Based on a perspective that situates students’ writing development across an expansive ecology of literate activities
rather than within any single setting (what we refer to here as an ecological model of literate development), an ecological
model of writing assessment gathers data addressing students’ wide range of experiences with writing and the impact
those experiences have on their abilities to accomplish academic tasks…The basic goal of an ecological model of writing
assessment is to offer students, teachers, departments, institutions and other stakeholders a fuller, richer account of the
kinds of experiences with writing that are informing students’ growth as writers throughout the undergraduate years.
(107)
The authors argue that, thus far, we have operated under a monocontextual, or vertical, model of assessment. This model values primarily school settings for literate activity and understands “the growth of writing abilities…as the product of increasingly deeper and fuller participation within a particular community’s engagements, with newcomers acquiring greater facility with the community’s valued knowledge and skills as they move along a trajectory from the periphery toward some more central location, not just through repetition over a period of time, but through an expanding awareness of the community’s beliefs, values, and interests” (108). Importantly, the authors do not argue that we should stop using this model; instead, they recommend that we use this and an ecological model.
Along similar lines, they assert that, though we have started using an ecological model when designing programs, we are not yet assessing our programs with an ecological model. “Assessing the success of these programs and how students develop within them must entail examining the vertical, horizontal, and longitudinal—the fully ecological—nature of literate development” (111). Using all forms of assessment would allow the university to find the more immediate results that stakeholders want, while also gaining an understanding of the long term successes and failures of the programs. The authors
envision an assessment model that incorporates portfolio creation, revision, and assessment over time and at multiple
locations, and is framed with student statements that are revised at various points, with transfer of writing-related
knowledge and student agency as specific aims; local surveys at multiple points (including after graduation), given in
conjunction with NSSE surveys; and small longitudinal ethnographic studies of students from various programs and with
various literate backgrounds. (107)
This kind of assessment would involve talk across many departments, including writing centers, WAC programs, Composition programs, general education programs, and other affected departments (114).
Identity in Literacy Development
Wardle and Roozen also spend a portion of the article discuss identity in literacy development.
- “Because moving between communities and systems requires not just adjustment to varying kinds of textual practices and processes but also to persons’ identities, ecological models of development also prominently forefront the construction of self” (110).
- “A crucial part of the construction of identity involves what Wenger (1998) refers to as the always ongoing ‘work of reconciliation,’ our continual and never fully realized efforts to coordinate different forms of participation, both past and present, so that they can coexist, harmoniously or not, into one nexus. This work is an active and creative process that involves ‘building bridges—or at least potential bridges—across the entire landscape of practice’ (p. 161)” (110).
- “literate identity results from the always ongoing and never fully realized effort to negotiate an entire ecology of literate practices and the beliefs, values, and interests they embody” (111)