Annotated Bibliography

March 2, 1999

Kathleen Blake Yancey is currently an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. She has recently worked with Pat Belanoff to survey people interested in writing assessment and then create a summary/position statement for writing assessment in our society today, according to writing assessors. She also co-founded and co-edits the journal Assessing Writing with Brian Huot. Her earliest publications dealt with teaching people with learning disabilities; she has also published an article on teaching people with hearing impairments. She has edited or co-edited four anthologies: two are collections on portfolios, which I cite here. One is on voice in writing and one is on WAC program assessment, and I also cite the latter. Yancey authored a book on reflection in teaching writing. Her recent publications reflect her continued interest in writing assessment and her interest in email: both of these interests are reflected by the selections for this bibliography, the former intentionally, on my part, and the latter incidentally.

Yancey's interest in reflection seems to reflect at least two things: her tendency to reflect a great deal as an individual and her interest in the relatively common inclusion of reflective texts in portfolios. Her interest in portfolios, itself, seems to be in reaction to her dissatisfaction with more traditional assessment methods, especially those used for writing. In an article co-authored with Peter Elbow, Yancey explores her distaste for holistic scoring, which she seems to find often does not make use of multiple readings of student texts, and certainly does not encourage the multiplicity of readings and responses that may best help students learn to write. This dissatisfaction is echoed in an article Yancey co-authors with Brian Huot about the (over) determination of the assessed by the assessors. She seems convinced that much of traditional assessment writes students' identities, at least as writers, for them, giving them little voice. The resulting biographies of writers may not be as fair to students as autobiographies, or co-authored biographies in which students and teachers negotiate assessment, scores, and grades in a way that gives students voice and power. This concern for voice and power is evident at another level, as well: in another article on WAC program assessment (the introduction to a co-authored anthology on the subject), Yancey and Huot explore the ways in which teachers may also need to be given a voice, or may need to exercise their right to speak, so that they, too, are active in creating their destiny and determining their fates. Certainly, then, her work serves not so much to offer reasons why traditional grading and assessment needs revision, although some of it does do this, as to offer ways in which we might change how we grade and assess to make it less oppressive and to focus more upon learning; those who share Yancey's concerns about grading might find at least possible solutions in her work on portfolios and reflection.

Part of Yancey's interest in reflection is that she sees reflection as one possible way to give students and teachers a voice in assessment; she also sees reflection as a way of assessment, which I think she thinks, should be a way of life. Yancey thinks when people reflect they learn: they may find answers, they'll certainly find questions, and they may recognize what they have already learned. She suggests that we began using reflection in portfolios without realizing the consequences of that choice, but she thinks it a serendipitous choice, finally, as she argues that student reflection in a portfolio is one way to allow students to negotiate their assessment. Part of her concern, actually, is that we have used reflection too much without reflecting upon its use and asking what we are doing with it, to what end, and with what success, which are all questions she addresses in hopes of finding what is good of reflection and working to maximize this in classroom use. For instance, she thinks reflection should be more systematically used: partially to give students practice writing reflection and teachers practice reading it, as she stresses these activities are unique (and challenging, so that she does not recommend portfolios for beginning teachers). However, an increased use of reflection also gives students an opportunity to learn more and to participate earlier in the writing of themselves as writers, since they have opportunities to self-assess, set goals, work towards those goals, then assess their progress or lack thereof in ways that put them in more control of their learning and make them, perhaps, co-educators of their selves, as they join the teacher in controlling their education and assessment. Yancey's work stresses these points but also gives practical advice on how to make, read, and finally assess reflection assignments. Much of this advice is offered through her telling us her experiences, reflecting upon her assignments and students: telling us her story.

