical tradition, has been for me an experience knitted with ruptures. Carnegie Mellon University captures these ruptures:
“Students may have learned a different rhetorical style that that employed in the US and may have difficulty adjusting to the academic expectations of US faculty…When international students apply their own cultures’ rhetorical conventions to written assignments in the US, their writing may appear to lack a clearly delineated argument or concrete proof of a thesis.”
As a white, Russian-born, Slavic, female, international, non-tenure-track, contingent US college professor, I’ve tried to find meaning in the foreign-to-me “delineated argument” or “proof of a thesis.” Born and raised in Russia, I have spent the last ten years in the US searching for a sense of belonging through foreign-to-me rhetorical conventions, as well as through my own languages, cultures, and histories. I’ve tried to carve out a sense of my own writing space and writing culture and how I belong to it. So, when communicating with international students, I find myself asking divergent questions: (1) Does the situation ask me to “sound as a “US college professor,” with the knowledge about “concrete proof of a thesis”? or (2) Does the situation ask me to be tuned with students’ “own” English, filled with their first-language histories and rhetorical patterns?” These questions surface in so many ways:
- Through the choice of writing prompts. For example, defining ways each student is articulate, like Jamila Lyiscott does in her TED talk “I am Articulate.” Students write about their own English and how they define their language communities.
2. Through the linguistically and rhetorically friendly word choice of writing prompts and syllabus: “I invite you,” “let’s explore.”
3. Through interrogation of the after- pandemic value of life, education, and justice: how do I, as a white, middle-class female professor with a Ph.D. degree see students’ desire to devalue the current system of education because it did not prepare them for this pandemic?
Such reflective life practices, rooted in a sense of belonging, now inform my teaching practice, too. Yet with belonging, I try to also bring justice and to create for my students — through discussion, communication, assessment, and reflection — room to communicate their difference in rhetoric and writing. Finally, these times also call for social justice in assessment.
The restorative, yet empowering scholarship of Asao B. Inoue, in “Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies,” and the diagram of seven interrelated elements that constitute a writing assessment ecology: power, purposes, places, people, processes, parts, and products (p. 186) taught me an approach to assessing international students’ writing, amid the pandemic and after. This approach, according to Inoue, can happen by dismantling control, instruments, practices, and locations when approaching students’ labor in writing classrooms.
When assessing Al’s writing amid Al’s life ruptures during the crisis this past spring, before grading or communicating my opinion, I reflected on my existing and hidden power and other privileges — having a house, financial stability, and a teacher status, being international, yet white — all of which could affect my judgement of Al’s situation. Abby Ferber calls this unlearning your own privileges, and it can inform teaching, theorizing, and practice. I wanted to avoid being the teacher who tells Al what to do or fix in his writing. I wanted to be his ally instead.
Reminiscing about the situation with Al now, in December of 2020, confirms my belief: teachers must consciously adopt socially just assessment practices, become allies, and consciously help international students enact their sense of belonging. Both in times of crisis and beyond.
