Language and Assessment Tensions

In this episode, Dr. Constant Leung and Dr. Wayne Au critically examine standardized testing and assessment systems, focusing on their historical roots and ongoing role in reinforcing inequalities related to race, class, and language in England and the US.

This podcast season was generously sponsored by the Spencer Foundation in partnership with the Adelphi Faculty Center of Professional Excellence.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:05

Language tensions, where the messages of language meet a good conversation. This podcast season was generously sponsored by the Spencer Foundation in partnership with the Adelphi Faculty Centre for Professional Excellence.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

I'm your host for today's episode. My name is Dr. Ian Cushing, and I'm a reader in Critical Applied Linguistics at ManchesterMet. And in this episode, we're going to talk about testing in education. To do so, we're joined by two guests whose work I have personally long admired, and I know that our listeners will have to. So let's just begin then by getting a sense of who our guests are today. So we're joined by Professor Wayne Al from the University of Washington and Professor Constant Lung from King's College London and University College London. So could I just start by inviting you both to just give us a two-minute overview of your research? I know how difficult that might be given the amount of work that you've produced and how it relates to testing in education. So what are some of the core priorities in your research and what motivates you to do it? Wayne, could we perhaps go to you first if that's okay?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Yes, it is. And thanks for having me on. And it's a pleasure to get to meet you both and be in conversation today. Yeah, you know, my research uh is pretty far ranging. It definitely started with um, you know, uh my doctoral work examining, uh critically examining uh the difficulties and the problems um with high-stakes standardized testing, both from a historical point of view, but then also uh in terms of sort of modern-day applications and really its relationship to capitalism and power in society. Um my research also sort of then has sort of branched out into some other spaces because testing really becomes part of you know issues of race and class and neoliberal education reforms. Um and then most recently I've been looking at uh Asian American education, um, very specifically in the United States and Asian American racialization, uh, which of course has some overlap with testing and concepts around like model minority and and Asian American educational achievement.

SPEAKER_02 2:24

That's brilliant. Thank you so much, Wayne. And how about you, Constant?

SPEAKER_04 2:29

Uh perhaps I should really uh say that uh language assessment is um one of the uh two or three areas that I've been you know focusing on over the years. But in relation to assessment, I think it started like this, okay? When I first started teaching, years and years ago, I was teaching English as a foreign language at university level. And there the the notion of language proficiency was actually very constrained. It was, I mean, in a sense, it was dictated by the big tests. You know, what's English? Well, English is really between the pages of the tests, and then the text, international textbooks, and things like that, right? Then a little later on, when I started teaching in uh in a high school, uh, when I started working with uh students from diverse language backgrounds, but in a regular school curriculum context, right, I realized that the very high status, internationally recognized qualifications in English language virtually had nothing to say to what we need to do with the students, you know, in a school environment where English is not a thing that is between the books. English is everywhere in the curriculum. They got to live with it, crave it, and it's not just academic English, it's also social, it's also personal development and all sorts of things. So that's how I got to, in one way or another, to where I am now. And so I'm I've been paying a lot of attention to trying to make assessment, language assessment work in teaching and learning rather than just testing people's proficiencies according to some standardized model of what is loosely called English, but in fact it's a very specific version of it. Anyway, I think that's it. So my priorities in the last few years have been really well, more than that, over a decade now, is to find ways of rendering the idea of assessment into classroom activities so that it's actually for the benefit of the students. I think that's probably how I would like to put it.