Yancey sees reflection as one way to encourage negotiation and therefore encourage learning and a more fair assessment. She also sees it as both an individual and communal act. The negotiations she refers to are a kind of reflective dialogue, in a way, and she sees these as essential to teaching and learning, at any level. One of the things she values as a writing teacher and assessor is being part of a community of learners and teachers that can reflect together: as she says in her first portfolio anthology, everyone can tell his or her own story. Then, by negotiating the space between those experiences, we as readers or authors can learn, through a kind of reflection, where we think writing assessment stands and where it might go and work together to revise it in hopes of improving it. The anthologies she has edited try to offer us stories and perspectives, while Yancey's introductions and conclusions try to identify some of the links and gaps for us. Also, many of her articles are co-authored or reflect conversations she has had with colleagues; at least one (the Portnet discussion) is actually mostly about one of these community reflections.

Finally, I think Yancey would encourage us to reflect upon this collection of her works. While we might be tempted to see many of these articles leading up to her book on reflection, which in a way they do, they are all mini-destinations themselves, not merely way-stops on a journey to a predetermined destination. Yancey sees her own work, often, as, for example, her "reflection on reflection, today" ("Portfolio as Genre" 68). She does not intend for her articles to be Road to Damascus revelations, showing how she has come to the Truth, been converted, or found Salvation. Instead, her articles are part of an on-going conversation with herself and in a community. They are her constant attempts to negotiate with herself and others to find answersóand, yes, even truths--and to seek better ways and beliefs, perhaps a kind of salvation, but also to ask more questions, and encourage more searching, and lead not to Neat Conclusions and Panaceas but to increased possibilities and learning, for all involved in writing assessment: students, teachers, administrators, and more.

(author's note: I chose to organize this bibliography chronologically, rather than alphabetically, because of its particular purpose.)

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Teacher's Stories: Notes toward a Portfolio Pedagogy." Portfolios in the Writing Classroom. Ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey. Urbana: NCTE, 1992. 12-19.

Yancey begins this introduction to the book by defining portfolios as models. These models are varied; individual teachers develop their own to fit the needs of their individual classes and then individual students develop them from their own work. Part of a portfolio, however, is that it reflects process. It also allows reflection and encourages inquiry. Yancey says "one distinction between a storage folder and a portfolio is reflection" (15), an idea she'll develop further and with more force later than she does here, where she thinks reflection is more or less part of a portfolio depending upon the particular model being used. She does suggest that reflection allows intuition to come into focus in the classroom. Along with reflection is inquiry, and both work with the participation of both teacher and student over time, which she describes as a gift allowing "students to learn to become writers, rather than to learn to write papers" (17). Yancey also suggests portfolios broaden the audience for which students write. She warns, however, that they are risky for both teachers and students, especially because they validate both success and failure. Finally, like many portfolio advocates, Yancey argues that portfolio assessment, while messy, is more valid than many other kinds of assessment, perhaps largely because it is negotiated, because students and teachers can both participate actively in learning and assessing. This is a good introduction to the book, and helpful as an overview of portfolios; however, this is probably the least detailed and most general piece of Yancey's on portfolios I read.

---. "Portfolios in the Writing Classroom: A Final Reflection." Portfolios in the Writing Classroom. Ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey. Urbana: NCTE, 1992. 102-116.

This is Yancey's conclusion to the book in which she defines writing portfolios as similar to artists' portfolios and financial portfolios: "longitudinal in nature--diverse in content--almost always collaborative in ownership and composition" (102). They also, she explains, contain metacognitive work, reflections and explorations of their contents that draw connections between the pieces inside. She suggests the portfolio frame encourages learning by encouraging this metacognitive work. The portfolio frame also encourages assessment that fits with classrooms that stress process over product and encourage teachers to assess individual writers over time rather than in comparison to other writers as one often does when grading a stack of individual papers. Two different kinds of portfolios can be used, working and presentational, and these function differently, the former as an "archive," the latter as a "presentation." Yancey also mentions that she thinks portfolios work best when they are voluntary, that they require teachers to read differently (finally, for evaluation, but throughout the semester, to encourage learning), that their use should constantly be revised, and that they may provide additional benefits. Finally, Yancey asks questions about portfolios, at least two of which--concerning reflection and reading portfolios--she will later address in more detail. This final chapter of the book gives much more detail than the introduction and also reflects both what Yancey may have learned from assembling the book and what the reader of the book may have learned through the other chapters.

