Education as a mode of existence: A Latourian inquiry into assessment validity in higher education

Abstract

Within professional higher education, the construct of assessment validity is used to make assumptions about the extent to which students are able to replicate in professional practice what they have learned during their studies through the provision of authentic simulated opportunities to practice. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, this article argues that the conceptualisation as well as use of the idea of assessment validity in theorising the assessment of simulation-based learning in professional courses, in order to predict the future performance of the student constitutes a category mistake that consequently makes claims for assessment validity which are unfounded. The article goes on to explore ways by which ethnographers of education might use other elements of Latour’s work in order to generate rich, problematising accounts of educational practice.

Keywords:

• Actor-network theory
• ethnography
• higher education
• Latour
• modes of existence

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Oakleigh Welply and Rille Raaper, fine researchers and colleagues, for their helpful advice during the thinking about, writing, and revising of this paper. I would also like to thank my medical education research colleagues: Rola Ajjawi, Paula Cameron, Olga Kits, and Anna MacLeod.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Tummons

Jonathan Tummons is Associate Professor of Education at Durham University, UK. He is an ethnographer of education and sits on the committee for the Oxford Ethnography and Education Conference. As well as his inquiry into using Latour, Jonathan is currently researching the ways in which people and technologies work together in distributed medical education programmes.