Page 202 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

REMEDIATING WRITING ASSESSMENT 169

TOWARD A SYNCRETIC UNDERSTANDING
OF TECHNOLOGIES IN THE WRITING CLASSROOM

With the convergence of technologies in writing instruction,
teachers have to be aware that remediating writing assessment
through the growing use of computers in the writing classroom
can lead us toward syncreticism. Syncretics, the blending together
of differing traditions or schools of thought—in this case assess-
ment and networked writing environments—offers writing
teachers a richer, more varied understanding of how technology
can be beneficial for composition pedagogy. The culture and prac-
tices that arise from syncreticism allow us to identify the work-
able elements of the older culture (assessment) that share
similarities with elements in the newer culture (computers). As
those elements are identified and discussed over time and across
various conditions, an environment emerges that fuses "what
works" into a set of practices and pedagogical habits.
Because writing instructors and their programs are in the middle
of technological convergence, any prescriptive offering to come to
the rescue seems narrow at best and dogmatic at worst. Schools and
colleges across America and the world are in very different stages as
far as in-place infrastructure and assessment philosophy. Instruc-
tors and their programs are not now, nor may they ever be, at a place
where "one size fits all" for the convergence of computer and assess-
ment technologies in their institutions.
As I proposed earlier in this book, the most promising and syn-
cretic avenue for remediated writing assessment comes from teach-
ers developing models of deep assessment that account not just for
content and mechanics but also for techne, aesthetics or visual rhet-
oric, and genre recognition. In deep assessment, standards carried
over from earlier forms of writing assessment can be blended with
the ideas we value in teaching with computers. In a syncretic sys-
tem, deep assessment becomes a type of "assessment as design" in
which evaluators create criteria that are flexible and accountable in
response to the course level taught and the range of student ability.
A syncretic understanding of remediated writing assessment
generated through convergence offers the hope that the field moves
toward ubiquitous deep assessment. This offers a type of evalua-
tion that integrates into our daily experiences and habituated prac-
tices. Composition is not at that point yet, but ubiquitous deep