Asao B. Inoue

Above the Well explores race, language and literacy education through a combination of scholarship, personal history, and even a bit of fiction.

Writing in response to recent work by Kathleen Kryger, Griffin X. Zimmerman, and Ellen C. Carillo, Asao B. Inoue offers an expanded and compassionate discussion of labor-based grading, a practice that involves negotiating a set of classroom agreements with all of the students in a course to determine how much labor will be expected of students and how it will be accounted for or identified to earn particular final course grades.

When teachers with antiracist goals invite students to share in assessment practices, they open up possibilities to reflect on their own and their students’ politics and subjectivities. The contributors to Narratives of Joy and Failure in Antiracist Assessment share their reflections on their efforts to engage in this collaboration.