SPEAKER_02 4:48

Thanks so much, Constant. That really helps to give us a sense of where you are coming from. So uh Wayne, your stance on testing is that they and excuse me if I got this wrong from from your own work, but is that they're not sort of measurements necessarily of assessment, but they're political tools that reproduce and indeed maintain social hierarchies, especially as you say, at the intersection points of of race and and and class. Could you perhaps offer a couple of examples or two of how this um materializes for us?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Yeah, for sure. I mean, really, you know, if if we look in the United States, and to be clear, obviously, the United States and the UK, um, while they obviously share uh a commitment to ISIS standardized testing and these sort of neoliberal education reforms that are ranking schools and teachers and everything. And the UK in many ways is more intense uh around that, right? Like we don't have the public school post rankings that get that get put out in the same kind of way, at least uh in the US. Um, but but the US, you know, historically we can you can really trace how early uh psychologists, educational psychologists, and psychologists in general uh took you know uh Binet's original IQ tests, right, which Binets were developed to really look for developmental disabilities in young children. And it's sort of in a typical US CRAST approach, uh, these early psychologists um adopted those tests and work reworked them to uh try and measure uh the intelligence of adults, right? And here we see the birth of the concept of you know IQ, right? Intelligence quotient um and looking at age versus uh intelligence. And you get so we get this you know nice neat number wrapped into it. And and so we see them doing this in like the late 1800s, early 1900s in the US. And so what so then you get this you get this idea of IQ. It's connected also to a growing uh eugenics movement in the United States as well, which sort of tries to equate uh intelligence with genetics, right? And but also at the time of the birth of sort of mass mass schooling in the US as well, right? And so they're they're trying to deal with like how do we deal with all these children now and these large schools, right? And the creation of sort of factory-style uh education, um, you know, where you have large classes and and students moving from teacher to teacher, almost like an educational assembly line, right? And sounds testing uh as a technology at this time sort of fit this milieu really perfectly. It's efficient, right? Um so you can do, you can, you can measure large numbers of students and uh and have this presumption of objectivity kind of built within the positivistic sciences of that of that that historical moment. And so everyone sort of assumed that these tests were actually measuring, objectively measuring um human intelligence. And so then what we saw, like you predictably, right, the these tests ended up supposedly finding objectively that uh rich white people in the US were more intelligent than immigrants and and black and brown folks, right, and poor folks, and and uh and so you can just see this historical mapping uh around the racism and the classism that gets built like at the birth of testing in the United States. And then these same psychologists were the ones who were responsible of bringing these tests into public schools at that time. And of course, then they were finding some of the same things, and they were used to build systems of tracking and and tracking um you know uh African American and Latinx students um you know into vocational trades and that kind of stuff. And and these folks like Terman and Yorks, they literally believe that that these black and brown kids were incapable of higher order thinking, right? And so all this so you just see how how it gets enmeshed and built into this thing. And then if we move forward, you know, 100 years, 100 plus years into the current into the current time, one of the things I always point out to folks when talking about the tests and thinking about race and class inequalities in particular is to kind of look at and say, look, these guys, these outright racist, sexist, classists, eugenicists uh, you know, from the early 1900s had these findings. And then we look at the out the outcomes of our tests now, and they are almost the same, right? Poor kids doing worse, black and brown kids doing worse on the test. And and so we can just see this reproduction of race and class inequality um in the current test, and it's become so clear. Um, and even to the degree that, you know, there's some research here in the US, like high stakes, high school exit exams actually increase the rate of incarceration uh in the justice system for students, right? That just their existence, which which makes sort of a basic sense, right? You fail the test, it limits your your life options, and then what do you have to turn to in order to figure out how to make a living and sort of continue on in a healthy and productive life? And so, yeah, so we can just see the this overlap of race and class in so many ways, um, both you know, 100 years ago and and happening right now.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

Thank you so much, Wayne. Um yeah, I love the way that you link what appears to be the kind of distant past, right, with the immediate present to show how those inequalities that are designed into tests from the big from the very beginning remain very firmly intact and very stable over time. Thank you. So, Constant, your work adopts a kind of similar conceptualization of non-objective testing, but uh perhaps places a bit more of a focus on language um than Wayne's work does, as part of those machineries really of inequalities that Wayne's work has been so helpful to expose. So, again, Constant, could I ask you to offer an example or two of how this materializes, uh especially in relation to language assessment?

