A Critical Resource Orientation to Literacy Assessment Through a Stance of Solidarity

• In Event: 14.041 - Toward Justice in Literacy Teacher Education: Critical Literacies in Elementary and Secondary Methods Courses

Abstract

This presentation describes a literacy assessment course, Assessing Language and Learning Differences, which is a core course in a K-12 reading specialist program grounded in a social justice orientation. The course was linked to a larger research partnership with St. Cabrini [all names are pseudonyms], a school and faith-based organization that serves Indonesian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and English speaking students and families. In our presentation, we explore what we term a “critical resource orientation” toward students as literacy learners. Teachers who take a critical resource orientation towards literacy and literacy assessment seek to value student strengths, learn from their knowledges, and also understand their literacies within larger structures of power and hierarchy. The design of the course was informed by research in literacy education and interdisciplinary theories of identity that share a commitment to democratizing knowledge production, including practitioner research, new literacy studies, the overlapping fields of realist understandings of experience and identity put forth by the Future of Minority Studies research collective, critical ethnic studies, theories of coloniality and education, and feminist epistemologies. The course was conceived to address issues of social justice directly in education by interrogating ideological assumptions about the location of knowledge through several inquiry experiences around assessment with children and families from St. Cabrini. We detail several inquiry projects situated in the university-community partnership: the “Penn-Pal” project with an Indonesian Sunday school that provided the opportunity for graduate students to build relationships with the community; a partnership with a collaborating teacher and her class to assess and respond to student writing; “Assessing the Assessment,” where students worked in small groups to investigate and present on a commonly used literacy assessment; and a culminating project, a semester-long “Portrait of a Learner.” In our discussion, we suggest that course participants embraced a more contextual, nuanced, and humanistic vision of assessment through the difficult process of unearthing and challenging their own preconceptions and deficit ideologies of the communities with whom we were partnering. Our analysis of data from the course also revealed at least two lingering tensions regarding assessment: navigating incompatible ideologies and grappling with institutional labels.

Authors

• Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania

• Katharine Emily Bartow Jacobs, University of Pittsburgh

• Lan Ngo, University of Pennsylvania