Assessment as pedagogy: inviting authenticity through relationality, vulnerability and wonder

ABSTRACT

Traditional authentic assessment tasks are frequently tied to future work and enmeshed in neoliberal and capitalist visions of education. We advocate an alternative approach where authenticity signifies meaningful learning outside the confines of the classroom to promote deep learning that ‘sticks’. We proffer an understanding of assessment as pedagogy, where pedagogy is an ontological endeavour that shapes not only what students know but how they understand themselves and their place in the world. We highlight creative assessments as a form of authentic pedagogy that eschews instrumentalism in three ways: highlighting opportunities for connection and community; reorienting students towards a more vulnerable conception of learning that is open to uncertainty; and eliciting wonder and joy via invitations to see the world anew. We argue creative assessments promote deeply authentic learning that can be transformative for students and educator-co-learners alike.

KEYWORDS:

• Creativity
• authentic assessment
• relationality
• vulnerability
• wonder

1. Introduction

Over the past few decades, authentic assessment has sought to connect learning in ‘the ivory tower’ to learning in ‘the real world’. This approach tends to privilege an instrumental orientation to pedagogy that directs students to undertake work-related tasks to better prepare them as productive workers in capitalist economies. In contrast, we understand pedagogy to be an ontological endeavour that takes the whole person into account and provides opportunities for exploration and connection with our selves, each other and our world(s). We argue that when traditionally-conceived authentic assessment is pursued at the expense of alternative forms of assessment, we offer our students an impoverished education that fails to invite them to bring their whole selves to their learning and to critically reflect on their societal and structural contexts. In response, we advocate for a fuller understanding of assessment as pedagogy, arguing that understanding pedagogy as an ontological endeavour transforms assessment from an assessment of learning to an integral component of learning itself. While traditional forms of authentic assessment are individualising and position students primarily as future workers, a more holistic understanding of assessment as pedagogy conceives of students as relational, embodied and spiritual as well as intellectual beings.

In what follows, we first explain the prevailing approach to authentic assessment in the modern university, noting the dominance of assessment tied to future work. In contrast, we argue for more holistic forms of assessment as pedagogy that challenge the neoliberal and capitalist imperatives of the modern university by explicitly embracing projects that enable students to authentically explore themselves and the world around them. In the second half of the article, we articulate three ways that creative assessments support our understanding of assessment as pedagogy. First, we explore the way they shift the focus from instrumental objectives to relational projects. Second, we show how creative projects reorient students towards a different conception of learning, one that emphasises not-knowing and vulnerability over certainty and content mastery. Third, we highlight the ways creative projects re-introduce students to the wonder and joy of learning, through inviting them to think creatively and intensively about the course material in relation to themselves rather than through pre-prescribed structures and forms. We argue that in these ways, creative assessments offer opportunities for learning that can be understood as profoundly authentic–as assessments that facilitate deep and meaningful learning outside the narrow confines of the classroom. Offering opportunities for students to embark on relational, vulnerable and sometimes-risky creative projects facilitates a more authentic and transformative relationship with knowledge.

2. Authentic assessment in the modern university

Authentic assessment can take many forms, ranging from assessment across an entire course designed according to authentic learning principles, such as ‘work-integrated-learning’ where students participate in internships or activities outside the classroom related to their courses (Henderson and Trede 2017), to smaller assessment items within existing courses. In traditional forms of authentic assessment, students may be asked to complete tasks that seek to mirror work outside academia, such as ‘injecting realism into tests’ (Villarroel et al. 2020), replicating vocational-specific tasks such as client-based projects (Pallant, Pallant, and Jopp 2022), or writing policy briefings (Mastro 2021). While authentic assessment has numerous benefits, including improved student engagement, development of critical thinking and problem solving skills (Jopp 2020), and proficiency in ‘21st-century competencies’ (Koh 2017), we are concerned that traditional authentic assessment tied to future work is intrinsically bound up in neoliberal and capitalist notions of education as a tool to develop skilled workers who add value to the economy. In centring students as future workers, this form of authentic assessment fails to recognise them as whole people with value beyond their economic contributions (Vu and Dall’Alba 2014).

With its emphasis on developing students as future workers, traditional authentic assessment mirrors the scenario in higher education more broadly. In the contemporary neoliberal university learning is still primarily focused on successful knowledge transmission from expert-knowers to passive students (Freire 1993). In this educational context, assessment functions as a way of measuring the extent to which a student has understood and critically evaluated key material from the course (Sambell, Brown, and Race 2019). Degrees are therefore increasingly understood as a ‘form of capital’ and, as a result, assessment ‘becomes a crucial technology through which students are positioned in the market and through which they are encouraged to see themselves as entrepreneurial citizens’ (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2024, 398). Traditional authentic assessment, with its focus on the development of transferable and marketable skills that prepare students for the workforce, valorises and intensifies this instrumental model of education, focusing on what students can do with their education rather than seeing it as an endeavour that shapes who we are as human beings.

As well as promoting an instrumental vision of education, traditional authentic assessment risks ignoring the ways in which learning is a deeply affective and embodied experience, engaging ‘both social and cognitive, emotional and rational, material and discursive’ practices (Zembylas 2022, 2). Despite prominent critiques of the information transmission model of education, much pedagogy in higher education remains premised on the Cartesian mind/body split, which sees knowledge as ‘unsullied by human passions, feelings, and emotions; that is, by the presence of the body’ (Shapiro 1999, 138). Authentic assessments, intended to prepare students for ‘the real world’, often uphold the mind/body split in asking students to think about the knowledge that they are encountering as ‘out there’ – information to be processed, critiqued, and packaged in ways that will be valuable to future employers. Developments in neuroscience research, however, show this understanding of knowledge as centred in the mind to be fundamentally flawed, with affect and bodily experiences shaping how we process the world around us (Amin and Thrift 2013, 158). As Armin Geertz notes: ‘The brain is not an isolated organ. It is embodied in a body through an intricate nervous system, divided into a number of subsystems, which it more or less controls … These systems allow bodily states to be influenced by both internal and external stimuli’ (2013, 306). Human cognition researchers show that ‘even the most complex thoughts are sense-based and not abstract-symbolic’ (Kiefer and Trumpp 2012) and that our thoughts are embrained, meaning we cannot separate social and cultural phenomena from the experiences of our brains (Kim 2023, 181). As such, we argue that we should be encouraging students to understand the ways affect, emotions and bodies mediate and construct our relationship with knowledge.

Other forms of authentic assessment are less wedded to notions of students as future workers, though the extent to which they reject capitalist framing varies. Burton, for example, critiques authentic assessment that is modelled on the contemporary workplace because ‘this may not be relevant in the future’ and instead presents an authentic assessment framework that seeks to be ‘fluid’ in order ‘to prepare students for lifelong learning’ (2011, 20). Yet the motivating concern for this work appears to be that authentic assessment may not, in fact, prepare students for future work, because it is too tightly tied to specific tasks or activities that may not be relevant as work environments change. The central logic of the task therefore remains unchanged – that authentic assessment is valuable for students in their future vocation – despite the apparent ‘softening of the disciplinary power’ (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2024, 398) in this framework. Similarly, Sambell, Brown, and Race (2019) outline the ways in which theorists of authentic assessment have offered alternatives to those that focus on ‘workplace scenarios’, identifying ‘productive assessment regimes’ that relate to subjects not closely related to vocational work. They draw attention to Davidson’s work, which identifies students’ views on authenticity relative to ‘the subject or discipline … to the real world … to personal interests … [or] authentic in process’ (Davidson, quoted in Sambell, Brown, and Race 2019, 54), but even this more expansive version of ‘authenticity’ still adheres to a logic ‘which individualises, regulates and hierarchises’ (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2024, 398) in its focus on applied knowledge and developing student expertise.

We recognise that highlighting the intrinsic value of education as important in developing our critical consciousness as individuals and communities can be considered a privilege – for many students, education promises a better future for themselves, their families and their communities. That promise often comes at a high cost – in tuition fees, living costs, time, resources, and lost earnings – and the turn towards authentic assessment seeks, in part, to show students that a university education is worth the cost: they will exit their degree with ‘work-ready’ skills that make them attractive to future employers. Our critique of traditional authentic assessment does not intend to suggest that this approach has no value at all, especially for students who cannot afford to treat a university education as a luxury. Instead, we seek to highlight what is lost if traditional authentic assessment is pursued at the expense of alternative forms of assessment, especially those that enable important critiques of dominating and unequal structures. In a context where universities are shaped by neoliberal and capitalist imperatives, we notice the increasing prioritisation of assessment that creates compliant capitalist workers, often at the expense of assessment that champions critical and creative thinkers.

