Reading :: Adapting Values

Adapting VALUEs: Tracing the Life of a Rubric through Institutional Ethnography
By Jennifer Grouling

In this book, which is available as a free PDF at the WAC Clearinghouse, Grouling conducts an institutional ethnography to examine how two universities separately adapted Valid Assessment for Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) rubrics. These rubrics, designed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), were meant to provide a national assessment tool. Grouling is interested in how the rubrics are taken up locally at each institution, compromised and negotiated in actual practice, and thus create and reflect the social practices at these two different institutions (p.3).

The two institutions are quite different. "Oak University" is a small liberal arts university in a college town, with historical ivy-covered buildings. Its writing committee is chaired by a history professor. "St. Rita's College" is even smaller, an open-access school that serves factory workers and their children in the local community. It's housed in an old BP office building, and its writing program admin is a creative writer. Both WPAs have been tasked with assessment, and both turned to VALUE as a nationally recognized standard on which to base that assessment. 

With these two cases established, in Chapter 2, Grouling reviews the history of writing assessment, asking why rubrics are popular in assessment circles now. She reviews the racialized history of standardization in US education, the emergence of testing, and the development of rubrics in writing assessment. In the 1980s and 1990s, she notes, in composition terms such as "outcomes," "competencies," and "standards" became conflated in practice. With this background in place, she discusses the history of the specific rubrics under discussion, the VALUE rubrics.

In Chapter 3, Grouling turns to institutional ethnography, specifically rooted in scholars such as Dorothy Smith. In Chapter 4, she leverages this vocabulary to term the VALUE rubrics as "boss texts," which "function as a part of the institutional circuit of accountability within higher education" (p.57). Using the orientation of institutional ethnography, she analyzes a representative rubric, examines who has funded VALUE, and looks at how WPAs at the two universities used VALUE to establish legitimacy for themselves. 

Chapter 5 looks further into local adoption by examining to what extent each university could adapt the rubrics for their own use. Here, Grouling gets elbow-deep into the challenges that each university — and each WPA — face and how the rubrics had to be adapted to address those specifics. Those challenges include not just student preparation and institutional workings, but also quotidian power struggles and differences in how stakeholders understand education. "The AAC&U and higher education, in general, is not often aware of institutional circumstances like the ones these faculty engaged with on a daily basis," she observes (p.97). 

In Chapter 6, Grouling moves from the committee to the classroom, examining how rubrics (not the VALUE rubrics, which are only for assessment, but rather grading rubrics) were used in classrooms. Although she finds little direct connection between assessment and grading rubrics, she does note that the two sets of rubrics both function as "boss texts" (p.102). Interested in how rubrics get picked up and reused in different contexts, she uses rhetorical genre theory to analyze this translation movement. Specifically, she examines where faculty found their rubrics: from books, from peer professors, from departmental leadership, and nominally — but not in observed practice, she points out — from collaborative departmental workshops (p.115). 

In Chapter 7, Grouling explores individualism, racism, and the ecology of the writing rubric. She does this in part by comparing demographics of the two universities (Oak is majority White, St. Rita's is not), by comparing statements of her interlocutors, and by examining deficit assumptions and acculturationist assumptions as they play out in the rubrics themselves. For instance, although the VALUE rubrics are intended by the AAC&U to provide an asset-based model, these rubrics were adapted to the dominant deficit assumptions at St. Rita's. She takes a deep dive into stories that some of her interlocutors told about themselves and their approach to education, noting how those stories also reflected deficit assumptions and reflected committee tensions and power dynamics. 

In Chapter 8, the conclusion, Grouling concludes that rubrics "are boss texts that are inextricable from systems of power" (p.155). She resists providing a heroic or satisfying close to the narrative, but does encourage us to continue interrogating our own institutions and the roles of rubrics and other boss texts within them.

What did I think of the book? Although assessment and rubrics are not the most exciting things in the world, they are very important for higher education, and they hold out the promise of more standard, more fair ways to understand how educational institutions serve their students. Grouling's institutional ethnography underlines how difficult it is to deliver on such a promise. I can imagine productively using excerpts of this book alongside other resources when talking about assessment and grading rubrics—in discussions of assessment as well as in pedagogical discussions. 

At the same time, I didn't find many surprises here. Yes, assessment standards promise to do specific things across institutions, and yes, they fall short on these impossible promises because they are locally implemented. Yes, they get implemented by individuals with their own biases, ways of seeing things, constraints, and power dynamics. Yes, those individuals are often unaware of how systematic racism underpins their own assumptions about education. Education is a much messier and more conflicted enterprise than people like to think, just like so many other pursuits. 

But perhaps I am a little blase due to my long-term readings and recent writings, as well as my participation as what I guess could be called a WPA since 2016. It's worthwhile pointing out these dynamics and exploring them in an academic environment, and Grouling does this ably. If you're involved in writing assessment at any level, definitely pick it up.