Student involvement in assessment: involving the whole student in pursuit of social justice and the social good

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7203/relieve.26.1.17089

Keywords:

Student involvement, Critical Theory, Social good, Social justice, Authentic assessment, Student achievement, Honneth, Mutual recognition, Responsive assessment

Abstract

In this article I offer a perspective on student involvement in assessment informed by critical theory and underpinned by a commitment to greater social justice within and through higher education.  It builds on earlier work on assessment for social justice to argue that student involvement in assessment must be considered more broadly than simply students doing particular tasks.  Instead, we must think of the student as a whole person, socially situated, and the ways in which engagement with assessment tasks nurtures both individual and social wellbeing.  There are three streams to the argument proposed.  Firstly, that scholarship on assessment should do more to problematise the nature of knowledge and that understanding the complexities of knowledge in higher education has links to both the experiences of our student as a whole person and social justice.  Secondly, that the purposes of assessment should be orientated to the critical theory notion of a social good, in which individual and social wellbeing are dialectically inter-related.  Finally, in thinking of the student’s involvement in assessment we must go beyond the conflation of the real world with the world of work which features in much of the literature on authentic assessment.  Instead, I propose the importance of understanding the economic realm as a broad and heterogenous sphere and one that cannot be disarticulated from the social realm.

Author Biography

Jan McArthur, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University

Jan McArthur is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Educational Research in Lancaster University and a research member of the Centre for Global Higher Education. Her main interests in research focus on two themes: education and social justice, and the nature of higher education. Similarly, McArthur has a considerable interest in inter-relationships between education and society, and between theory and practice. She has explored different interpretations of critical pedagogy, and the ways in which the conceptualizations of knowledge impacts on social justice. A great deal of her work relies on the critical theory, and shows a special interest in the work by Theodor Adorno. Her recent work has analyzed the nature of evaluation and feedback and their role of failure in learning including the relationship between conceptions of failure and social justice. In her last book,  Assessment for social justice , McArthur explores the potential for promoting social justice within and through assessment in higher education and draws on the critical theory of Axel Honneth.

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Published

2020-10-20

Issue

Vol. 26 No. 1 (2020): Monográfico: Evaluación en la Educación Superior

Section

Special Section

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