3. Creative projects in/against the modern university

Our challenge to traditional formulations of authentic assessment relates to our broader critique of pedagogy and assessment as individualised and focused primarily on the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Instead, we argue for an understanding of assessment as pedagogy in which we foreground an understanding of pedagogy as ontological (Timperley and Schick 2022). As we have written elsewhere, we understand pedagogy to be an ontological endeavour that shapes not only what students know, but affects their very being – how they understand themselves and their place in the world (Schick and Timperley 2022). This much more holistic approach recognises that ‘all pedagogies are necessarily embodied, relational, and performative’ (Schick and Timperley 2022, 3) and seeks to craft students’ learning experiences with this in mind. Understood in this way, learning and teaching becomes more expansive and encompasses alternative ways of knowing beyond the traditional acquisition of already-existing knowledge excavated from written texts. As well as engaging with texts, we encourage students to engage with one another, with their communities, with objects and with stories/lived experience. We attend not only to what we teach, but also to who, where, and how we teach, acknowledging our diverse student communities, the land on which we teach, and the inextricable intertwining of mind, body and spirit.

As part of an ontological approach to teaching and learning, we recognise the integrated nature of all that we do as course instructors and learners, from course design to classroom dynamics to assessment. Assessment, we argue, should be concerned with what makes us human, and uplift those dimensions of our beings that we seek to cultivate as humans, in particular our curiosity, joy, and relationships with others. Rather than focusing primarily on demonstrating the acquisition of knowledge or skills via summative or formative assessment processes, we advocate creating space for students ‘to embody and affectively experience knowledge’ (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2024, 399) via innovative practices such as creative assessments, which we discuss below. Bringing an ontological pedagogy lens to assessment means ensuring that students can bring their whole selves to their assessments; assessments, in this way, become pedagogical–offering the opportunity for deep, authentic learning via the assessment process. As Tony Harland (2016, 185) notes, authentic learning takes place where ‘the student learns the deep knowledge structures of the subject and feels part of it, rather than learning the facts and theories and feeling external to it. Authentic learners have a different relationship with knowledge’. Rather than being oriented towards particular outcomes, such as work-readiness, transferable skills, or knowledge recall, ontological pedagogy is oriented towards the student and their deeper engagement with learning.

We apply our theory of assessment as pedagogy across all of our courses, including a large first-year introductory course in Aotearoa New Zealand politics with approximately 300 students, two large upper-level undergraduate feminist and critical theory courses of between 80–120 students, and three postgraduate courses in peace and conflict studies, feminist theory and Aotearoa New Zealand politics ranging from 20–40 students. Across these course levels, sizes, and subject matter, our ontological approach to pedagogy is reflected in our assessment options. We design assessment with the aim of encouraging students to bring their life experiences and expertise into the classroom and to applying their learning from the course in their own lives. We encourage them to challenge existing hierarchies, including the traditional power dynamics in the classroom as well as conventional views within the discipline (in our case, Political Science and International Relations) about what ‘counts’ as knowledge or learning. Our assessment options seek to facilitate student’s creativity and autonomy over their learning, including in challenging disciplinary norms and expectations. While the power dynamics in the classroom and in assessing students’ work cannot be entirely erased, through challenging assessment criteria as ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’, we encourage students to view assessment as intrinsically valuable to their learning, rather than a measure of their learning. Students are invited to relate differently to knowledge and knowing–rather than consuming or reproducing knowledge that sits at some distance from their self and their world(s), we encourage students to bring their classroom learning in conversation with their life and communities.

In our approach to assessment as pedagogy, one of the options we give students is to undertake creative projects in lieu of traditional essays. Students are invited to express their learning via creative projects and accompanying critical reflections, allowing them to bring more of themselves and their (shifting) identities in dialogue with the course material. The form of these creative projects is not pre-prescribed; students are welcome to make a case for a wide variety of media to express their learning including, for example, visual arts (paintings, carving, traditional Indigenous artworks, textile arts, photo essays), aural arts (musical compositions, Indigenous mōteatea or traditional chants, spoken word poetry), creative writing (poetry, plays, short stories) and interactive interventions (immersive art experiences, pick-a-path video games, Instagram stories, street art). They are also encouraged to work together in developing their creative projects, rather than in isolation, further reinforcing the idea that learning happens in community. Students write a critical reflection that they submit alongside the creative project, in which they explicitly draw out the relationship between their project and their learning during the course. In the final weeks of the course, students are given the option of sharing their creative projects with the class, allowing for collective conversations around the process of developing their ideas and the themes of the course that they engaged with.

