Through our language standards and judgements, white language dominance is encouraged because they stem historically from a white racial formation in the Western world. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the discussion of how these habits of white language (HOWL) are found in traditional writing assessment practices and feedback. This chapter focuses on deconstructing and reconstructing Brown's approach to instructor-student conferencing (ISC) as feedback to student writing and reframes the ISC conference through an antiracist and dialogic pedagogy where student conferences become a space that decenter HOWL and emphasize students' rights to their own language and languaging. This chapter presents a dialogic framework and critical reflection questions for writing instructors that aims to promote more equitable writing assessment and feedback via the dialogical writing conference.
TopIntroduction
When it comes to the role of feedback in the teaching of writing at the post-secondary level, many instructors can agree on its critical nature in improving student writing as well as improving student motivation and self-efficacy. On the surface, feedback is often designed and executed in a way that aims to assist students with their best interest in mind. However, when deconstructing these practices, what is discovered is the complex issues in which feedback and assessment practices become yet another source of teaching writing that promotes Habits of White Language (HOWL) and white languaging (to language) which results in unequitable teaching practices. Customarily, instructors’ feedback on student writing involves offering one-sided feedback by way of margin comments on student essays and writing assignments. Much research has highlighted the issue of effectiveness in the traditional process of providing student feedback (Bean, 2011; Sommers, 2013; Stellmack et al., 2012; Straub, 1997). However, what is often ignored in this standard of practice is its conscious or unconscious promotion of HOWL and white languaging over all other habits of language. When using HOWL and languaging, it is borrowed from Inoue’s (2021a) definition of language which is done in two ways:
I use “to language” in order to refer to a range of actions and other things that are more than just words, more than speaking or writing. Language is the way in which we embody and practice ourselves and our ideas, which affects how others judge our words and us and how we judge them. To language involves a set of embodied practices that involve words, grammars, logics, a range of performative aspects of people and their particular bodies, as well as habits of various kinds. (par. 8)
While feedback is intended to provide guidance for students on how to improve their writing, instructors must consider what is being communicated simultaneously. Written feedback is limited in that what is actually limited is how people naturally communicate with each other through embodied practices and in context using participants' (students’) own terms. Written feedback alone does not do this, and it risks multiple (mis)interpretations and meanings of what is being communicated by the instructor to the student. In one aspect, instructor feedback becomes transactional rather than dialogical. Written feedback in a transactional sense assumes that the students share similar environmental and individual aspects with the instructor which suggests that both the teacher and student share the same social system (Barnlund, 1962). It is understood that this is not generally the case. So, what social system is being shared and what language is being privileged? What is typically being shared are HOWL students have learned over the course of their educational experiences in English and Language and Literacy classrooms as well as institutional spaces. What instructors are communicating through their written feedback closely resembles ways in which students must write that matches more of the markers of white standardized languaging expected in schools, which perpetuates a hierarchy of language where those who display HOWL in their writing are praised and granted high grades and those who do not are perceived or marked as low achieving or lazy.