Challenging formative assessment: disciplinary spaces and identities

Abstract

What if knowledge is a form of doing, an engagement between a knowing subject and what is known? What if learning is a contextualised performance involving students engaging with prospective and current social identities, and therefore an ontological as well as an epistemological accomplishment? What then becomes of formative assessment within different disciplinary pedagogies? In this paper, we open up the possibility of formative assessment as encompassing a disciplinary meta‐discourse within the context of teaching as response. We draw on data from a postgraduate context to illustrate how the identities of teachers and learners may be brought into play. Formative assessment is seen to involve movement across a concrete–procedural–reflective–discursive–existential continuum, and between the convergent and divergent. We suggest that by asserting the centrality of disciplinary knowledge and identities, the frameworks presented may be used heuristically to entice academics into thinking more specifically and organically about pedagogies which are more appropriate to the changing nature of twenty‐first‐century higher education.

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