Between working on assessments, thinking about my assessment in this module (moderated by comments about how my writing needs to be more reflective, and foreground myself), and reading about assessment, I have grown more ambivalent about assessment. For the final taught session of our PgCert spring semester, I elected to read Mark Barrow’s ‘Assessment and student transformation: linking character and intellect’, which explores assessment through Foucauldian lenses. The reading describes how learning in the institution and assessment itself can be a tool of discipline. More optimistically, it can lead the student to self-reflection and self-examination. This latter stage, theorised through Foucault’s technologies of the self, imagines that students can build an attitude or understanding of the institutional practices of education, leading individuals to critique the limits imposed on them (as students) (Foucault, 1997 b, p. 319 IN Barrow, 2006, p. 367). Education, ideally, will facilitate these eye-opening processes, allowing students to see the power systems that are part of the institution, empowering them to resist the structures imposed upon them.
In my conversations with Karen, who has been a supportive advisor, I have been recommended to edit my writing to ensure that I am focused on my reflections, instead of composing the entries as essays or arguments. In my own lessons, I teach students how to unpack critical arguments in theoretical texts, building an understanding of their practices and culture at large through these conceptual frameworks, with the aim of developing their own critical abilities through writing. I am interested in interrogating power and offering decolonial strategies, but I am once again confronted with this goal of submission and assessment. Submission – what a double entendre – submitting the final assignment and submitting to the calls of the institution.
I grew up in an environment where marks mattered. This was shaped from my own parents’ upbringings in South Korea where Confucian meritocratic systems were metered by quantifiable learning outcomes. I was conditioned and socialised from a young age to believe that higher marks led to some inherent value within myself, and this was anxiety-inducing. I am an adult now, and I understand that this is the disciplining ideology of education systems at play, but I nonetheless have a voice in my head that is shaped by this social conditioning and learned perfectionism. So I have a choice between submitting to institutional demands to get higher marks or to submit what I want to write about. I often think about the time that Rage Against the Machine was asked to refrain from using swear words during their performance on the BBC. It was an iconic moment, where an institution that moderated itself through the politeness of civil society asked a radically political band to censor their own lyrics. Of course it went awry. I think those acts are called for under the bleak times.
Works Cited
Barrow, M. (2006) ‘Assessment and student transformation: linking character and intellect’, Studies in Higher Education, 31:3: pp. 357-372.