Controlling What We Can: Calling for Relevant, Responsive, and Sustaining Assessments

             Taylor (2022) not only presents three cultural frameworks for practice in the classroom, they make a case for how our assessments need to also be culturally aligned. Culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally responsive pedagogy (Gay, 2002), and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) are interwoven into the fabric of resistance and response to the long history of historically marginalizing students of color. Acknowledging that school continues to be a tool for weaponizing education to create a hegemonic set of values and norms that work to support false dominant narratives of white supremacy while working to delegitimize the intelligence of people of color, Taylor (2022) demonstrates how assessments can also benefit from these three frameworks. The assumption is that teachers have autonomy, authority, or control over their assessment practices.

In my own practice, we are given latitude over two assessments per semester that count as summative. Students are already scripted a formative assessment each month, a unit test ever one-and-a-half months, a final exam, and three adaptive diagnostic tests a year that are all outside of local teacher control. What is important is to consider not only what I can control, but also how the standardized testing data is utilized in the classroom. Taylor (2022) argues that “culturally and socially responsive assessment tools will differ” from what we are currently doing in our county (p. 61). Assessment frameworks such as project-based learning (PBL) and “assessment as learning” can include relevant, responsive, and sustaining practices, but the teacher should be intentional with involving the families and communities of the students. Without helping students in building critical consciousness and developing non-standardized assessments that are authentic and empowering for the students, assessments will continue to marginalize students of color. Without personally doing work such as developing critical consciousness, working towards bias mitigation, and receiving anti-racist training, assessments (regardless of how they look) will still serve hegemonic forces.

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings

Using standardized testing data to help students set goals and grow capacity is empowering and liberatory. Deconstructing data to be weaponized against students in order show only deficits is racist and dehumanizing. Data can be used with students for goal setting as part of re-humanizing practices in classrooms. Projects such as students researching issues in their communities and then interviewing their families, friends, and community members values the funds of knowledge that exist in our classrooms (Moll et al., 1992; Taylor, 2022). Assessments can be mirrors, windows, and sliding doors too (Sims Bishop, 1990), if students can see themselves reflected. Evaluating an authentic research project alongside students is both empowering and authentic and will help students to master academic standards with greater fidelity than completing worksheets on reading passages. Students have to “engage with these tools to demonstrate learning” (Taylor, 2022, p. 84).

Lack of engagement is a problem with traditional assessments and the data teachers can gather, but the way that assessment and school has traditionally functioned has conditioned students to distrust assessments. This is doubly true if students have had traumatic experiences in classrooms or felt a complete inability to be successful (see historically marginalized groups). Autonomy in task selection as well as content selection is important for engagement, but also in helping students in building self-efficacy (Taylor, 2022, p. 88). In the research project I mentioned with students, helping students to have choice in not only what they research, but the methods they choose and then how that research is represented is vital for engagement. The “primary goal of classroom-based assessments in a standards-based culture” does not match traditional forms of multiple-choice standardized assessments (Taylor, 2022, p. 98). If teachers wish to be relevant, responsive, and sustaining, they should remember assessments are a vital part, if often neglected, part of these frmeworks.

 

 

 

Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2), 106-116. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487102053002003

 

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995, 01/01/). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.

 

Moll, L., C., Cathy, A., Deborah, N., & Norma, G. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132-141.

 

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally Systaining Pedagogy:  A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93-97.

 

Sims Bishop, R. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6.

 

Taylor, C. (2022). Culturally and socially responsible assessment: Theory, research, and practice. Teacher College Press.