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| VOICES ON: Statewide Testing and the First-Year Writing Course Donna Dunbar-Odom, an associate professor of English, has directed the first-year writing program at Texas A&M University-Commerce since 1993 when she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. Before her doctoral work at Pitt, she taught basic writing and directed the writing center at Indiana State University. She's currently working on a project examining literacy, class, and desire, and loves teacher movies.  Can you tell us a little bit about your role as WPA?In my department, we have a director of the writing program, Dick Fulkerson, a director of basic writing, currently Jonikka Charlton, and a director of first-year composition, me. My job is primarily to coordinate our two-semester sequence of first-year writing courses and to train, mentor, and supervise our graduate teaching assistants. I write the assignment sequences for both courses, collaborating both with the teaching assistants and the director of basic writing, and this is one of my favorite parts of the job. In fact, writing sequences for our second composition course (which focuses on research and argument) led me to my textbook, Working with Ideas: Reading, Writing, and Researching Experience, that just came out last November. I'd been experimenting with ways of using elements of ethnographic research methods to energize the concept of the research paper and ended up with something I'm pretty darned happy with. What is one of your biggest challenges as director of first-year writing? In the last five or so years, Texas has implemented statewide testing of all public school students. Students must pass the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) several times throughout their first twelve years of school — most importantly, they must pass the final exit exam in order to receive their high school diplomas. Those students who want to attend state universities must also pass the Texas Academic Skills Program exam (TASP). If they don't pass it, they can start work at the university but must be enrolled in some form of remediation and may not take "upper-level" coursework until they satisfy the TASP requirement. What effect does the test have on your program? The test itself is quite problematic. For one thing, it has given even more power to the five-paragraph essay as high school teachers, much more stressed by these tests than we are on the college level, try to get as many of their students as possible to pass. For another thing, the prompts are questionable. The last time I taught basic writing, several of my students came to class baffled and angry after they had been presented with a prompt that asked them to discuss recycling. This particular group all came from the same apartment complex in a predominantly black region in the Dallas area where recycling simply wasn't an option. Others in the same class who got the same prompt came from farms and small towns in east Texas where they either haul their own trash to the dump or burn it — recycling of sorts, but not what the testing folks were looking for. The prompt is aimed at middle class students in urban parts of the state. Locally, what TASP has effectively done is take away many placement decisions at A&M-Commerce; we used to have an on-site, local placement exam that asked students to respond to a brief, meaty reading in writing. We scored their responses holistically then had students write again during the first week of class to test our initial placement. We were, on the whole, satisfied with it and the results. Now, however, if students haven't passed TASP, it doesn't matter where we want to place them; the state says we must place them in basic writing. In addition, the pressure to teach to the test and to let students drop the class once they pass TASP is enormous. So far, we've been able to resist, but it isn't easy. How do you see this test and others like it affecting the field of composition? I don't know if Research I institutions will be much affected by state testing, but at state schools like mine, we're being forced to rethink and defend our "of course's." For example, I find that the word remedial has been forced back into my vocabulary. And there are rumors that the state of Texas wants to implement state testing on the university level as well. It's discouraging to have trained to do a certain job well, a job I believe in, and not be able to follow through on that training. I'd say that, as composition professionals, we have to educate ourselves about what our state legislators are doing and how they perceive us, and we have to learn to speak so that others can hear us and not dismiss us. The testing movement isn't going to go away if we ignore it, so, like it or not, we have to become our own lobbyists. |
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