SPEAKER_04 10:30

Yes, um, thank you. I I think this also reaches has long roots in, if you like, certain kind of cultural values. Right now in England, anyway, but by the way, I'm I'm speaking mainly in relation to what goes on in England because uh Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have their own decentralized uh local education administrations. There are lots of commonalities, but there are also differences. So I think I'd be safer to talk just refer to England. Right right now, for example, in England, I think they have uh roughly speaking just over nine million students in the school system. About two million, just over twenty percent of them are regarded as from language diverse backgrounds. In other words, they are not all first language mother tongue speakers of English. But the you know, the system public education from reception, which is about age four to five, up to sixteen, you know, the regular uh statutory schooling age, the whole thing is presumptively taught through the English medium. And in fact, this is not something that's been talked about that much. But the 1989 Education Reform Act for England actually enshrined the principle of the teaching of the uh mainstream curriculum has to be in English, in England. I mean nobody I think nobody remembers it. But it's so much ingrained in the system that you don't even need to remember it because it's it's naturalized. Now, what actually happens is when you have a diverse student population where the idea of equality in the mainstream system is not to differentiate the curriculum, but to root it down the path of everybody is entitled to go to school. So equality is achieved by your being in school. What you do in school is neither here nor there for anybody else, right? So it's up to you. Then you become the, as it were, the heroic individual trying to make something happen in your life in what is uh very difficult to navigate situation where your maybe your English is not quite up to the mark at any one point in your you know academic career and things like that. And the data would you know bear this out. The most recent, by that I mean published about five years ago by the by the government, reported that, for example, for pe for young people at the age of four and five reception year, only 43% of those children who are at at that age, who are at the beginning uh of their learning English, only 43% are judged to be enjoying a good level of development. Now, now I'm not talking about you know doing subjects like physics or anything like this because we're talking about very young children. But they are, you know, the the government uh evaluation system actually says just 43% or thereabouts actually even achieve at that level the so-called good development, meaning able to socialize, use language to talk, to make friends and you know get on with a little bit of this and that and something else in in in in learning context and that sort of thing. Similar figures go all the way up to you know primary school or elementary school and um secondary or high school. And we also know from years of research, international research, that it takes forever for people to really catch up. Because, you know, you can't actually learn enough English in two months, three months, just like that, to do well in the mainstream curriculum across the subject range. So as a result, what you have is not just the machinery of assessment that is biased against you know uh about 20% of the population in the schools, but you also have this cultural complicity which sees not nothing wrong with it, which is I think the problem. And so, for example, we in England recently have um uh a sort of curriculum review. The idea was to look at what needs to be done, and in the report, this went on for over a year, and in the report there was not a single mention, not a single mention of English as an additional language or second language or linguistic diversity. Actually, I at the top of my head, I don't even remember there was any talk of ethnicity at all. It's almost as if the whole thing rose on, you know, from probably 1900 onwards, and we are still there. So, on top of that, our teachers are not trained in teaching children from diverse language backgrounds. There's no qualification for English as a second language or additional language, and there is virtually no in-surface, you know, con continuous professional development support for teachers who are already working to deal with all this. So we got this kind of rather built-in system of inertia, and it's everything is pushed down to the teachers themselves in the school. And some are doing heroic, you know, work, but there's no support, there's no guidance, not very much at all. And if anything, it's from the third sector, you know, from charities, from academics, who are actually, you know, doing this stuff of their own bed. So the situation is probably mapping on weighing your work in terms of the fundamental injustice already in the standardized testing regime. We also had a kind of cultural complex complicity on top of it of being completely not seeing, not recognizing any linguistic uh difference. Language is fundamentally the access to understanding in school context. I mean, I know communication has multi- you know, multi-dimensional aspects like you know, multimodality and you know, all sorts of other things, but still language is key and uh and where where we are, which is um which is where we're actually to deal with both the technicality of monolingual assessment all round completely, and also the cultural complicity of not seeing a problem at all.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

Thank you, Constant. Thank you. So this podcast and the research more broadly are particularly interested in the overlaps and the shared struggles really between education in England and the US. So listening to each other's answers just now, do you feel like there's particular things that strike you as important when considering that cross-country comparison? Or put another way, what do you feel are the unique challenges that you see to critical approaches to testing in England and the US? Uh Wayne, could we start with you?

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Yeah, I mean, I actually feel like there's there's a lot, there's there is a lot we have in common, you know, despite our sort of individualized histories and trajectories and context. You know, listen to the constant talk, I mean, it it like it just reminds me of another point that I always make is for instance, with our own, you know, English language learning population in terms of like immigrant populations, for instance, in the United States, um, I'm always pushing on the idea, like, um, well, not only and and also in addition to that, uh, the the variety of the variety of Englishes that we have, right, um, in this country, um whether we want to refer to them in terms of uh dialects or or however, but like there's so many different kinds of English spoken in the in in the US. And so then we have this test that's basically written in standard American English, right? And so that raises this question for anyone who who doesn't speak standard American English, um, like what is the test assessing? And I think any any of us who know anything about assessment, right? Like, if I'm assessing mathematics and the directions are in standard American English, I'm not only assessing some particular distinct mathematics skills, I'm also assessing your ability to comprehend the standard American English and and and and that already starts to invalidate the assessment, right? Yeah. Um the same thing with reading comprehension. Like if you're just trying to understand how someone decodes language and processes what they're reading um in a particular way and makes sense of that, like it shouldn't make it shouldn't matter what language they're reading in, right? Because it's it's the skill that we're trying to look at, right? It's the process we're trying to understand, not not the reading comp, not the comprehension of English language, standard American English, right? And so I think that's something we most definitely have in common if we look at UK, UK and the US, um, and and the and the challenges we're struggling around, sort of the sort of hegem the hegemony of of standard English, whichever, whichever one we're looking at.

unknown 19:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

The other thing I feel like we we have sort of between us is like we're both caught up in, and I brought this up earlier, around sort of the sort of neoliberal market approach to education reforms, and um the way that testing, you know, creates simplistic and easy numbers to then be turned into sort of quasi-markets, you know, competitive markets for schools and teachers and districts and states, or internationally between countries when the PISA scores come out, right? Like all that stuff sort of exists, and then that becomes the main driver for like education policy and education reform, right? And so, you know, we need this new curriculum so students can, you know, everyone's been wringing their hand, like everyone's been like pulling their hair out here in the United States and wringing their hands over the fact that our reading scores went down in the most rounded PISA, and then you know, then we have all this fights about the science of reading and all these things happening, right? You can just see all this, and so this whole sort of market-based competition thing without a real focus on learning, right? And and a real focus on actual assessments that can help us actually measure learning, right? And we get caught up in in sort of this constant thing around um, you know, just competition and and then the marketization of education, right? And the folks making money off of every aspect of all of this, right? So I think we definitely share both of those issues uh you know across the water, uh, and they they both they both represent really significant uh obstacles to to making, I think, substantial changes to assessment.

SPEAKER_02 21:15

Thank you so much, Wayne. Uh same question to you, Constant.

SPEAKER_04 21:19

I agree with Wayne actually that um we do share s a lot in common in that respect. Perhaps I would like to add that maybe the two things that we could be thinking about in terms of kind of you know what could be done, one is to move away from excessive promotion of summative assessment and begin to root a lot of assessment into the classroom for educational, for learning purposes. So I'll come back to that in a little while. But the main thing for me is the the language model within the curriculum is apart from it. Being a kind of standard English, however defined, actually it's very ill-defined anyway. But the the idea is that there is a version of English that's correct and ever anything else is not quite good enough. I think it's a problem as you pointed out. But more than that, actually, it misses the point. In our kind of um linguistically diverse communities, people don't actually in real life always communicate to one another for whatever purpose, monolingually in one language. So even, I mean, all the sociolinguistic research over the last 25-30 years shows that, for example, youth culture in England and in the UK generally, through music, through dance, through fashion, through everything else, actually has always incorporated lots of language elements from the community, from diverse languages, if you like to call them by their names, right? And so there's that going on, but also intra-fam familial communication. We're now talking about in a kind of demographic transition of possibly in some families who may not be seen as, if you like, kind of English, or by that I mean white English. That's very imprecise. But the point is there are lots of British people who are now going through third, fourth generation, and their their capacity to use languages within the home is very, very diverse. It's not always just, oh well, you know, you're you've got a surname that sounds like Punjabi, so therefore you speak Punjabi at home. Not necessarily, but it would be English, Punjabi, probably something else, and probably, you know, the children will bring some other bits of language in because of the you know, football or I don't know, dance or music or whatever it is. And so basically what we have is in effect a version of trans languaging in the community life. And that is not just restricted to, you know, young people from minoritized communities. You get that, you know, across peer friendship groups and things like this. Okay? And the classic thing is, you know, for example, in urban youth culture, you often get a lot of black Englishers because of the music and because of the fashion and because of you know all the sort of desirable things that young people want. And so, as you say, if you want to assess anything at all in the curriculum, if your prime priority is to find out what people have learned and what they can do in all the subject areas, the purity of the language in terms of English cannot be the priority. Because even in a monolingually taught classroom, young people actually learn through what they bring into the classroom together. And what actually happens then is very often they can do all sorts of things in this translingual way, right? But if you want to make them to kind of just sit down suddenly and write it out in 15 minutes what it is that they have done, it may not conform to that kind of, if you like, standard English, monolingual, standard English model. But that's actually missing the point. What we want is to know what the young people have learned and what they can express to show what they you know can do and so on. So there's a lot of work to be done there. But the beginnings of promoting formative assessment or assessment for learning, I think is really it should be high on the agenda for anybody who's campaigning for greater fairness and equity in education. Because in an increasingly linguistically diverse kind of setting, it makes no sense to insist on just everybody conforming to a particular variety of English when actually their life is lived out in very complex and interesting ways. And this is born out time and time again in any research paper uh that you know that I I have had the privilege to read. Here, you know, in England, over there, over your side, Wayne in, you know, different bits of the United States. And um so those are the kind of issues that I think we need to they're cross-country between, you know, between UK and the USA. Thank you, Constant. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

