Assessment Matters: Humanizing Education

• In Event: Too Much Not to Know: Considering a Broader and Bolder Approach to Equity and Access in Teaching and Teacher Education Policy

Abstract

This paper examines performance-based assessments as authentic measurements capable of providing clear evidence that students are developing real world problem-solving skills. It argues that such assessments require teaching young people to make use of real skills, such as transformative literacies (across all disciplines), and community relevant resources in order to increase students’ levels of academic engagement and achievement. As context, the paper is situated in a burgeoning body of research that serves as testimony to the importance and power of grounding teaching practice and student assessment in the articulated needs of young people struggling to navigate the seemingly hopeless realities of everyday life (Camangian, 2010; Duncan-Andrade, 2009; Ginwright, 2010). In this way, the paper seeks to answer the following question: How can educators genuinely ground and reground their teaching in the articulated needs of their students and their students’ communities?

Illuminating the social, political, and cultural processes through which ideas of race, class, and gender are constructed at multiple levels of school design—from curricula to assessments—the paper draws on several years of qualitative data, collected from urban schools in California. More specifically, it uses critical qualitative ethnographic analysis (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1998) of two classrooms in South Los Angeles and East Oakland to explore teachers and particular elements of urban teaching as they focus more on developing humanizing and transformative pedagogies and call for assessments that connect with students’ lived experiences. In so doing, the author offers analysis and description of alternative assessments that promise to allow young people to transition between and across their multiple identities while developing a deep awareness of the world and their positions in it. Hence, the paper’s major findings are framed around theories of critical culturally relevant pedagogy and critical literacy for social transformation (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Howard, 2001; Morrell, 2005)—theories that reinterpret academic standards so that they can provide culturally empowering learning experiences for students. Paying close attention to the inter-related conditions that shape students’ subjective identities and inform their worldviews, the paper concludes with curriculum implications for actively designing assessments that develop and evaluate young people on the compassion, social analysis, and leadership qualities needed to transform unjust social conditions.

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco