Kelly Sassi
I am a Full Professor of English and Education at North Dakota State University in Fargo. My scholarly interests include writing assessment, qualitative methodology, Indigenous literatures and pedagogy, feminist research methods, social justice, writing, and English education. I teach courses in writing, young adult literatures, methods of teaching, and composition research.
Address: 348 9th Ave S
Fargo, ND 58103
Address: 348 9th Ave S
Fargo, ND 58103
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test results did not reflect the job they were doing as writing
instructors, and they wondered if students might need an additional
remedial writing course. These questions about writing assessment
led to a locally based collaborative assessment of student
writing that addressed larger goals of culturally responsive professional
development and improving the teaching of writing from
elementary through college.
Research Questions: 1) During writing assessment research, what
discourses do educators engage in and how might writing assessment
research be used for professional development? 2) Does the
professional development during writing assessment reflect the values
of culturally responsive pedagogy? 3) Does culturally responsive
professional development attached to writing assessment lead
to addressing social justice issues?
Literature Review: To explore the issue of writing assessment at a
tribal college, I use theories of culturally responsive, relevant, and
sustaining pedagogies from the field of education, and Christine E.
Sleeter’s 2014 framework of four dimensions of social justice teaching,
as well as indigenous perspectives from Devon Mihesuah, Angela
Wilson, Sandy Grande, and Scott Richard Lyons to complicate
and critique these theories and to extend the work on participatory
assessment to include tribal colleges.
Methodology: In addition to quantitative data in the form of essay
scores, this project primarily relied on discourse analysis modeled
on Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin’s grounded theory approach.
Analysis involved emic coding resulting from labels that emerged
from patterns in the discourse, combined with etic cross-coding,
using elements of culturally relevant pedagogy as an analytic tool.
Conclusions: Despite the presence of culturally congruent mission
and vision statements in local contexts such as Sitting Bull College,
large-scale writing assessments have great power over teachers
and students; nonetheless, as this study shows, this power can be
questioned when groups of teachers work together to assess writing
collaboratively. Teacher discourse demonstrates raised expectations,
changes in teaching practice, and evidence of modifying testing
materials to draw on cultural strengths. There was also evidence
of the professional development around writing assessment leading
to social justice outcomes when teachers chose not to add another
remedial class to their curriculum and instead adopted culturally
relevant prompts. Such prompts increased writing test scores.
Partnering with K-12 educators also suggests willingness to address
structural inequities.
Qualifications: The sample size of the writing was very small and
not all increases in writing scores were statistically significant. The
discourse analyzed may have been particular to this group of educators
and not representative of other groups of educators engaged in
professional development around writing assessment. Despite the
tribal college context, most of the writing instructors were non-Native,
so this particular study may not have been the most conducive
to exploring how Lyons’ vision of rhetorical sovereignty can be applied
to writing assessment.
Directions for Further Study: How would the discourse differ if
there were a greater proportion of Native American instructors participating in writing assessment? How would the results differ if the
mode of assessment were further indigenized? What does Lyons’
theory of rhetorical sovereignty look like when it comes to writing
assessment?
qualitative studies: (a) the mentor’s study in a diverse 9th grade classroom and (b) the protégé’s subsequent study of teacher
professional development in the same school. Friendship methodology, as theorized by Tillmann and others, is extended
to include protection and mentoring. The effect of mentoring is demonstrated through examples of the former protégé’s
own research. Explosive moments in each study demonstrate how research can be analyzed and the course of the research
projects influenced within a friendship/mentorship context. Like friendship-as-method, mentorship as methodology can
result in rich data, but there is also the potential for more transparent and rigorous data analysis when the researcher
is a mentor because the mentor can model research skills for the protégé-participant. Thus, mentorship as methodology
socializes peers into the conventions of qualitative research.
test results did not reflect the job they were doing as writing
instructors, and they wondered if students might need an additional
remedial writing course. These questions about writing assessment
led to a locally based collaborative assessment of student
writing that addressed larger goals of culturally responsive professional
development and improving the teaching of writing from
elementary through college.