So I think both of you have started to touch upon this a little bit in your previous answers, but I just want to start thinking a little bit about how social justice work in education is not just about the often repeated cataloguing and documentation of harms, but it's about developing new and different visions for more equitable futures. So, what role, if any, do you think testing plays here? Um, or in other words, what are some of the ways that critical education scholars might take part in some of these efforts in relation to testing and assessment in whatever role that might play? Wayne, could we start with you?

SPEAKER_00 27:33

Yeah, and and I really like this question, right? Um, because we so often get caught up in the critique, you know, and from our from our perspectives, and and and it's hard to think about the sometimes hard to think about the building and the the beauty of what could be on the horizon and futures we can create, you know. Um, you know, one thing I do always like to point out though is that around high-stake standardized testing in the United States is there is this thing at the also at the origins of it around sort of the ideology of meritocracy. And that's just to say that that a lot of folks support this kind of testing in the US uh because they think it offers that objective measurement of individuals, which means regardless of race or class or social standing or or immigrant status or whatever, uh, in their ideal, they think that the tests then measure these individuals in terms of their hard work. And so that's a way to like succeed regardless of who you are, right? And there's this ideology of meritocracy just sort of always floating. And so the tests get pushed even by liberal democrats in the United States as well, often, because this is the tool to achieve equality in education, right? And so I just want to highlight that there are some true believers who really see these tests as the way to um actually achieve transformational equality in the United States, right? To me, the irony, of course, is that that sort of ideological push is is uh is completely undermined by the large-scale outcomes of the tests in the United States, right? Um so yes, some individuals can exceed, you know, maybe their race or class status in the United States, but on the whole, as we talked about earlier, they do end up reproducing a lot of inequalities. But you know, there and so the question for me is is less about is there a role for the current tests we have? And more, I think, in line with what Constant has been talking about around what kinds of assessments can we work towards that actually are more equitable, more critical, and work more towards social justice, right? You know, for me, in some of the work I've done with Rethinking Schools, which is a which is a long time, um, I think we're going out for almost 40 years old. This that's sort of a social justice education project in the United States that's really focused on, you know, how do we do classroom practices and curriculum and that in ways that that supports students' identities in broadly and help them uh engage with learning, right? A lot in a lot of those discussions, you know, I've kind of put forth trying to think through almost in line with like forms of discipline. And what I mean is, you know, when we look at our current high-stakes standardized testing, really these they're punitive, right? It's like do well or someone's gonna get punished. And so I always want to flip that question and think about it relative to the other some other conversations we've been having around like restorative justice and transformative justice, and sort of thinking about what would it mean to have like a restorative or transformative assessment, like an assessment that actually helps students maybe heal from historical trauma, or an assessment that actually helps students even heal from maybe the traumas that they've had from past schooling. And what would that look like, right? And then it becomes a conversation around, oh, then what would that process look like? Because for me, I want students, you know, to engage in assessment where they're doing critical self-reflection and learning about themselves, and then also learning about how society operates and really have a meta-understanding of how they fit into the like maybe the institution of education, or and then use that as sort of the springboard for demonstrating their learning, right? And so um more engaging with the community and have that be the same springboard for demonstrating their learning. And so I think there's space for us to be really thinking about from a social justice perspective, you know, just can't, you know, how do we sort of just think really big around what the assessments could look like? You know, one of my favorite forms concretely here in the US is um, you know, the the New York Standards Performance Consortium. They their high school exit exam is almost like a mini doctoral defense, and students get a long time to work on a series of portfolios across various subject various subject areas, and then they have to present that to for their for their final exam is a presentation of their portfolios to a panel that can consist of teachers or maybe some peers, as well as community members or and parents. And you know, it because it's built around process and it's based on the students' own self-reflection and meta-reflection on their learning, um, it's a very, very different process. And we've seen this work really well for you know college, um, both college attainment and college staying power power, particularly for working class students and English language learners in the US. So these things exist, they're just not efficient and they don't they don't fit the market metric comparatively comparisons that happen um because the idea is for students to be like measuring themselves against themselves in a way, right? Like we're not about comparison. We want to we're about learning, you know, and we want to see what a student has learned. And so um it's a very different way of thinking about it, and it but it's it but it helps us really sort of challenge um all these major inequalities that sort of come through our current dominant forms of high-stakes standardized testing.

