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Critical reflections on the role of identity in two respondents' formative assessment practices

This article reports on a research project that two lecturers on an Academic Literacy course at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg), conducted into their own assessment practices. Noting the contrasting ways in which they had responded to a set of students' essays, they reflected analytically on these differences in terms of a conflict between their professional and personal identities. Using Elbow's notion of ‘free writing’ (P. Elbow, 1973. Writing without teachers) they explored their underlying, implicit motivations as respondents and realized that these were sometimes in conflict with their espoused, conscious ideologies. They had assumed that their shared ideological approaches, centred on Genre Theory and Process Writing, and on a Socio-cultural model of writing in which students are apprenticed into a new discourse (J. Gee, 1996. Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses). In fact, while recording in detail the comments that they had made on the students' essays, it became evident that much of the feedback did not reflect these theoretical approaches, but had more to do with less conscious wishes, processes, and identities (J. Kristeva, 1999. Revolution in poetic language). Some of their comments reflected models that were either ‘traditionalist’ or ‘progressivist’ (B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, 1993a. The Power of literacy and the literacy of power). Using a Critical Action research model, they revisited the research into formative assessment and developed a number of principles of good formative feedback. In the light of these principles and ideologies about literacy, they reflected critically on their assessment practices, and resolved on future directions for research into an improved, more theoretically grounded ‘praxis’ (W. Carr and S. Kemmis, 1986. Becoming critical: Education, knowledge, and action research).