Inoue

            I often remind myself that my goal as a writing tutor and as a future writing instructor is to help students become better writers. Part of becoming a better writer involves developing critical thinking skills and being vested in one’s own writing skills; I want to encourage the development of these skills, instead of accidentally teaching students how they can pass a class without trying or learning.

            I find Inoue’s community-based assessment approach fascinating and a little difficult to trust. He essentially argues for a personalized democratization of education, as opposed to one of massification and impersonal checklists. I’ve participated in radical skills and knowledge sharing groups, where we made collective decisions and resisted having conventional teacher-student roles. Basically, we were a bunch of feminists, socialists, anarchists and the like who tried nonheirarchal ways of learning through a loose organization called the Free Skool: one Free Skool was in Santa Cruz, CA; the other I co-founded here in Columbia. These workshops and classes were, importantly, outside of academia, so grades and credit were not factors; this was tuition-free education our way. At the Free Skool, I attained, shared and retained knowledge in ways I had not in conventional academia, and felt deeply vested in the classes I participated in.

            Still, it was far from a learning utopia that everyone can grow to love; frankly, most people have little to no experience with this style of learning, and trying new things is scary and not always successful. Inoue writes that in conventional education, “(students) haven’t been pushed to become agents in their own education.” That most people have learned to learn in one specific way – that is, the teacher as information distributor, the student as information regurgitator – can make attempts at other ways of knowledge development difficult to impossible. Free Skool Columbia no longer exists, partially because people didn’t know how to or weren’t interested in learning in a nonheirarchal way – it’s a lot more work to be an equal agent in one’s own education! (Free Skool Santa Cruz is still rocking hard.)

            Although I agree with Inoue in theory and could be interested in trying his community-based assessment in my future classroom, I want to be able to reach college freshmen where they are, not where I philosophically wish they were. I’m interested in finding out if any instructors here have attempted similar approaches to Inoue, and their results.