Dr Emily Salines Interviews Professor Susan Orr
Exploiting assessment as a progressive tool to widen our grading reference frames, to welcome marginalised voices and global cultural frames…”
(Orr & Shreeve, 2017)
- Assessments are an important part of trying to address and close the attainment gap
How can assessments be used to subvert dominant discourses and hierarchies of knowledge, also how can it impact on attainment?
Dr Gurnam Singh: talk about the awarding gap vs the attainment gap – understand that this is located in our sphere of influence of control
- Calling it the awarding gap, reminds us that we need to look to our assessment practices rather than problematising the students.
Assessments is the place where university’s value’s are represented – it is how we find different ways to be dismissive of student work
- It is how lecturers are communicating what they value or more importantly, what they dismiss or deny value to
We need diverse assessment and course teams that are actively developing their criticality and reflectivity over assessment practices
Example used: went to a degree show and it was obvious that the amount of money each student spent on their project varied significantly. Need to ensure that every member of the assessment team has done the challenging job of looking across the material difference to get to the heart of the students learning and achievement in a way that doesn’t disadvantage the students that had less money
Need to recognise the material challenges of the student – some students don’t have access to economic opportunities, network, contacts, etc.
Respectfully think about the different circumstances of the students
Focus needs to be placed on the assessment briefs that are written in a way that disabled students don’t need an adjustment made to it for them to complete the assessment?
What can we do in our assessment briefs to empower students so they can engage fully without the need to identify as different in any way?
Course team should have more conversations as to what they mean by First Class with somebody not from the course team – to provoke, to challenge, to test out, to ask naive questions – assumptions about first class work can be challenged and tested
Professor Susan Orr re-wrote the assessment criteria that we currently use throughout UAL
Takes inspiration from Wenger’s work on ‘Communities of Practice’ and Suelen Shea’s work on Objectivity, subjectivity and Intersubjectivity – it is how people use and understand, co-construct meaning around the marking criteria that is really important
Developing the assessment criteria at UAL forced to make the familiar strange
“If assessment ever feels easy, we’re doing something wrong. It should feel difficult, we should be constantly challenging ourselves”
Assessment criteria is one way you can communicate your values and behaviours you want your students to exhibit
Process criteria – communicates that the journey of learning and concept development is so important that it is an entire assessment criteria
We want to promote student’s agency in the construction of their learning
Inquiry – great way to communicate the agency in a student-centred approach
Knowledge – seeking plural forms of knowledge that go beyond the western canon, diverse and actively encouraging students to bring knowledge from their interested, lives and experiences in their creative practice – and that is actively rewarded.
- Opening the door to decolonial practice and lens
What are the key things the course team should consider?
- Start with the students – look at your students in all their richness and diversity, experiences, – think about how you can access those
- How do I design an Assessment that gives voice to those experiences, ideas, their individual practice?
- How do you harness their strengths that are entangled with their sense of identity and sense or ‘material circumstances’?
- NORMALLY, you look at what the creative industries need from our graduate, HOWEVER, these arenas are not diverse, have a gender pay gap, POC to white paygap
- We need to design an assessment that challenges the status quo, need an assessment that starts with what the students have got, are, and what their potential
- Give them the development opportunities they need and assess those on their own learning
Common thought with art school – ‘students come in and they need to unlearn everything’
Professor Susan disagrees with that – we need to harness what we can give voice to when students start with the uni
What would a Black Lives Matter assessment process look like?
Follow up research: Watch https://www.arts.ac.uk/students/stories/new-assessment-criteria3 – talks about the assessment criteria that UAL currently has
Bibliography
Assessment and Attainment in Art and Design Education; Dr Emily Salines Interviews Professor Susan Orr (2020) Vimeo. Available at: https://vimeo.com/458640666 (Accessed: December 5, 2022).
Orr, S. and Shreeve, A. (2017) Art and design pedagogy in higher education: Knowledge, values and ambiguity in the creative curriculum. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
(no date) Level 4 Assessment Criteria Descriptors. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/study-at-ual/course-regulations/assessment (Accessed: December 6, 2022).