---. "Make Haste Slowly: Graduate Teaching Assistants and Portfolios." New Directions in Portfolio Assessment. Ed. Laurel Black, et al. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1994. 210-218.

This at first seems unusual for Yancey, perhaps, because in it she argues against portfolio use. However, she argues against portfolio use only in a specific case--first semester teachers--and largely because she thinks that portfolios will finally be used better and more often if inexperienced teachers are not pushed into their use before they are ready. Basically, she argues that beginning teachers need "time to develop," "resources to draw upon," and "guidance to shape their own portfolio writing classroom" (211). She thinks beginning teachers often do not have time to learn to use portfolios well while learning other basic teaching things, too. Instead, teachers may need to see how writers develop over time, learn how to develop good writing assignments, learn to read and comment helpfully on many papers, learn how to motivate writers, and see "revision in action" before they can use portfolios comfortably and well (213). Aware that not using portfolios may make some new instructors uncomfortable with their pedagogy, Yancey advocates a contract system, negotiated with students, to "focus on writing" and "diminish the malignant effects of averaging" while still giving new teachers time to "structure" their own portfolio curricula for the future. Yancey's mission is advocating teacher readiness; at the same time, she offers us valuable insight into her views about portfolios and assessment. For instance, she apparently always finds averaging as it is traditionally done undesirable and she does not advocate portfolios in every circumstance.

Elbow, Peter and Kathleen Blake Yancey. "On the Nature of Holistic Scoring: An Inquiry Composed on Email." Assessing Writing. 1.1 (1994): 91-108.

Elbow and Yancey discuss holistic scoring in a way that reflects one of Yancey's interestsóemail conversations, an interest I think may finally reflect her interest in community and the value she attaches to conversing about writing assessment in an effort to reflect upon and revise our practices (incidentally, you really can identify who said what in the co-authored article). Yancey and Elbow first define convergent and divergent ways of learning and acknowledge the conflict between the divergent reading our discipline generally values and the convergent readings that holistic scoring and its valued reliability generally value. Yancey, in particular, stresses that while she thinks formal assessment is valuable, it should be done carefully: based upon conversations between teachers and assessors, with a focus on what will help learners, which may relate to authentic reading--if we define authentic reading in part as reading for a "multiplicity of demonstration and multiplicity of response" (102). Although portfolios are not a large part of this article, one can see, perhaps, how portfolios might lend themselves to authentic reading as Yancey and Elbow define it. Certainly, their general distrust for assessment shows through, although Yancey emerges as slightly more assessment-friendly than Elbow. This assessment-friendly stance may be related to Yancey's interest in reflection, which she sees as a way of assessing.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Dialogue, Interplay, and Discovery: Mapping the Role and the Rhetoric of Reflection in Portfolio Assessment." Writing Portfolios in the Classroom: Policy and Practice, Promise and Peril. Ed. Robert Calfee and Pamela Perfumo. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1996. 83-102.

This article largely tries to connect reflection to portfolios, to discuss how they relate to help students learn. Yancey explains what kinds of reflection are best: those that juxtapose knowledge. She connects reflection to a community, she argues that reflection requires believing and doubting with specific language, and she suggests reflections in portfolios both "enhance" and "problematize" our understandings of student writing (85). The way she defines it, reflection is dialogic and includes projection, retrospection, and revision (goal setting, text revising, and articulating learning). Portfolios as "developmental" and "diverse" collections developed through selection, including reflection, can then enable self and outside evaluation. Yancey thinks that habitual reflection promotes learning, and that students can learn to reflect if given time, an understanding of decision making that reflects values, an ability to juxtapose texts, and an ability to see their own development in a bigger picture (93). Finally, however, she wonders whether portfolios require new ways to read, new ways to assess both writing and reflective performances. Finally, she notes that her essay itself reflects. It places reflection historically and looks at how it now is or might be used in portfolios and finally raises questions and suggests directions. This article is a good preview (or shorter and earlier version) of her later reflection book, which discusses many of these ideas in more detail.

---. "Portfolio as Genre, Rhetoric as Reflection: Situating Selves, Literacies, and Knowledge." Writing Program Administration. 19.3 (1996): 55-69.

