Toward Writing as Social Justice: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Abstract

In her last book published in 2013, Responsibility for Justice, late political theorist Iris Marion Young wrote,While there are vast disagreements about why, almost one in American today thinks that educational opportunity is equal . . . The turn-of-the-century hope that public education can equalize relationship among children of very unequal parents, giving each child an equal chance to compete with others from more privileged backgrounds, seems a strange dream. (21)Indeed, writing teachers and writing program administrators working today in higher education often find themselves wondering if equitable education is a strange dream. Placing students into noncredit writing classes, assigning credit for dubious dual-credit experiences, and preventing students from advanced coursework through exit assessments that capture just slivers of writing construct: So much of writing assessment work we do seems complicit in sustaining inequality. No wonder we are drawn to seemingly more democratic assessment methods directed self-placement, portfolios, and contract grading. If we were to make this desire for more democratic assessment more visible in our profession-to say that we value socially just writing assessment-what would it mean? Would assessing for be asking something of writing assessment that is simply, to echo Young, a strange dream?This special issue takes up a singular question: What would it mean to incorporate social into our writing assessments?One of our goals in putting together this special issue was to foreground perspectives of contributors whose voices are not typically heard in writing assessment scholarship: non-tenure-track faculty, HBCU WPAs, researchers interested in global rhetorics, queer faculty, and faculty of color. These voices have too often not been heard in writing assessment scholarship. There is doubt that first step toward projects of social writing assessment is to listen to those who have not been heard, to make more social project of socially just writing assessment. Thus, in this special issue of College English, we argue that there is much to be learned by making writing assessment scene, Chris Gallagher would say, more inclusive.Theor i z ing Soc i a l J u st i c e for Wr i t ing Ass e ss mentSocial theory may encompass many disciplinary and theoretical orientations. As Michael Reisch points out in Routledge International Handbook of Social Justice, social theory is not simply eradication of injustice. Achieving social justice, or perhaps simply justice, means envisioning what a just would look like (1). As a result, it requires us to address fundamental questions about human nature and social relationships; about distribution of resources, power, status, rights, access, and opportunities; and about how decisions regarding this distribution are made (1).John Rawls's thought experiment, what he called the veil of ignorance, was an exercise in imagining what kind of we might choose if we could suspend our current knowledge of our place in society. In this exercise in which no one knows his place in society, his class or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and like, principles of are selected behind a veil of ignorance (A Theory 12). Rawls defined this original of equality because are similarly situated and one is able to design principles in favor of his particular condition (12). For Rawls, justice meant understanding ways that basic structure of society was created by relations among individuals (Justice 10). He explains that as a social process view, fairness focuses first on structure and on regulations required to maintain background over time for all persons equally, whatever their generation or social position (54). …