Reframing assessment from an indigenous perspective: practices and conceptions of the Tzeltal teachers

• In Event: Teachers in Comparative Settings

Proposal

This study is framed in a Mexican indigenous population called the Tseltal population in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Historically, interactions between learning assessment and indigenous communities tend to be strained due to precedents of using assessment as a control and accountability mechanism, which have led to educational inequities in these spaces. This proposal seeks to understand how Tseltal teachers can enrich the evaluative process through knowledge of their context, represented in conceptions and practices of assessment. The methodology will be qualitative, exploratory, and framed from the systematization of experiences. For the entry into the field, a collaborative fieldwork exercise was carried out, a space for dialogue of knowledge, and interviews with community teachers whose focus was to rescue contextual components immersed in the process of learning assessment.
To carry out the fieldwork, a civil association called NUNEMI, located in the municipality of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, facilitated access to the communities, the selection of the schools to visit, the vehicle for transport, and the staff who assisted with translation and contact with the community teachers.
During a month of visits to the community, four major initial categories emerged from a process that involved transcription, review, and systematization of the collected experiences. The initial categories are as follows: Assessment Approach, Student's Behavioral Component, Feedback for Improvement, and Reflection and Accompaniment Processes. The following table shows how the emerging dimensions were grouped within each of these categories.
a. Assessment approach: It reflects the unique perspective that Tseltal community teachers have regarding the learning assessment process. Their approach is unconventional, departing from the use of formal and standard tools to evaluate students. Additionally, the notion of “intuitive” assessment arises, referring to the tendency of Tseltal community teachers to rely on their previous experiences and knowledge of their students to assess their learning. They do not necessarily depend on formalized assessment tools.
b. Interactions with students: The second initial category is the behavioral component of the student, which focuses on the importance of student interaction and behavior, recognizing that academic performance is not the only measure of learning. Tseltal teachers pay special attention to how students interact with their peers and behave in general.
c. Assessment as a reflective process for autonomy: This primarily emerges from the notion of autonomous learning, which implies that an important aspect for Tseltal community teachers is to motivate students to reflect on their own learning and identify their strengths and weaknesses in order for students to act and foster their learning and their peers learning.
d. Feedback as a collective process: This is mainly based on providing constant feedback to students to support their learning. They also encourage students to learn from their peers.
Although each dimension could be linked to some theoretical grounds in the learning assessment literature, it is worth noticing that the ecosystem of Tseltal learning assessment conception and practices is holistic and non-formal/naïve in nature. It could even be called "invisible assessment," as it considers the teacher-student relationship within the community as an organic entity that articulates peers (all class members) from a horizontal perspective. Many of these evaluative processes, although intentional, are amalgamated with the communal and social sense of the school. It is important to highlight that, as the literature points out, conceptions and practices can be closely related (Brown, 2008; Castillo and Colmenares, 2017; Murillo and Hidalgo, 2018; Remesal, 2011). In this sense, it was also identified that an emerging focus responded to both notions of learning assessment. This mapping can be seen in the following table.



Table 2 Identification of conceptions and practices of emerging foci in the analysis.
Category Emerging focus Evaluative Conception Evaluative Practice Conception-practice combination
Evaluation approach Observation-based assessment X
Intuitive assessment X
"Hidden" evaluation X X X
Focus on individual progress X X X
Student Behavioral Component Importance of interaction and behavior X X X
Consideration of assistance X
Processes of reflection and accompaniment Autonomous learning X X X
Importance of empathy X X
Feedback for improvement Constant feedback X
Focus on improvement X

These data are a vital starting point for generating inputs that allow an approximation to the characterization of how a community teacher implements and experiences the evaluative processes of learning. Based on this conception of learning assessment, Western perspectives, tied to processes of standardized instruments, certification, accreditation, and quantitative evaluation (grading), can be rethought for formative purposes and feedback, fostering not only individual growth but also communal growth.

Authors

• Miguel Angel Rivera Navarro, Universidad Iberoamericana

• Luis Medina Gual, Universidad Iberoamericana