An Afterword in two Voices: The Tools of Destruction and Empowerment: Reflections on Creating a Book About Rubrics

In 2008, I was hired as a new full-time faculty member in a college of education. Having spent the previous 15 years as an adjunct professor at a community college, as well as having been a teacher and curriculum coordinator for a private school, I was new to higher education at this level. Among many other things, I never had to contend with accreditation processes nor the expectations of approved programs of a state’s department of education (DOE). Thus, when I was informed that one of my first tasks would be to generate a key assessment rubric to meet both Florida’s DOE requirements for English education and NCATE requirements for accreditation, I was confused and overwhelmed. We were explicitly instructed to develop rubrics based on current assessments in extant syllabi—syllabi that I had neither generated nor taught since I had only just begun teaching in the program. While the details of the process are beyond the scope of this afterward, the effects of that experience are not.