Here Yancey stresses that reflection is what makes a portfolio more than a folder of student work. She draws upon Polanyi, Elbow, Sommers, Hilgers, Schon, Perl, and others to define three kinds of reflection: reflection in action (including both retrospection and projective structuring), constructive reflection (making selves through story telling), and reflection in presentation (largely what portfolios do, she thinks). Yancey then reminds us that when we assess or grade, we must decide which reflections to value and reward, and she suggests we might value multi-voice reflections over single-voice reflections. Finally, she stresses that reflection and her reflections on it are community-bound, and demonstrates this belief by responding directly to several colleagues' concerns. This article clearly develops the article on portfolios and reflection in more detail than the article in Calfee and Perfumo and also clearly leads her towards her book on reflection, which again goes into more detail than this one, although this one may be more explicitly linked to the nitty-gritty of portfolio grading.

---. "Teacher Portfolios: Lessons in Resistance, Readiness, and Reflection." Situating Portfolios: Four Perspectives. Ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey and Irwin Weiser. Logan: Utah State U P, 1997. 245-261.

In this chapter Yancey explores the teaching portfolios she assigned to a methods class in education one semester, a change for her in this course from a professional to a student based portfolio assignment. Giving us three student portfolio examples, she explores how she reads portfolios and how she assesses them. She mentions, for example, that portfolios and the reflections they include often address the course's delivered and student's experienced curricula and the places where these curricula interact. (Perhaps interestingly, one of her footnotes includes the suggestion that we also have a lived curriculum, an idea she expands upon later in the reflection book.) Yancey reminds us that how we construct portfolio assignments will affect what we and students find in them and get from them, and that we should try to avoid "being trapped" by what we are "supposed to do" (259). Yancey also stresses that part of the validity of her portfolio assignment is in its relationship to the curriculum, and that this is "enhanced by its power to teach the teacher," as her students' voices have done. Finally, Yancey reiterates the importance of community and readiness.

Michael Allen, et al. "Portfolios, WAC, Email, and Assessment: An Inquiry on Portnet." Situating Portfolios: Four Perspectives. Ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey and Irwin Weiser. Logan, UT: Utah State U P, 1997. 371-384.

The scenario: Yancey distributes a portfolio created by a student in an undergraduate honors economics class to members of Portnet, an email list, who discuss the portfolio along with the course syllabus. She thinks she wants confirmation from colleagues that she and the student's teacher evaluated it fairly; she also wants a reaction to the student's work and to the portfolio assignment. Different Portnet members share their thoughts on the assignment, assessment, and Portnet community, and Yancey closes by stressing that the community has uncovered issues about embedded assumptions--about what an honors class is, for example, across institutions--about the role of reflection for students, teachers, and readers, and about the importance of email communities in research. Finally, she reminds us that we can read "fairly/reliably/appropriately without being directed by anchors and benchmarks and a training process" (383), especially when given information about the course, school, and classroom and when we remember (perhaps) to have one reader act as a student advocate. Again, this work reflects Yancey's interest in community and reflection as parts of assessment, but this time at a cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary level and in an electronic community.

Huot, Brian and Kathleen Blake Yancey. "Assumptions about Assessing WAC Programs: Some Axioms, Some Observations, Some Context." Assessing Writing across the Curriculum: Diverse Approaches and Practices. Ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey and Brian Huot. Greenwich and London: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1997. 7-14.

This piece is an introduction to the volume, so part of its function is to introduce the rest of the articles in the anthology. However, it also offers other information. For example, it informs us that Yancey and Huot see assessment as an integral part of any educational program, as assessment allows people to ask good questions and learn and then change. They define program assessment as concerned with classrooms, classes, and programs at a level larger than the individual student, saying it "addresses the total nature of the program rather than its individual components" (8). They stress that the emphasis in program assessment should be on inquiry, and methods and material should be tools towards answering the question, not the foci themselves. Yancey and Huot also remind us that WAC program assessment assumes writing is epistemic but also is performance, and that since WAC programs are diverse so must be the ways in which we assess them. Finally, they note that WAC assessment is, in a way, a reflection designed to promote faculty development, which should, in turn, promote student development. They state that this assessment should be "regular, systematic, and coherent," perhaps not surprisingly much the same criteria Yancey advocates students do with their own work (although this may be less systematic). Like much of Yancey's other work, this introduction reminds us that community is important: assessment is defined as collaborative, democratic, rhetorical (with exigence and audience, in context), and reformative. Yancey and Huot set up the anthology as a community effort from which we can learn, should we reflect upon it.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998.

