Journey into Light - Developing Better Questions Together through Qualitative Assessment

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by SANS

“Journey into Light” explores how qualitative assessment can open rigorous classroom dialogue and improve course structure, pedagogy, and assignments in transitional English and college composition. Centered on the question of how A, C, and F grades appear across courses, it highlights coding categories and a pivotal issue: dialect. The discussion focuses on accommodating African American English and students’ “right to their own language,” rethinking SAE-only competency and grading practices through readings, research, and workshop-based learning.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages10

Reading Time25 min

AccessFree to download

Journey into Light: Developing Better Questions Together through Qualitative Assessment

Qualitative assessment and course improvement

Grading, portfolios, and coding categories

Dialect and African American English in assessment

Pedagogical shift and questions about competency requirements

THE CEA FORUM Summer/Fall 2010 A CEA Forum Roundtable Journey into Light: Developing Better Questions Together through Qualitative Assessment KAREN SANTELLI Art Institute of Pittsburgh As my colleagues have indicated, the thrill and value of qualitative assessment is that it let us loose to speak and dig into the questions that we had to keep silenced during rubric-based assessment. It allowed us to value our many questions about student writing and pedagogy. As we voiced our questions and discussed them vigorously we began to understand that the process could help each of us in refining course structure, pedagogy and assignments in the Transitional English classroom and in the college composition courses that follow. Our original question was “What does an A, C, and F grade look in each of our classes?”and we sat around a table to share sample portfolios in each category. This question led to many others, as evidenced by our four pages of coding sub-categories in our appendix. One of the most important issues raised was about dialect. We noticed that often failing grades showed evidence of African American English, a dialect none of us knew well and most ofus had not considered in our pedagogy. Like many Composition instructors, we did not have specific training in THE CEA FORUM Summer/Fall 2010 composition; only one of us had been trained in the field (Krystia). I was trained as a journalist and educator, Jeff as a creative writer, and Katie as a literature specialist. As a result, we had not been given a proper introduction to the concept of other Englishes, and our focus was more on meeting our course objective’s goals of fluent Standard English than on complicating the issue with the validity of other dialects. But with our conversations about how we grade, that was about to change, as the issue of dialect kept reemerging during our assessment sessions. The discussions ofthis issue had a particularly strong effect on me. As we together looked at David Johnson’s “Review Essay: Defining Dialect” from what was at that time the most recent College Composition and Communication issue, I began to question, how do we accommodate students who speak other English dialects and help them succeed as writers? Specifically, how do we accommodate the “other English” we most encounter at the Art Institute: African American English or Black vernacular? As a native Pittsburgher, it’s pretty easy for me to deal with English dialects with which Iam familiar (Here in Pittsburgh, we’re fairly comfortable understanding and helping students shift into Standard American English from “Pittsburghese,” like “My car needs washed,” and also West Virginia and Ohio dialects) . However, I found African American or Black vernacular more challenging. First, the issue is so politically charged. Our transcripts showed not only me, but all of us wrestling with the “students’ right to their own language,” and eagerly learning more as we came to realize how we disagreed about these rights. We read the work of Geneva Smitherman and others, and re-read our students’work with the new issues in mind. We learned THE CEA FORUM Summer/Fall 2010 that AAE contains grammatical structures that we are only beginning to understand. As Brian C. Lewis writes in “Black English: Its History and Its Role in the Education of Our Children,”Geneva Smitherman instructs us that today’s Black vernacular is the child of West African languages and English. In the days of slavery, says Smitherman, Black English “involved the substitution of English for West African words, but within the same basic structure and idiom as that characterized West African language patterns." As a result of our readings and conversations, I was determined to learn more. I found articles, looked up YouTube videos from the PBS special American Tongues, and attended Geneva Smitherman’s workshop at the 2008 CCCC. My entire pedagogy was shaken and remade because we took the time to ta

FAQs

What core grading question motivates the roundtable discussion?

The group begins with the question of what an A, C, and F grade looks like across their classes, sharing sample portfolios for each category to generate further inquiry.

Why is dialect—especially African American English—described as a major issue?

The participants observe that failing grades often correlate with evidence of African American English, a dialect they had not been trained to address, making the grading process and pedagogy contentious and difficult.

How does the discussion suggest instructors should respond to students’ home dialects?

After reading and revisiting student work with new perspectives, the author concludes that instructors may need to learn African American English and allow students to write and communicate in their native dialect to support success.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by SANS