This week's reading acknowledged three distinct ways of knowing and learning: "committed knowledge" of the modern past, "knowledge relativism" of more recent times, and "knowledge repertories" towards new learning. What interested me most in this reading was the differences drawn between the second and third ways of knowing and learning, as I find myself very engaged in (and still committed to) the "knowledge relativism," although I wouldn't necessarily use that same language to describe it. This, in part, begins to answer some of my questions from earlier weeks regarding critical theory's place (or absence) in comp/rhet and pedagogical research. I didn't find the concerns about the equality of teaching 'cultural relativism' and its supposed 'fragmentation' to be very convincing at all. I'm not saying that those situations don't happen, just that it has much less to do with a postmodern ideology than it does with the bureaucratic politics of K-12 and (now) higher education. This so-called fragmentation may be nothing more than a disparate exposure to ideological thinking about the world around us (and such critical thinking is always ideological). In the "marketplace of ideas" model of higher education, professors with differing outlooks and personalities approach their content and the(ir) world in unique ways; yes, this is fragmentary in nature, but to switch to a more standardized approach (as K-12 has bought into) is a dangerous alternative. One of the values of an American education in particular is the wealth of knowledge, outlooks, and experiences that student can have, and that differs from class to class, and institution to institution. The chart on page 241 looks really great, but it honestly makes me nervous: it looks a little too perfect, a little too neat, and I wonder what the loss incurred by such neatness might be. This model seems to be created by those who, I would suspect, perhaps learn less by means of abstract conceptualization, and that difference in personality impacts the 'theory' they're putting forth here. The idea of "knowledge repertoires" strikes me (on face value; I'd have to read more to be sure) as an effort to more equitably elevate certain kinds of knowing to other kinds of knowing, an effort very popular in today's field of education but an effort that, if we were to turn to critical theory (and the 2nd way of knowing), might be brought into more criticism by those (like Jean-Francois Lyotard) who criticize these "grand narratives of Enlightenment" and the push for "progress," which must always be approached wish suspicion. To suggest that this is now obsolete is, perhaps, as we may see in coming years, a way of controlling knowledge (or at the very least restraining it). I realize this is probably a very contrarian view, but I think we have to be careful. I do a lot of work with Outcomes Assessment, which attempts to accommodate and respond to this new way of learning, but I don't think it has to come at the cost of the so-called "knowledge relativism" (which is a seriously misguided phrase). 

I really enjoyed this essay, which takes a critical approach to some of the (single) genre-based approaches to assessment and the use of reductive rubrics which, as Ball states, are "designerly" rather than "readerly." The failure of most rubrics here expresses a point that is always present in rubric creation: the difficulty of creating a rubric that can take into account the complexity of any given writing situation. In more basic writing classes, we might be comfortable with reducing writing to such tasks associated with a given genre (as has been a common approach in comp/rhet readers), and while I'm not opposed to that (although I do resent the ever increasing disappearance of the genre of literary analysis from such books, although I understand the political reasons for that change), I agree with Ball that writing (as exemplified in multimodal writing and analysis of multimodal texts) is often too complex to be narrowed down to any single genre. I like the chart on page 408 with the example of the 'red peppers' which shows how the text operates by means of five different modes, all of which work to form the rhetorical situation of that text. Most rubrics would not be able to take into account this complexity, calling attention to the problem of using rubrics as the sole method of assessment (See Maja Wilson's work on this). Very interesting article.