Positivity and Student Identity (Blog 1)

There’s a saying, usually attributed to Mother Teresa, that I’ve been thinking about in relation to assessment: “I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be there.” This quote, which urges hearers to focus on positivity rather than negativity, has affected me ever since my mother first told it to me as a child. I fight to maintain a positive focus and attitude;  I try to share that attitude with others (namely my students).

But there is something about the notion of “assessment” that, for years, escaped my laser beam of mindful, intentional positivity. I naturally associated the concept and practice of assessment with fear, intimidation, and negative self-definition (because I dreaded the thought of earning bad marks on a high-stakes assessment  and our high school teachers had wonderful, but very high, expectations). I’ve even heard people disregard assessment feedback before in attempts to reestablish their sense of intellectual identity (i.e.- “I bombed the GRE, but  I don’t do well on timed tests. How I did on that test is not who I am”). Before this unit, it honestly never occurred to me to consider assessment as a tool to build students up or at least construct their identity in a positive way.

From among the histories that we studied, I credit Dr. Yancey with my paradigm shift here. Her essay implies that the fusion of trust and the gift of responsibility in the form of portfolio assessment can actually foster a more well-rounded sense of identity in a student (Yancey 145). Students, in this attitude, transcend their status as government or institutional numbers and are acknowledged (and thus, dignified), just like we discussed in class on Tuesday.

I try to imagine an ideal assessment, one “in which reliability and validity work in harmony rather than tension” (Huot et al. 29); is it one where the student is prompted to improve their writing ability through incentive rather than fear? How can we use assessment to generate a Mother Teresa-esque focus on positive student potential? How can technology facilitate this kind of development? And (I’m asking this question because of my personal interest in teaching across genres in comp.), would such an assessment situation warrant us to augment “the scope of writing activities to include creative and imaginative works” so that we “focus on idea and content within writing rather than solely form” (Behizadeh and Engleherd Jr. 197)? Should we visualize assessment as more of a chain in a link instead of a bottom line?