Pre-Conference Keynote Session - Recording
Exploring new and joyful relationships with assessment for staff and students, Dr Jan McArthur
We were delighted to welcome Jan McArthur to deliver our online pre-conference keynote session on Thursday 15th June 2023. This session, exclusive to us here at Warwick, allowed us to come together to explore how we might find new and joyful relationships with assessment. We continued the conversations started here at the conference on 22nd June where our student conference team shared their key take away messages.
Keynote abstract:
In this keynote I will explore the seemingly improbable relationship between joy and assessment. I will ask us to consider not how we assess, but why we assess? In reflecting on, and challenging, the purposes of assessment we are in a better position to re-imagine assessment in more positive and constructive ways, for students, staff and wider society. Indeed, it is looking to understand the socially-situated purposes of assessment that we can reconnect with what should, and can be, joyful and meaningful when we engage with our students’ work, and when they reflect on their own achievements. I will associate joy with assessment not as a fuzzy, feel-good term, but as a genuine indicator of the fundamental purpose of the work we and our students do, and the contribution this makes to social, as well as individual, wellbeing.
Keynote recording:
0 mins - 43 mins: Jan's presentation
43 mins - 1hr 24 mins: Q&A and discussion
Jan McArthur
Jan McArthur is Senior Lecturer in Education and Social Justice in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK. Her research focuses on the nature and purposes of higher education and how these relate to practices of teaching, learning and assessment. She has a particular interest in critical theory and in her published work explores the ideas of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Axel Honneth, applying these to higher education. She has previously published a book exploring how Adorno’s critical theory can inform our understanding of, and engagement with, knowledge in higher education for the purposes of greater social justice: Rethinking Knowledge in Higher Education (Bloomsbury). Her second book uses Honneth's conceptualisation of mutual recognition to rethink the nature of assessment in higher education, where one is committed to greater social justice: Assessment for Social Justice (Bloomsbury). She has published a wide range of journal articles on assessment, critical theory and social justice. Jan is a researcher in the ESRC and HEFCE funded ‘Centre for Global Higher Education’, and currently working on the international and longitudinal project: Graduate Experiences of Employability and Knowledge. This builds on the previous project: Understanding Knowledge, Curriculum and Student Agency. She is also Editor of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.
If you would like to read some of Jan's work....
- Rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being and society, Higher Education (2023), 85, pp.85–101.
- Reflections on assessment for social justice and assessment for inclusion (chapter two). In, Assessment for inclusion in higher education: promoting equity and social justice in assessment (2022) (downloadable e-book).
- Student perspectives on assessment: connections between self and society, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (2022), 47(5), pp.698-711.
- Assessment for social justice: the role of assessment in achieving social justice, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (2016), 41(7), pp.967-981.