Storytelling Values and Practices of Humanizing Modes of Assessment: Alexia's Perspective

• In Event: Stories of Humanizing Assessment: Disrupting, Dismantling, and Reimagining Assessment in Teacher Education and Beyond

Abstract

I, Author-Z, am a US born, cis, queer, abled, white-bodied, Mixed race, Latina. I live on Nentego (Nanticoke) territory, where I integrate generative somatics and abolitionist ways of being into my relationships, teaching, and scholarship. My research and teaching focus on liberatory and anti-oppressive pedagogies and curriculum design in dance/somatic-, teacher-, and early childhood education. I practice disrupting and dismantling modes of assessment that are rooted in punitive, oppressive, and dehumanizing systems of oppression, like grading.
My teaching beginnings were in private dance studios, where I assessed students’ learning through relational, embodied, and humanizing modes of assessment. I practiced informal modes of multimodal dialogic formative assessment, for example, engaging in conversations with my students, using non-verbal, tactile-kinaesthetic modes of critical feedback, and eliciting student’s reflections through artistic modes of representational learning. Each of these modes of assessment guided my week-to-week instruction and curriculum design (Shepard, 2021).
When I began teaching at a preschool research center as a lead teacher in 2012, myself and my co-teachers used similar modes of assessment as listed above, in addition to long-term portfolio-based assessments. Portfolios were used to document and tend to the young children’s learning and development in and over time, and were meant to be shared with their families at the end of each semester. Pairing documentation with assessment allowed us to better adapt our teaching methods and curriculum for the children’s development and learning that were made visible (Shepard, 2021).
I brought these experiences with me as I entered the field of teacher education in 2015. As a graduate assistant and adjunct faculty member, I held little power to dismantle and abolish the institutional process of grading that I was now expected to participate in. I worked to uphold my values of social justice and humanizing student experiences in learning by disrupting capitalistic, neoliberal expectations for assessment in the college courses I taught. I’ve adapted the modes of “feedbacking” and portfolio-based assessment that I utilized in my dance studio and early childhood teaching for my collegiate courses. I don’t grade individual assignments; rather, I ask questions and share constructive feedback that engages my students in their work rather than objectively evaluating their work. And my feedback is informed by the relationship building I’ve nourished with my students throughout the semester, which includes a socio-cultural awareness of how my and my students’ positionalities meet, intersect, and have informed their learning and my teaching.
My values-based intention towards transformative justice has upheld and shaped how I’ve intentionally practiced “ungrading.” My intention is to give my students, most of whom intend to become certified educators, a liberated sense of agency in their learning, participation, and work in my courses, and the same for how they then design and teach curriculum in their job placements. I am committed to learning, through intentional, imaginative praxis, how to deepen this liberatory work, and am curious to witness how others engage in anti-oppressive ungrading practices as well.

Author

• Alexia Buono, Salisbury University
  Presenting Author