Join us in welcoming Mya Poe, Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University for formal talk at 4 pm on Thursday, March 7.
Assessing Writing While Thinking Like a Rhetorician: Justice-Oriented Possibilities
Every new generation of teachers is promised writing assessment technologies that will correct for the failures of previous assessment technologies. But technocentric approaches to assessment will never address injustice. Drawing on insights from her work with writing teachers and challenges to standardized testing designers, Mya Poe explains how thinking like a rhetorician is a powerful means to break from technocentric logics and invite justice-oriented possibilities for writing assessment. Poe’s work asks us to question assumptions about who students think they are writing to, what we mean by “good writing” when we respond to our students’ writing, and the role we want writing assessment to play in in socially just classrooms and programs.
Mya Poe’s research focuses on writing assessment and writing development with particular attention to equity and fairness. She is the co-author of Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering (CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award, 2012), co-editor of Race and Writing Assessment (CCCC Outstanding Book of the Year, 2014), and co-editor of Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity (2019). Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as College Composition and Communication, The Journal of Business and Technical Communication, The Journal of Writing Assessment, and Assessing Writing. She has also guest-edited special issues of Research in the Teaching of English and College Englishdedicated to issues of social justice, diversity, and writing assessment. She is series co-editor of the Oxford Brief Guides to Writing in the Disciplines. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Northeastern College of Humanities and Social Sciences, College Composition and Communication, MIT School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities.