“I'm Following the Rules, and I'm Breaking the Rules”: Histories of Assessment, Consent-Based Feedback, and Descriptive Review

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 10:50 am
  In Roundtable Session: Describing the Immeasurable: The Transformative Potential of Descriptive Review for Teaching, Learning, and Research (Table 29)

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores poetry created in a community writing workshop in a coastal town in Nova Scotia, Canada. It pays particular attention to the relationship between the act of creative writing and processes of assessment within the workshop, to explore the possibilities of “consent-based” feedback, participants’ histories of “schooled” assessment, and the importance of description as an analytic mode.
Theoretical framework
Literacy scholars have noted the impact of assessment within school contexts, particularly in relationship to student writing (Elbow, 1993), but extending into administrative logics that justify a lack of support for students (Author 1, 2013). Yet teachers of writing are also aware of the importance of (and hunger for) feedback from creative writers, even as offering feedback carries emotional risks and consequences (Atwell, 1998).
Alongside these dynamics of assessment and feedback, there is the act of creative writing itself, which Yagelski (2011) describes as a way of being and a transformative experience that can interrupt literacy normativity (Johnson, 2017), particularly for writers whose identities are excluded or marginalized in school contexts. Yet Schneider (2003) observes that creative writing should not be treated as autobiographical unless the writer says it is, particularly in the context of group feedback. Carini's (2001) descriptive review processes offer a versatile way to engage with creative writing that uses an analytic dwelling without resorting to “ranking” (Elbow, 1993).
Adopting an “inquiry stance” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) on practice, this paper analyzes moments of communal feedback within the writing workshops, and the poems of participants, to think about the connections between consent and description within writing classes, for students and teachers.
Methods and data sources
The poems explored in this paper were written across seven 2-hour workshop sessions, which happened once a week. Field notes and audio recordings were used to document the process, as well as collecting poem drafts from participants.
Results
Some participants were hesitant to offer feedback to each other, and articulated their fears around critique and assessment. Others mentioned their strong desire for feedback, and a direct engagement with an audience for their writing. Workshop participants collectively devised a consent-based format for offering feedback to each other before they shared their poems. Participants tended to use descriptive language when engaging with each others' work, and the process of descriptive review also undid some of the power dynamics between participants and the facilitator when they collectively discussed specific poems. Group conversations also revealed links between feedback and fundamental uncertainties within the creative process, the pedagogical significance of silence, and the shifting locations of authority.
Scholarly significance
Description offers an important analytic alternative to researchers, and it also offers an alternative to traditional evaluative feedback within creative writing workshops. The experiential subjectivity of description doesn't make it useless as an evaluation tool. Instead, it offers a crucial way for writers to share their responses to each others' writing in a language that emphasizes the continuity and relationality of a writing practice, dissolves hierarchies between facilitators and participants, and supports consent-based feedback processes.

Author

• Ben Gallagher, University of Toronto - OISE