Scholarship on student self-placement (SSP) emphasizes the importance of understanding methods like directed self-placement (DSP) as dynamic assessment ecologies (e.g., Inoue, 2015; Nastal et al., 2022; Wang, 2020), with implications not only for placement but also for how students conceptualize writing and themselves (e.g., Johnson, 2022). What can be learned about SSP’s ecological impacts by more meaningfully attending not just to patterns in students’ placement decisions but also to the qualitative content of their (self-)reflections and (self-)characterizations? Leveraging a dataset of more than 5,000 SSP pathways, we examine a corpus of short-answer survey responses, totaling more than half a million words, in which students wrote about their strengths as writers and what writing tasks they find most challenging. Students’ words help us understand how they see themselves as writers and how they conceive of college writing expectations. Through data analysis, this study found implications for how corpus data can be used to better understand potential tensions between students’ and institutions’ understandings of academic writing in a self-placement ecology.

Within writing assessment scholarship, disciplinary discussions about the politics of pathways regularly question how reforms mediate education and affect education actors. This article complements and complicates these conversations by attending to the micropolitics of pathways: how local education actors mediate reform-related standards, and, in the process, pave what they believe to be locally-meaningful pathways. Taking the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as our point of departure, our study centers on one important site for micropolitical work that has, to date, gone unstudied in CCSS-focused writing assessment research: teacher education, which involves coordination between secondary and postsecondary actors who might differently interpret and engage with externally-imposed reforms. Our findings suggest that while standards may be politically intended to mediate education and standardize pathways, teachers micropolitically interpret and repurpose those standards--strategically drawing on them as a means to communicate about local writing instruction and assessment. For this reason, we argue conversations about pathway-related reforms can benefit from adopting a micropolitical perspective, sensitive to the participation of teachers in locally constructing and maintaining educational pathways.

Keywords: Micropolitics of pathways; Common Core State Standards; Teacher education; Writing assessment; Local interpretation