Culturally Sustaining Educational Assessment: A New Approach to Enduring Challenges

• In Event: Evolving Approaches to Classroom Assessment

Abstract

“Culturally sustaining” assessment argues that education should go beyond “culturally responsive” to sustain diverse cultures while also providing minoritized students with ready access to what Django Paris’ called “dominant cultural competence” (2012, p. 95). Three challenges in this practice are (a) creating “culturally valid” assessments, (b) the subsequent risk of “tokenizing” students with minoritized identities, and (c) the current sociopolitical climate that censors discussions of race and privilege in schools. We present a new approach called culturally-sustaining educational assessment (CSEA) that promises to sidestep these challenges. CSEA carefully employs sociopolitical “uncertainties” involving race, culture, privilege, etc. Learning is formatively and summatively assessed at four increasingly-formal levels that draw on situative assessment theory and support extensive peer and instructor interaction.

Authors

• Daniel T. Hickey, Indiana University
  Presenting Author

• Charmian Lam, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author