SPEAKER_02 32:28

Thank you so much, Wayne. And we'll put some links to the Rethinking Schools project and some of the other things that you mentioned in the show notes so that listeners can follow up on that. We appreciate that. Thanks, Wayne. How about you, Constant? Same question to you.

SPEAKER_04 32:42

I mean, I I I I understand and would go along with you know everything that Wayne has said so far. But in the context of what goes on here in England, one of the things that is um missing completely is any sense of English language learner's learning trajectory being recognized as different from that of a typical, you know, kind of, if you like, English uh speaking family background. And so the lack of recognition, I mean, there's nothing in the curriculum for any teacher, however caring they are, to actually even begin to get a sense of the difference. So, and they've been sort of told every day, you know, that uh judgments are made, and here's the benchmarks, and you know, and so on. But so there's no reflexiveness in the system. And one of the things that I was fortunate uh to be able to do with the support of a charity called the Bell Foundation, working with a number of colleagues at Cambridge, we managed to develop what is, I think, relatively comprehensive, English as an additional language proficiency scales, you know, rating scales, setting out the levels and all the details of the steps within each level and so on. The idea was not to actually use that for lockstep, you know, uh kind of summative judgment of who people are. But the point is to the way we did develop those skills uh was essentially taking account of the collective research over the last 30, 40 years in the what is effectively Anglophone countries, plus some European countries. But also we work with teachers and got their opinions uh to help us identify the trajectories. And out of that, we now have a system not mandatory, it's not even being recognized by any official system, but but teachers we know that use them, right? And the idea there is they become a roadmap. So if you are teaching a group of children, some of whom are actually learning English or in the process of becoming proficient, but not yet, you can you know use that as a roadmap to identify where they are on the different, if you like, bands and all the different levels within the bands, not just to judge them, but to identify what is above, below, or adjacent from this set of descriptors, so that you can, as a teacher, begin to look and use that information to support your formative assessment or assessment for learning in the classroom context. And the way we form our descriptors uh was such that they could be understood by subject teachers. They're not about, you know, the past tense or the adjective or you know, the past perfect or something like that, which could actually put a lot of teachers off because they're not trained linguists. But it's to do with, you know, can express this in the context of a laboratory task or something of that kind, right? So we got that, and I think hopefully, the more we're able to develop that side of things, in other words, assessment for learning integrated into everyday teaching learning, then it is one way of achieving at least a little bit of equity and justice. It won't solve the problem until we have much more uh a fuller kind of recognition and understanding and acceptance of diversity. But until then, that actually is one way of moving things forward. And in a way, you know, from the informal feedback, uh, we do know that teachers do use you know those scales in that way. So it's a very, you know, it's one way anyway, but but you know, there's so many things. I mean, we could we should be engaged in much higher level conceptual debates, you know, about the nature of education and things like that, which we do. But um but realistically in the classroom, those are the kind of things that we could do, I think. Thank you, Constant.

