Gaining Grounds Revisited: Sustaining Tales of Development

Sustainable development is a popular phrase often associated with environmental studies, but the phrase can serve as ecological metaphor through which to view environments associated with writing assessment and writing program development. Sustainable environments depend on symbiotic relationships. Writing assessment and writing program development constantly rely on the classroom environment as the essential site for understanding student growth in writing. Applying a metaphor of sustainable development to student development in writing presumes that novice writers will first acclimate to academic writing across the curriculum, and that more experienced students will acculturate to writing within their chosen disciplines. But each student and each classroom teacher, in turn, affects the environment of generalized assimilation and acculturation since each student, at any given time, has unique and different needs. Thus, institutional diagnostics and assessments are by their very nature a sampling of water flowing by in the stream.1 Ideally, institutional writing assessment should always strive for more follow-up to quantitative generalizations, for more discussion about particular students who tend to complicate institutional writing assessments, for more balance between institutional reporting of data, which tends to go out to a larger public, and institutional feedback to the students themselves. Institutional writing assessment that claims to measure general student development should privilege and encourage more reflection from individual students as well as from individual classroom teachers. Typically, students are discussed through narrative, in teacher lore. “Without a question, an academic reflex to hold lore in low regard represents a serious problem… and Practitioners need to defend themselves, to argue for the value of what they know and how they come to know it” (North 55). In contrast, statistical differences in freshmen’s writing abilities contrasted to upper level students’ writing abilities are often seen as Gaining Grounds Revisited: Sustaining Tales of Development