Assessment as a Caring Practice

• In Event: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives and Tensions in Developing 3-D Classroom Assessment That Promote Equity

Abstract

Objectives:
Assessment is often framed as an instrumental practice used to monitor student learning or to motivate student’s educational achievement. And yet, we know that learning is fundamentally a social process mediated by developing and mobilizing intellectual relationships operating with learning environments (Bang et al., 2016; NRC, 2004). With this focus, I argue how it is productive to frame assessment from an ‘ethic of care’ perspective to create more just learning environments.

Theoretical framework:
Learners bring diversities of cultural knowledge, worldviews, sense-making routines, concerns, values, responsibilities, and goals into learning environments (NASEM, 2018). Critical pedagogies work to create identity-safe spaces focused on promoting epistemic openness and collaborative sense-making across these diversities (Vossoughi, 2016). Building from a long line of work on heterogenous sense-making, Roseberry et al. (2015) define the concept of interpretive power: “teachers’ attunement to (a) students’ diverse sense-making repertoires as intellectually generative in science, and (b) expansive pedagogical practices that encourage, make visible, and intentionally build on students’ ideas, experiences, and perspectives on scientific phenomena” (page 1). How can teachers be supported to effectively develop and enact interpretive power? I argue that adopting an ‘ethos of care’ frame, working from a relational stance, is a productive strategy to pursue. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) has developed a detailed argument for enacting ‘an ethos of care’ from a relational conception of ontology inspired by Joan Tronto. It eschews universal morals and argues rather for a coordinated focus of caring on affective, ethical, and hands-on agencies of practical and material consequence.

Mode of inquiry & Evidence:
This piece is a conceptual argument to question the framings, purposes, and qualities of formative assessment practices in education (Burbules & Warnick, 2006). I then speculate about how to frame and constitute classroom assessment as a caring practice. Throughout I use conceptual evidence and examples from the literature to clarify the argument.

Warrants for arguments:
I argue that educators (and other learning partners) need to become more susceptible to the contributions and assets that students bring to a learning environment than to others. They need to discern relevant knowledge, worldview, values, and purposes that learners contribute to collaborative sense-making and activity. Further, affectively animated forces (e.g., interests, concerns, explanations) are distributed in fields of meaning-making materialities among actors. Promoting equity within this frame involves welcoming all of the identities of each student and engaging in shared practices that support surfacing, channeling, and refining those distributed animated forces. It also means that not all matters can be instructionally prespecified given the human diversities involved. The cultural norms of the learning community need to be open and responsive to the centering of student voice and experience. Formative assessment in this sense becomes the set of shared caring practices to coordinate the subjectivities and identities of all learners relative to known and emergent learning goals.

Scholarly significance:
The theoretical framing of formative assessment can and should attend to caring dimensions of those in a learning community being in an intellectual relationship with each other.

Author

• Philip L. Bell, University of Washington