Research Questions: 1) During writing assessment research, what
discourses do educators engage in and how might writing assessment
research be used for professional development? 2) Does the
professional development during writing assessment reflect the values
of culturally responsive pedagogy? 3) Does culturally responsive
professional development attached to writing assessment lead
to addressing social justice issues?
Literature Review: To explore the issue of writing assessment at a
tribal college, I use theories of culturally responsive, relevant, and
sustaining pedagogies from the field of education, and Christine E.
Sleeter’s 2014 framework of four dimensions of social justice teaching,
as well as indigenous perspectives from Devon Mihesuah, Angela
Wilson, Sandy Grande, and Scott Richard Lyons to complicate
and critique these theories and to extend the work on participatory
assessment to include tribal colleges.
Methodology: In addition to quantitative data in the form of essay
scores, this project primarily relied on discourse analysis modeled
on Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin’s grounded theory approach.
Analysis involved emic coding resulting from labels that emerged
from patterns in the discourse, combined with etic cross-coding,
using elements of culturally relevant pedagogy as an analytic tool.
Conclusions: Despite the presence of culturally congruent mission
and vision statements in local contexts such as Sitting Bull College,
large-scale writing assessments have great power over teachers
and students; nonetheless, as this study shows, this power can be
questioned when groups of teachers work together to assess writing
collaboratively. Teacher discourse demonstrates raised expectations,
changes in teaching practice, and evidence of modifying testing
materials to draw on cultural strengths. There was also evidence
of the professional development around writing assessment leading
to social justice outcomes when teachers chose not to add another
remedial class to their curriculum and instead adopted culturally
relevant prompts. Such prompts increased writing test scores.
Partnering with K-12 educators also suggests willingness to address
structural inequities.
Qualifications: The sample size of the writing was very small and
not all increases in writing scores were statistically significant. The
discourse analyzed may have been particular to this group of educators
and not representative of other groups of educators engaged in
professional development around writing assessment. Despite the
tribal college context, most of the writing instructors were non-Native,
so this particular study may not have been the most conducive
to exploring how Lyons’ vision of rhetorical sovereignty can be applied
to writing assessment.
Directions for Further Study: How would the discourse differ if
there were a greater proportion of Native American instructors participating in writing assessment? How would the results differ if the
mode of assessment were further indigenized? What does Lyons’
theory of rhetorical sovereignty look like when it comes to writing
assessment?
qualitative studies: (a) the mentor’s study in a diverse 9th grade classroom and (b) the protégé’s subsequent study of teacher
professional development in the same school. Friendship methodology, as theorized by Tillmann and others, is extended
to include protection and mentoring. The effect of mentoring is demonstrated through examples of the former protégé’s
own research. Explosive moments in each study demonstrate how research can be analyzed and the course of the research
projects influenced within a friendship/mentorship context. Like friendship-as-method, mentorship as methodology can
result in rich data, but there is also the potential for more transparent and rigorous data analysis when the researcher
is a mentor because the mentor can model research skills for the protégé-participant. Thus, mentorship as methodology
socializes peers into the conventions of qualitative research.
In this unit, students will focus on examining their beliefs about Native Americans and Native American literature, as well as challenge those beliefs through an inquiry into representations of schooling in the novel and the connections between their reading and their own experiences of schooling.
This unit is designed for students in the fall semester of their ninth grade year.
Next, you have choice again with reading YA novels of science fiction or fantasy. In October, we will do a unit on books by and about African Americans in various genres and media. We start with an African American author everyone should know—Sharon Draper, who just received the Edwards Award this year, and her book, Copper Sun. This book starts in Africa and continues on the North American continent. You’ll get to know another prominent African American writer, Chris Myers, through his audio book, H.O.R.S.E., and we’ll finish the unit with a work of nonfiction, The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights about African American soldiers by the award-winning Steve Sheinkin. November is Native American history month, and we’ll be reading the now-classic book by Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. There’s more choice this month and we finish with a discussion of the Printz award-winning book Nothing by Danish author Janne Teller. Graphic novels are very popular with YA readers, and Chinese American author Gene Luen Yang is having a lot of success with his recently published work. We’ll read his book American Born Chinese. This semester’s reading can provide only a glimpse of the larger (and growing) world of Young Adult Literature, a body of literature that provides access to the diversity that students need to develop into global citizens.