Unsettling Assessment Thought and Practice

Abstract

Unsettling Assessment Thought and Practice Dana M. Malone (bio) and James D. Breslin (bio) Assessment is not working. Not for us as scholars and practitioners, our institutions, our shared values, or the students. While commonly characterized as an "other duty as assigned" or looked upon with derision by overworked faculty and practitioners, assessment is a core component of our work that threads through all areas and responsibilities. It serves as a foundational element for making decisions, yet assessment thought and practice rely on racist, Western, patriarchal, and positivist roots. It is time that we, as a field and a community, committed to supporting all humans in reaching their full potential, address the ways assessment serves to reify and reproduce structural inequity, white supremacy, and colonized thought. We acknowledge and honor that we are not the first to recognize this tension and to call for change. Leathwood (2005, p. 310) accurately observed that "assessment has served, alongside a discourse of meritocracy, to legitimize and rationalize the unequal distribution of power and resources in society." Moreover, the guiding document for ACPA's Strategic Imperative on Racial Justice and Decolonization (Quaye et al., 2018) challenges us to center love in a possibility framework and actively seek to unsettle neoliberal practices in support of indigenizing our work. This approach stands in contrast to the ways white supremacy and positivism reinforce hierarchies of knowledge, positional power dynamics, and efficiency of systems over human growth. Even as assessment thought has begun to evolve more rapidly in recent years through concepts of culturally responsive and socially just assessment (Montenegro & Jankowski, 2020), we find that too often in practice this effort is still reduced to minor tweaks. These systems of power and oppression serve to inhibit change, obscuring what may be possible and reducing the potential for meaningful movement by naturalizing incremental approaches (Bourdieu, 1977; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). As we join these calls for change, we also acknowledge our roles as two scholars and practitioners in dismantling white supremacy and colonized thought. We have labored collaboratively for more than a decade to understand, innovate on, and evolve assessment. Our social identities situate us in this conversation. As we name the limits of language and labels to capture these locations, we offer that I (Malone) am a white, second-generation Armenian American, heterosexual, cisgender, woman, first-generation graduate student, and qualitative researcher, and I (Breslin) am a white, heterosexual, cisgender, man, qualitative researcher, and social constructivist. With a commitment to the transformative ability of our field, we understand that this call requires more than a slow and steady reworking of assessment. Instead, we advocate for moving beyond assessment thought and practice as our field currently conceptualizes it, a rethinking of its nature, role, and function. [End Page 114] THE CURRENT CLIMATE The demand for assessment data is growing exponentially. One aspect of the current situation is clear: assessment is an externally driven component of our work, too often characterized by a check-the-box mentality. Amid the need to validate the worth of a college degree, higher education developed a "culture of compliance" (Kuh et al., 2015, p. 5). Assessment, done in this manner and in service to outside entities, is an addendum, layered on top of the work, or worse yet, disconnected entirely from those directly responsible for student learning—faculty and student affairs practitioners (Kuh et al., 2015; Henning & Roberts, 2016). Beyond a "culture of compliance," the push for evidence of student learning to satisfy accreditors and secure funding cemented the association between assessment and learning. McArthur (2016), therefore, argued assessment has become "one of the most powerful drivers of student learning" (p. 967). McArthur also asserted (which is a fulcrum of this entire discussion for us), "if assessment is the key driver of how and what students learn, then it must also be fundamental to the relationship between student learning and social justice" (2016, p. 967). ENVISIONING WHAT COULD BE While assessment may have emerged from a human desire to understand learning, contemporary assessment is myopically focused on a culture of compliance. Understanding that assessment is and likely will continue to be connected explicitly to budgets, positions, and other neoliberal mechanisms of the academy, our vision...