Educational Assessment as Relational Learning Towards Ancestral Flourishing

• In Event: Ancestral Prolepsis: Cultivating Relational Learning with Land and Generations for Indigenous and Planetary Futures

Abstract

Objectives
This case study aims to reimagine educational assessment through the lens of Ancestral Prolepsis, an Indigenous framework that foregrounds ethical responsibility braided through generations, Lands, and more-than-human kin. The study aims to relationally rupture conventional, individualist models of formative assessment by co-designing intergenerational, and land-based pedagogies. Rooted in a summer ISTEAM program in Turtle Island, the objective is to illustrate how assessment can become ethical, epistemic, and ontological practices that nurtures ecological responsibility, communal wellbeing, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Theoretical Framework
Guided by Ancestral Prolepsis, this research conceptualizes learning as a place-based, intergenerational process rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. It draws on frameworks of axiological innovation (Bang et al., 2015), and the metaphysics of modern existence proposed by Vine Deloria Jr (1979) to explore how ethical commitments—rather than solely content knowledge—organize learning as a relational and development process. The work builds alongside the scholarship of Bang (2015, 2020), Vossoughi et al (2021, 2021), Marin (2020, 2020), and Brayboy (2014), articulating formative assessment as a co-theorized practice of cultural continuity, collective thriving, and ecological reciprocity.

Methods
The research centers a community-based design approach (Bang et al, 2015) across a two-week land-based ISTEAM program involving inter-tribal Indigenous learners, educators, and community members. Data collection methods included audio and video recordings, wearable GoPros, and observational field notes, governed by a consent-as-process protocol (Klykken, 2021). Analysis braided interactional discourse methods (Schegloff, 2007) with ecological attunement, engaging plants (McDaid Barry et al, 2023), and Land as active participants (McCoy et al., 2016) in knowledge construction. Ethical deliberation—rather than cognitive achievement—became the focus of assessment.

Data Sources
Materials include video/audio footage of pedagogical interactions, transcripts co-curated with families, and fieldnotes from group activities such as Wonder Walks. Central to the data is an interaction involving a young Indigenous learner, Ash, who critically challenges the ethics of setting fish traps for Manidoonsong (Crayfish). This moment, along with facilitators’ pedagogical responses, serves as a focal point to analyze how formative assessment unfolds as a relational, ecological, and axiological practice.

Results
Findings reveal that assessment, when reconstituted through Ancestral Prolepsis, becomes a living framework that nurtures ethical inquiry, cultivates cultural continuance and matures ecological responsibility. Ash’s question—“if they’re our relatives, then why are we going to capture them?”—transformed the learning environment into a site of collective ethical deliberation. Facilitators’ responsive assessments elevated her inquiry as a central act of knowledge-making. The study shows that formative assessment can be co-authored across generations, grounded in values, stories, and responsibilities that re-orient settler-colonial educational models.

Significance
This study offers a transformative model of assessment that resists epistemic capital and imperial logics, instead proposing formative assessment as a pathway for Indigenous sovereignty and planetary responsibility. It affirms that assessment must be ethically grounded, culturally co-constructed, and ecologically embedded. In light of global calls to align education with Indigenous rights and sustainability (UNESCO, 2020), this work demonstrates how communities are already enacting those futures. Educational systems must shift not to accommodate these models, but to be guided by them.

Authors

• Miguel Angel Garcia-Bocanegra, Northwestern University

• Anna Lees, University of Washington