We are delighted to announce that the symposium features Dr. Asao B. Inoue, whose social justice-focused work in Rhetoric and Composition engages the ways that writing assessments construct particular kinds of failure and, as a result, raise disproportionate barriers to success for students of color, first generation college students, and other students from diverse backgrounds.
Dr. Inoue is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and Director of University Writing and the Writing Center at University of Washington Tacoma, a member of the Executive Board of Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), and Program Chair for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) 2018.
Among his many articles and chapters in writing assessment and race and racism studies, his article, “Theorizing Failure in U.S. Writing Assessments” in Research in the Teaching of English, won the 2014 CWPA Outstanding Scholarship Award. His anthology Race and Writing Assessment (2012), co-edited with Mya Poe, won the 2014 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection. More recently, his Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future (2015) won the 2017 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for a monograph. In November of 2016, he guest co-edited a special issue of College English on writing assessment as social justice, and is currently finishing a co-edited collection on the same topic.
As such, Dr. Inoue is not only a prominent scholar of antiracist pedagogies, he is also shaping national conversations in composition studies. Dr. Inoue’s antiracist philosophies and classroom strategies will help us to redesign course content, delivery, and assessment in ways that support all of our diverse students.