Abstract
One way of queering teaching, and assessment as a part of teaching, is to draw on various theories that simultaneously make sense with and make trouble for one’s teaching. Queer theory can provoke the queering, challenging how a teacher approaches seemingly axiomatic assumptions about social identities and the expected behaviors of those exhibiting those identities. In this chapter, we focus on queering assessment, and the assessment of student writing through turning to a piece of student writing authored by Justine, an African American lesbian, during her junior year in an urban, arts-based magnet high school. We draw on New Literacy Studies in troubling the approaches we take toward defining “good” writing. Because of the gendered and racial identities Justine claimed, we also turned to feminism and Critical Race Theory (CRT) to make sense of and complicate our understanding of her writing, in terms of both content and form.
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Blackburn, M.V., Beucher, B. (2019). Productive Tensions in Assessment: Troubling Sociocritical Theories Toward an Advancement of Queer Pedagogy. In: Mayo, C., Rodriguez, N.M. (eds) Queer Pedagogies. Critical Studies of Education, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27066-7_3
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