This reflection emerged from my reading for Workshop 3: Assessment and student transformation: linking character and intellect. The point that I want to discuss emerges from the point the author makes around assessments in educational contexts:
While assessment has many purposes, including accrediting the knowledge and performance of students (Boud, 1995), it also conveys powerful messages to students about what they should be learning during educational processes (Biggs, 1998), and how they should be shaping themselves.
At the bottom of this idea there’s the question: into what extent the student sees the lecturer as a possessor of a valuable knowledge? The power relationship is evident especially through the fact that the lecturer decides on the success/failure of the student. This power relationship, though, doesn’t necessarily derive into a knowledge relationship, i.e. a relationship where the students see that they have something to learn from the lecturer. This is especially emphasised in today’s educational model, we teachers are encouraged to act as facilitators of experiences rather than authoritarian figures. The lecturer is today thought as a co-developer or co-designer of the educational experiences. And it seems it is precisely here where we find a clash with assessments, because, even in this more horizontal teaching setup, the lecturer is still ultimately the decider of what is success and failure. The power relationship is still there, and this still creates a deviation from the learning focus.
Back in my home country Chile, I lead a project around disability and music [1], where we worked with students from Computer Science, Sound Arts, and Occupational Therapy and users from a Rehabilitation Centre for disabled kids and teenagers. The task was that interdisciplinary teams of students and users would collaborate to design an build musical instruments that emerge from a co-design process. The project was successful in many ways and it failed in many others [2]. Here I want to focus in a fundamental flaw. As referred in the paper we wrote about the experience[3], it wasn’t uncommon in students the feeling that they were “helping” the users, giving raise to a power relationship where students were self-perceived as them doing a favour or working for free for users, creating a tacit power imbalance in participants of the project. In our view, to avoid this imbalance it is fundamental to
…emphasising that students are not only learning but even being assessed from the resulting designs would switch this view towards a mutual understanding within the context of the project.
My view is that the future of education related to these kind of collaborative interdisciplinary projects, especially the ones with a clear social aim. The challenge, however, is how to develop a clear framework around how to assess these assessment that are not relating about learning concepts or formulas, but rather to reflect and learn about the knowledge that comes from the experience itself, not from a wrapped-up source of knowledge. Some important lines to work towards this new paradigm might include:
- As referred before, clarify how each participant is being assessed. Having a clear initial framing in the project including stakeholders and users, to make explicit how to measure success and failure for each one of the actors involved in the project.
- Give the opportunity to students on how would they measure success or failure of the project, and maybe co-design the metrics and instruments of evaluation.
- Include reciprocal assessment (inter-peers assessments, users assessing students, or students assessing the tutor or lecturer).
[1] Project website: https://luthiersxxi.home.blog/
[2] Paper detailing the co-design process here: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/88516
[3] Dannemann, T. (2023). Music jamming as a participatory design method. A case study with disabled musicians.
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