| At Binghamton University, first-year writing courses are taught primarily by graduate teaching assistants, in addition to a small group of non-tenure stream senior faculty. Although this is standard at many public research universities, when the Binghamton University Writing Initiative was established as an independent writing program in 2008, a collaborative grading system was implemented. Teaching writing through the use of revision-based portfolio pedagogies is ubiquitous within writing studies and the intensity of this work is further amplified by a system that requires instructors to assess their own students' work, in addition to an equal amount of writing produced by students from other colleagues' classrooms.;This research draws on interviews and naturally occurring group conversations to examine the sociolinguistic strategies that are utilized in the daily contexts of enacting this work. In doing so, I demonstrate how individual instructors move within this system -- continuously participating in something they often recognize as not necessarily being in their own best interest. In offering a picture of how collaborative assessment is structured, enacted, and experienced, this work also illustrates the reach and pervasiveness of the labor- related and epistemological assumptions that characterize writing skills instruction across wider contexts of higher education. Analyzing language in action demonstrates how the systematic work of teaching and assessing writing is ideologically mediated. Writing instruction is socially constructed as 'contained' labor: work that takes place in discrete writing classrooms, as opposed to disciplinary contexts. Writing instruction is also constructed as a site of 'commitment': instructors must work closely with students, helping and guiding them through processes of discovery, wherein transferable skills are developed.;The degree to which an ideology overlaps with, supports, or reflects social actors' views of the world is an indicator of its power and success. This success is, however, most problematically observed in the fact that writing instruction is most often enacted and experienced by contingent laborers. I argue that in linking teaching and effectiveness through ideologies of commitment and containment, problematic assumptions about writing instruction are reproduced in what may seem like the most unlikely of locations: writing programs and writing classrooms. |