Yancey's book on reflection defines reflection and speaks more specifically about its different possible uses in and implications for the classroom, the teacher, and the student. Most of the chapters dealing specifically with assessment I will annotate separately. Other chapters, however, assessment related issues like how much reflection can tell us about student literacy, especially as it may relate to the curriculum. Yancey introduces the text as largely an attempt to retheorize Donald Schon's work on reflection for a classroom environment. The entire book, relates to assessment since Yancey seems to see reflection as part of assessment, a way of assessingófor ourselves, our students, our classes, our teaching, our discipline, etc. Certainly, also, this book collects and expands upon the ideas in Yancey's many earlier articles about assessment.

---. "On Reflection." Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998. 1-22.

This chapter defines reflection as how we know what we know and articulate that knowledge and as the product of that process (6). It breaks reflection into three main parts, each of which will be its own chapter in the book: reflection-in-action (writing in the process of text creation: reviewing, projecting, and revising), constructive reflection (generalizing and identifying patterns of learning over time, telling one's own learning story; Yancey wants these to be multi-voice and multi-story), and reflection-in-presentation (formal reflective texts written for audiences and often for formal evaluation; these texts are generally selective and context-specific). Yancey also mentions that reflection intersects with teaching writing at many levels: that of the individual student learning to write, that of the teacher trying to teach, that of researchers wanting validity in evaluation, and that of leaders in education wanting to reform. Finally, she reminds us that reflection is both individual and social, process and product, next to and in texts.

---. "Reflection in Presentation." Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998. 69-96.

I chose to annotate this chapter separately because it deals with how to read more formal student reflections such as those often included in portfolios. Yancey thinks, first, that these must be read in the context of the course or assignment in which they were created (this appeared as well in the Portnet discussion about the student portfolio). Reflection in presentation is written both in and for the self and for an external audience, and readers should remember this. When evaluating these writings, readers might look for things like overly short texts, texts that seem to indicate their authors were not familiar with their own knowledge and writing or learning, texts which do not demonstrate the writer cannot identify links or gaps (think rhetorically or synthetically), or that "parrot" the class or teacher but fail to demonstrate either had an influence (82). What good reflections might do is draw connections to other contexts, use metaphors, juxtapose situations, etc. Along with these ideas about reading reflections, though, Yancey asks questions about how detailed teachers may want to make reflective assignments, whether students should address particular questions, or use a particular form--I think that she does not want her ideas here to be taken as "answers" to a reading-reflection-problem, but as her reflections on the problem, as her dialogue with herself which she wants to make a dialogue with the readers of her book. Still, this chapter offers practical advice as well as food for thought.

---. "Reflective Reading, Reflective Responding." Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998. 97-124.

This chapter addresses how teachers (or other assessors) might read reflective texts. She suggests they respond directly and specifically to the student text at hand, and that we remember acts of reading, interpreting, evaluating, and responding are not all the same. Yancey reviews ways readers readóreading and responding as a common reader, reading and judging as a editor, reviewer, gatekeeeper, receiving and analyzing as a critic, and receiving and improving as a diagnostician or therapist (101). She also reviews how teachers may think of textsóevaluative with the text closed, formative, with an evolving text, developmental with a portfolio, or contextually (102). She reminds us that just as we may read students texts differently, the students may also read their own texts in various ways. Finally, Yancey demonstrates with examples how she reads student texts in what she hopes are many ways and "replies" to them, specifically, in context, as reflections of individuals, but in a way she hopes promotes dialogue and negotiation. Although this chapter is not really about formal evaluation, it is about a kind of assessment related to specific problems of reflective texts; perhaps not surprisingly Yancey's final "solution" here seems to be to move the text into dialogue, to form a community of at least two in which to deal with it (and from the Portnet discussion, it seems she'd be willing to have a real community, too).

