- Tucson, Arizona, United States
- 520-621-1863
Keith L Harms
University of the Fraser Valley, English, Faculty Member
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Problem: Because U.S. overseas colonial expansion in the early twentieth century is a much ignored part of our nation’s history, archival work in writing assessment has overlooked the colonial legacies informing the ways we think... more
Research Problem: Because U.S. overseas colonial expansion in the early twentieth century is a much ignored part of our nation’s history, archival work in writing assessment has overlooked the colonial legacies informing the ways we think about the role of language in writing and its assessment. This has led recent assessment work to ignore international scholarship that is already asking important questions about the colonial legacies of writing assessment practices.
Research Interests: History and Colonialism
Research Interests:
This study looks at writing assessments in the school system in the U.S. colonial Philippines in order to test the claim made by Horner and Trimbur (2002) that many of the assumptions we make about language in our pedagogies are rooted in... more
This study looks at writing assessments in the school system in the U.S. colonial Philippines in order to test the claim made by Horner and Trimbur (2002) that many of the assumptions we make about language in our pedagogies are rooted in the "high tide" of overseas U.S. imperialism at the turn of the 20th Century. These assessments show that, indeed, many surviving assumptions about language were an integral part of the "white man's burden," as were the exporting of composition pedagogy and psychometric testing techniques.
Research Interests:
The present volume celebrates an important milestone in the history of Writing Studies: a unified call to action. In the field of writing assessment, the time has come to end the disciplinary isolation of writing assessment. In ending the... more
The present volume celebrates an important milestone in the history of Writing Studies: a unified call to action. In the field of writing assessment, the time has come to end the disciplinary isolation of writing assessment. In ending the isolation of writing assessment as mere technique and bureaucratic action, we end the isolation that has denied student agency over their educative processes in written language development. In what has become a nightmare of unequal power relations, standing with our students is restorative. To secure this restoration and place students at the center of teaching and assessing writing, we turn to a new conception of writing assessment—a conceptualization that advances opportunity for every student. As we noted in the introduction, authors for Writing Assessment, Social Justice , and the Advancement of Opportunity were invited to deliberate on a single question regarding the relationship of writing assessment to opportunity: How can we ensure that writing assessment leads to the advancement of opportunity? In their answers, our colleagues addressed this question in terms of theoriza-tion, research methods, policy implications, and future directions for research. What becomes clear in their contributions is that a body of knowledge now exists connecting the achievement of social justice through opportunities created by writing assessment.