Assessment Approaches That Build and Support Belonging

• In Event: International Perspectives on Belonging in Schools

Abstract

The history of educational assessment is grounded in the psychology of the individual, with an emphasis on identifying innate, immutable characteristics and abilities or disabilities (Guerin & Morton, in press). This focus on the individual, especially on individual differences, has long underpinned assessment practices in special education in general. Assessment has been used to identify and remove students from classrooms, children from families, people from communities. Many approaches to assessment tell us, explicitly or implicitly, which people belong and which people don’t (Morton, 2015). Macartney and Morton (2013) outline a number of problems arising from focusing only on the individual. They go on to show how the ostensibly objective assessments of an individual’s deficits may in fact be a product of the individualised and decontextualized approaches to assessment. Students and their families alike become pathologised, groups of people framed as deficient and blamed for their perceived educational failures. Individual assessment continues to be implicated in exclusion.
The impact of assessment models on teaching, learning and curriculum cannot be overstated. It might be expected then that a model of individual assessment that is premised on expert knowledge used to identify (or diagnose) and then prescribe teaching to remediate or fix an individual could shape the ways teachers think about and practice education in relation to that individual. If assessment is narrowly used to identify the ‘next steps’ in development or learning, curriculum is similarly narrowed. One effect is that teachers may come to hold very limited views of the potential of some children to learn.
This paper describes the work of a number of projects in Aotearoa New Zealand that have focused on the centrality of relationships in classrooms and schools. The key ideas that come from this work in Aotearoa New Zealand are that curriculum, pedagogy and assessment have to support the development of learning communities. Curriculum, pedagogy and assessment should be framed to support the development of positive relationships between students and teachers, between schools and families, amongst students, and amongst teachers (Morton et al, 2012). Turning to sociocultural perspectives on learning moves the focus from the individual to the individual in context, to learning as a social activity. Understanding early childhood centers, classrooms and schools as learning communities frames all members as learners, including the adults in the settings. Three characteristics of assessment approaches will be described in detail. The first characteristic involves paying attention to context, including the people, places and things that make it possible for children and young people to show us what they know and what they can do. The second characteristic is a focus on strengths and interests. Finally this approach to assessments supports students and teachers to learn about themselves, and supports students and teachers learning together (Morton & McMenamin, 2011).

Author

• Missy Morton, University of Canterbury