Overcoming the Negative Effects of Evaluation in Teaching: Teacher-Researchers’ Learning to Assess as Inquiry

• In Event: Exploring Discourse Analysis as a Critical Methodological Tool

Abstract

To navigate inequitable systems while working toward emancipatory aims, teachers need tools for bringing assessment frameworks into productive relationships. In this practitioner-inquiry telling case, a teacher-researcher group learned to see the limiting infiltration of dominant institutionalized assessment discourses in their daily interactions and decisions. Interactional ethnographic and discourse-in-use approaches exposed a confluence of inquiry-based assessment moves which provided eclipsing moments, or interactional spaces where teachers saw dominant assessment effects and explored alternate possibilities. Navigating eclipsing moments across time enabled teachers to resituate dominant frameworks. The study offers epistemological proof of concept for understanding how confluence and eclipsing moments empower teachers to live in contested spaces that privilege dominant assessment frameworks while developing inquiry-driven, inclusive instruction and assessment through their research.

Author

• Danielle Lillge, Illinois State University