“Undoing Assessment: Engaging with Appearance of Literacy-as-Event”
Dr. Cathy Burnett, Sheffield Hallam University
Check out our podcast episode and accompanying sketchnote with Dr. Burnett where she talks about “undoing assessment”, how assessment shapes what– and sometimes who– is valued in education, and she invites us to imagine literacy-as-event and the potential it provides in education.
About Dr. Burnett:
Dr. Cathy Burnett draws on teacher reflections generated through a UK-based study to argue that many contemporary assessment practices work to disenfranchise and fail learners, their families, and their teachers, not least when they materialise as data wrangled for accountability or curriculum planning. With classroom examples, the idea of literacy-as-event, or ‘assessment as-event’ is explored to re-imagine assessment as a process that engages multiple ways of knowing to understand the here-and-now, embodied, ephemeral dimensions of literacy learning. Assessment is approached as a tripartite process that combines: a generous intention to illuminate what children know and can do; with critical reflection on how educational practices, such as routines, furniture, tools, discourses, texts, tests, etc., enable or constrain that knowing and doing; and reflexive and critical awareness of how people, things, histories and spaces shape what we, as educators and researchers, notice about—or deem relevant to—children’s literacies.
Dr. Burnett is Professor of Literacy and Education at Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University. Burnett publishes and presents widely, particularly in the area of early literacy, where her video research in early childhood settings has contributed to better understanding the literacy practices of young children as they engage in meaning-making practices with materials, technologies, and with others. Burnett will draw on her research to demonstrate how assessment methods must be attuned to how children learn, to noticing and documenting what children are doing, rather than what they aren’t. As the Past President of UKLA, Burnett understands classrooms and systems, and can help us re-imagine assessment at this crucial moment.
undoing, decolonizing, liberating, righting and reassembling literacies assessment 