Creating Humanizing and Transformative Educational Spaces Through Authentic Assessment: Toward Peace, Justice, and Human Rights

• In Event: Advancing Peace and Justice Through Humanizing Processes in Education

Abstract

In the last two decades, high-stakes testing policies have proliferated exponentially, radically altering the broader educational landscape in the United States. Although these policies continue to dominate educational reform agendas, researchers argue that they have not improved educational outcomes for youth, and have exacerbated inequities in schooling across racial, economic, geographic, and linguistic lines. In the context of New York City, where opportunity gaps remain wide among youth, alternative project-based assessments tasks (PBAs) are one type of practice to have shown promise in aiding the creation of humanizing and transformative educational spaces that are aligned with the goals of critical peace, social justice, and human rights education.

Given this context, this paper takes up the questions: How can schools that use project-based assessment (PBAs) reinvigorate school culture to address enduring racialized and structural inequities that persist in schools? How might PBAs reframe schools to be more humanizing and transformative spaces? Drawing from three years of data collection at 10 NYC public high schools undergoing a policy (and practice) shift transitioning away from high-stakes standardized tests to PBAs, this paper explores how students and teachers make meaning of this process. We consider the role that assessment might play in shaping curriculum, pedagogy, and school culture to repair systemic injustice.

The research team used multiple qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how this shift influenced curriculum and practice, and consider the role assessment might play in creating a more humane, equitable and just school culture. We conducted a broader investigation of the 10 transitioning schools (including annual anecdotal staff surveys), three ongoing focal school case studies (including observations, interviews, focus groups) over the three years, and targeted surveys with experienced teachers new to schools that used project-based assessment. We developed data displays to model the emerging analysis, coded the data to reflect the broader themes (i.e. dignity, agency, care, and critical questioning) of critical peace, social justice, and human rights education.
Overall, the data shows promise that the transition to PBAs fostered opportunities for transformative agency among teachers and students alike. Overwhelmingly, school actors felt that PBAs shaped curriculum in ways that standardized tests could not, by fostering more innovation, inquiry, cultural and ‘real world’ relevance, and rigor. They also felt PBAs helped mold school culture by facilitating processes of care, support, and respect. These processes were dynamic, overlapping, and nonlinear, and enabled the curriculum and culture to transform in desirable ways in line with the purposes of critical peace, social justice, and human rights education. Although there were inevitable bumps in the process of transition, the data suggest school actors mediated some of them, and ultimately felt that PBAs helped create more humanizing and dignified spaces for youth. By anchoring the assessment process in the concept of transformative agency, the transition to PBAs not only reinvigorates school culture, but also redresses harmful systemic and racial injustices, and serves as a necessary part of school reform and education policy.

Authors

• Maria Hantzopoulos, Vassar College

• Alia Tyner, Stella and Charles Guttman Community College - CUNY