SPEAKER_02 37:08

That's great, thank you. That kind of tension that you allude to there leads us quite nicely onto our final question. You're doing you're doing my job for me as the podcast host. Thank you, Constant. So the final question on our podcast is always a really special one because um it's from a student. And so the again the question is to both of you. So this question is from a student who is on an undergraduate pre-service teacher education program. Uh so uh this time next year they're going to be teaching uh English in mainstream schools. Uh, and the question that this student asked is this uh they wrote, I desperately want to align my teaching with a critical applied linguistic approach. I firmly believe in the inherent injustices within testing. But I'm also aware that teachers must also prepare students to navigate national standardized tests. How can I reconcile the desire to be a critical educator whilst also working within a system that I know is unjust by design? Wayne, we'll start with you again, if that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 38:17

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, honest, this is honestly, this is this is like this is the real question, right? In a way of like, like, here's a teacher, and we see this in all of in our teachers all the time here in the space as well, and especially in programs like the program I'm connected with. Um you know, and to me there's there's a couple answers. Uh one answer is is just a broader idea of like, look, you know, I think good teachers teach the students who are in front of them, right? And so whatever the whatever whatever norm is being cast by this national standardized testing, fundamentally you still have to connect the curriculum to sort of the lives and experiences and communities of the children that are in your classroom, right? Um, and that means that um, yes, I know there might, you know, there's there's nationalized curriculum in some spaces, and there's pacing guides where people have to do X, Y, and Z. But that there's usually some space for teachers to really, really engage with students where they're at and think about their identities and figure out how to connect that with the curriculum. So that's one sort of way to do that. You you're not doing any open, sort of really challenging of the systemic issues, but at least you're not letting those systemic issues fully define your teaching. I think that's an important sort of small step within that space. Um plus you can do good stuff and fun stuff and engage kids, and that's why we're there as teachers, right? That's really why we're there, I think. The other thing I always encourage folks to do is I feel like I feel like students have a right to understand these systems that they're being forced to uh partake in, right? And so I want students uh, you know, in in classes to be able to like, they should know the history of of the standard of standardized testing, right? They should know all these issues around the inherent inequalities, they should under, you know, the linguistic issues, um the way the tests are used to to punish students and teachers. Like they should understand this whole system that they are engaged with. And that's not necessarily so I mean if I I just feel like they have a right to understand the stakes and the issues, and they can make choices about whether they want to boycott, um, but they also have to understand the consequences, right? That's part of understanding the system, right? And so, but at the core of all that then becomes that way if students don't do well in the test, they also understand that this test actually isn't measuring what the system says it's measuring, and so they're it's not measuring their intelligence, right? It's not it, it might be measuring some other things, but it's not necessarily uh, you know, it's pointing to them being bad or or dumb or anything like that. It's it's just it's a particular game that you gotta play if you're gonna try and get to a particular university or whatever. And so they just they at least have to have a meta understanding of of what they are involved with. I think that's an important step. But basically, we can think about in terms of developing critical consciousness about the system of testing itself.

SPEAKER_02 41:01

Yeah, thank you, Wayne. That's such a powerful answer. I appreciate it. And I know that the student will too. Thank you. Uh, same question uh to you, Constant.