---. "Reflection and the Writing Course." Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1998. 125-143.

This chapter is not so much about students; its focus is the teacher and the curriculum. Yancey proposes that reflection is a helpful way to think about and revise one's curriculum by looking at what one does, how it seems to work, how it seems to fail, predict or project into the next experience, and then begin again (not surprisingly, this aligns closely with reflection-in-action--) Again, Yancey demonstrates the power of reflection by working through examples with her readers, juxtaposing different scenarios and the curriculum she delivers with that her students experienced in an attempt to learn more about what works with different students and how and why. What she learns, and reminds us of, is that reflection may provide answers but it also raises questions; perhaps the same is true of any good assessment?

---. "Reflection and Assessment." Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998. 145-168.

In this chapter, Yancey more specifically addresses some of the issues surrounding using reflection, especially in portfolios, in assessment. She reminds us that "reflection is thought to enhance the validity of the assessment--precisely because it requires that students narrate, analyze, and evaluate their own learning and their own texts and thus connect the assessment to their own learning" (146). She reminds us that when we assess portfolios we usually are evaluating two things, the reflection and the work itself. The chapter reviews many portfolio assignments and several of the main concerns of portfolio assessors, from whether one should read reflection as an introduction or a conclusion to whether a reflective text should be called a letter or an essay to whether we "inappropriately conflate" the reflective and other written processes and products in a portfolio. Yancey offers us an assignment that she thinks worked fairly well, and the assignment includes reflection in action, constructive, reflection, and reflection in performance. Finally, Yancey asks many questions and again turns to negotiation when she suggests we may look to our students for some of the answers. Like her other chapters in this book, this one is both very concerned with practicality and grounded in theory; it works towards answers and it asks questions.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake and Brian Huot. "Construction, Deconstruction, and (Over) Determination: A Foucaultian Analysis of Grades." The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing: Problems and Possibilities. Ed. Frances Zak and Christopher C. Weaver. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 39-52.

This co-authored article, like the article Yancey and Elbow wrote together, is written as a conversation, with different voices clearly marked (although this time not clearly identified). Huot and Yancey demonstrate grading is now often done out of context and they promote dialogue and negotiation between the grader and graded (40). They seem unconvinced grades are good, but since they seem (for now) resigned to their existence, they want to minimize the harm they can do. In discussing the problems with grades, such as their working both to motivate and evaluate, they give some recent history of grading: looking at things like a move away from norm-referenced assessment and problems with gender and determining that grades perhaps do not keep good records of student work. Finally, both authors seem convinced that like them or not, grades are here and powerful, and their concern then becomes with how grades (over) determine students, stripping them of power to make decisions, stripping them of voice, perhaps. The counter to this? Negotiating with students, giving them a voice again, letting them help to "write" themselves. Since teachers and students are ranked by grades, they wish for teachers and students to both have a role in this ranking, to help determine their own fate. They ask that we provide more context for our grades and grading and that we let students set their own criteria (at least to a point) and self-assess as part of their negotiated grades. Finally, they ask for change.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake et al. "The Conversation Continues: A Dialogue on Grade Inflation." The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing: Problems and Possibilities. Ed. Frances Zak and Christopher C. Weaver. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 185-192.

Again, Yancey takes part in an electronic community, a dialogue about grade inflation. Her role here is relatively small; she shares a story, which perhaps is important mostly because of its relation to the article she and Huot co-authored for the same anthology. She suggests grades (over) determine us as they do our students, something Huot comments on in his section of the article. Yancey also ends the article with a story that reminds us "that when we start educating people (rather than delivering a curriculum, as though there were no recipient of the delivery) we change the grading game, too," a summary of the entire article in which most participants seemed concerned about who owns grades, what is judged, and why--and hope to, through their reflective dialogue, help resolve some of the problems in the situation (or at least move towards stating the problems).
 

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