The keyword this week is value since all the authors touch on how social and historical conditions enable the value (of language and literacy practices) to change.

Scott looks at how writing signifies values that shouldn’t be restricted quantitative measures. He advocates for writing assessment that values students’ and teachers’ labor. teachers assign value Bawarshi shifts from use value to transfer value of composition and argues that the use value of FYC should be defined by how well it develops students’ ability to perform “far transfers.” Lorimer examines the ways in which values of literate resources fluctuate. Mao also focuses on the instability of literacy as he talks about the afterlife of seemingly outdated discourse and its implication on the agency of a younger generations of Chinese. This rhetoric of cultural nationalism also confirms the instability of value of language and discourse.

Bawarshi’s explication of the legibility of transfer value gets at the heart of many of the issues we have been discussing so far, especially new managerialism, because those in the position of power often “manage” resources by validating and legitimizing what is transferable (i.e. valuable). I can’t wait to adopt Bawarshi’s theory in designing my syllabus.

Scott’s criticism of the shift from qualitative assessment to quantitative assessment is well-intentioned but sounds to me like it’s coming from a privileged position. His essay also seems to construct the writing instructor in a romanticized way. This instructor is a “creative” teacher who wants to orchestrate their agency in assessment, when in reality teachers are faced with workload that does not give them time to perform the sort of qualitative, “intellectual” labor Scott envisions.

Finally, I agree with Mao’s suggestion that refashioning of seemingly old discourse highlights the instability of discourse as well as the subversive potential in the circulation of language. The idea of agency comes up in Mao’s chapter as well as Edwards’s paper (as in his reference of Watkins’s “agentless agency”). Can we spend some time on dissecting the concept of agency?