SPEAKER_04 41:11

Very, very, very uh challenging question. Um perhaps my answer lies in something that I thought about a while back and I kind of did some thinking around it. I think we need to be thinking about teacher professionalism as something that could be a way in. And um and I think there are two kinds of professionalisms. One is the sponsored type of professionalism whereby you are comfortable within the educational regime in which you work. So whatever is required of you, if you if you do what you are expected, then you are a good guy, you get promotion, uh your career is, you know, uh on a good trajectory and things like that. The other way of seeing it would be an independent professionalism. Whereby as a teacher you engage in I mean, I I don't mean every day you wake up in the morning, you do this, but at least have a level of consciousness to realize that there are certain things which are not at all helpful to our students. And in fact, you know, some things are actually harmful, right? So what do you do then? And I think most of us as teachers actually have had that experience. We know something's not right. Like, you know, we've been told, for example, to teach uh I mean I remember I was um when I was doing this uh foreign language teaching thing, I I had to teach a class of engineering students English. I knew nothing about engineering, right, at that point. I have to say I still don't. But at that point I didn't. And I was teaching this stuff, and I I was really floating myself because I didn't have any any sense of where I was going and where the students were going, and what what the heck is this English for them? So now that's a fair I mean, you know, it's laughable now, I'm laughing, but those are the moments actually, and it could be much worse, but you know, this is a light-hearted kind of example. So those are the moments, and if we have the consciousness of understanding, knowing that this is not right, then that's the beginning. And the way to go is I understand we can't all be, you know, doing critical thinking all day long because we won't have the you know have a job or we won't be able to pay you know our rents or the mortgage or you know, all this stuff. So, you know, to the extent that we can, we need to encourage our teachers to have at least a degree of independent professionalism. And it doesn't mean that you you you know you y do things that would be kind of overtly kind of if you like um difficult in the school context. Of course, as you say, Wayne, I mean there are things that you can do anyway in the classroom that is not necessarily controlled by anybody. No school inspector is going to be with you 24 hours a day. And so there are things that you can do anyway. But then, you know, that's not the only way. You could take, you know, take a course on some particular aspect of your teaching. You could join a subject association or a trade union, and you can begin to represent your views through those fora. And um and you can, I mean in my case, I took it upon myself actually, uh, when I felt I didn't know anything about teaching English. My first training wasn't in English language or linguistics at all. So I actually did a conversion masters in uh teaching English. And so that's another way, right? I knew I couldn't carry on in good faith. And that I think is also important. Now this might sound a bit bourgeois, okay? You're a lucky guy, you know, you could afford to do an MA. But I'm not saying that's the only thing, but you know, it doesn't take a lot to uh to join a uh subject association and to uh you know write little kind of diary notes and something to be published and engage other colleagues and all kinds of things like that, and also be very active in the school. And uh in relation to all of that, um I've just put something on the chat for um possibly the students who raised this question. And this this is a a paper on uh a kind of assemblage of all the publications up until a couple years ago, yeah, well, three, four years ago, on uh classroom-based formative assessment. And so if anybody's interested, just go there because it gives you little summaries of what all the things that have been done in that area. And I'm gonna bounce it off now. Thank you, Constant.

SPEAKER_00 46:11

Ian, if I could if I could jump in on one other thing real quick, uh, is also just to say that um, you know, I like the other thing is like I always tell students you gotta find your people, right? Like it's the it's the worst to be a progressive social justice educator and do that in isolation. And so you gotta figure out so Ian uh Constance talking about professional associations got me like, I mean, it's one of the things like rethinking schools, for instance, becomes this space of a gathering of of progressive social justice educators, and so and you and you can read the magazine and go, oh, I'm I'm not alone, right? Or we have regional conferences here, and here in the Pacific Northwest, we have the Northwest Teaching for Social Justice Conference, totally run by a volunteer army of teachers, classroom teachers, and we do a conference and we have workshops and people from you know or in the in the whole re North Pacific Northwest region of the United States come together, some folks nationally, and like we share work with each other and we meet and we talk, and you kind of go, wow, I'm not like you go there and you go, okay, it's not just me, like you know, I like like I'm sane in this work, and and that's but and that's so critical for just survival and and just understanding that okay, I can learn from all these other folks other ways to like sneak this work in if I need to, or I can I can get inspired by you know um union work that's happening in this district or this just like there's there's so much you can learn and just gain from the power of other folks. And so I also just encourage um uh any any new teacher to sort of try and tap into some existing networks, do some research, figure out who's around, and go get together with with other people.

SPEAKER_02 47:47

Thank you so much, Wayne. That's such a powerful note to end on. Um, so that brings our podcast to its close. Thanks so much to both of you for your time and expertise today. It was it was it was a real honor to have you as part of the podcast. And I guess just addressing our listeners now, uh, especially the types of students who uh who asked that final question, that you might sometimes feel that the system is oppressive, and indeed it is, but as we've heard today from Wayne and Constant, there's a long history of resistance and contemporary efforts as well. Thanks to our listeners, of course, uh, we look forward to the conversation developing. Uh, and we hope that you might join us again for thinking about how to design more equitable futures in language and education more broadly. Thank you so much.