Creative assessment supports students in an endeavour to more intentionally experience knowledge, encouraging them to think not only about learning as content-driven (i.e. life of the mind), but also about how they access, process, and evaluate the material they encounter. Through creative assessment, we explicitly invite students to recognise that ‘our brains are intimately shaped by the bodies they inhabit, and vice versa’ (Timperley 2021, 111), thus deepening their critical engagement with the course material. Yet, as Sambell et al. note, ‘it is also important to remain mindful of the massive impact that summative assessment tasks can have on students’ approaches to learning’ (2019, 51). While we encourage students to challenge disciplinary norms and expectations in their work, we note the tension in being required to assign a grade for their final project: as experts in our respective fields, we are applying our disciplinary knowledge (shaped via decades of institutionalised learning) in assessing their efforts. We seek to manage these tensions by building relationships and trust with and among students across the course, deprioritising marks in favour of written comments (and in some cases, where possible, engaging in ungrading (Kohn and Blum 2020)), and encouraging intentional student reflection and dialogue.

In choosing to offer creative alternatives to traditional assessments, we make ourselves vulnerable as educators: it takes courage to try new pedagogical innovations and to step back from the position of ‘expert knower’. In doing so, however, we ‘go beyond the metrics and the employability market’ and seek instead ‘to engage students in deep transformative learning processes for a future that is uncertain and unknowable’ (Mangione and Norton 2023, 384). In particular, we focus on the ways that open-ended assessment avoids the pitfalls of traditional authentic assessment, by centring students and their experiences rather than valuing and evaluating them primarily as future workers. Open-ended creative assessments also move away from the individualisation of knowers, whereby knowledge is ‘measured’ as something that ‘individual students [possess]’, and instead re-values communal and embodied forms of knowledge (Nieminen and Lahdenperä 2021, 13). In the remainder of the article, we explore three ways that creative assessments exemplify assessment as pedagogy, focusing on how they encourage relationality, validate learning as uncertain and vulnerable, and foster wonder and joy in learning.

3.1. Relationality

In the contemporary neoliberal university, modes of education remain largely underpinned by a focus on knowledge transmission. In this mode, students are treated as ‘empty vessels’ (Freire 1993) ready to receive knowledge from instructors. Assessment thus becomes a test of how well a student has understood and interpreted the knowledge they have been exposed to. Such assessment tends to take the form of essays, tests and reading summaries, all of which enable an instructor to consider the extent to which knowledge transfer has successfully occurred. Traditional authentic assessment extends this model by looking beyond the successful transfer of knowledge to its application in a real world setting. This focus on transferable knowledge and skills often casts learning in instrumental terms: a key objective of education is to create productive workers with the right knowledge and skillset to contribute to the workplace. While these goals are not necessarily at odds with seeing intrinsic value in learning – it is possible to both value skills and knowledge for future work and to experience joy in learning – a focus on work-ready skills and authentic assessment has a tendency to displace learning as a joy-filled and relational endeavour that is in an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

Instead, we argue that learning is a deeply relational and human endeavour–one that should consider our students’ whole selves (Timperley 2021, 109)–rather than a narrower focus on acquisition of knowledge and skills. Understanding learning as embedded in social relations underpins our everyday classroom practices (Schick 2020; 2021) in which we ‘normalis[e] the collaborative’ as commonplace (Boud and Bearman 2024, 8). In our assessment practices, we seek to shift the focus of learning from instrumental objectives to relational projects that recognise students as multifaceted and complex people, who bring a range of prior experiences and expertise to our collective questioning of our subjects and the world. We are inspired by pedagogies of care and reflexivity that highlight learning as relational and context-dependent (hooks 2003; Krystalli 2023; Inayatullah 2022; Motta and Bennett 2018; Schick 2020). In our context of Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, we encourage students undertaking creative projects to consider their relationship with tangata whenua (people of the land/Indigenous communities) as well as the land itself (Byrd 2011, 117; Simpson 2014, 7; Timperley 2021, 114).

Creative assessments allow students to bring their whole selves to their projects in a much more tangible way than do conventional essay projects. There is often a relational dimension to these projects, with many of our students using their creative project as a way of exploring who they are in relation to the aspect of the course they are engaging with and bringing their identities into dialogue with course content. For some students, this results in deep engagement with their wider whānau/families and friends: for example, in learning traditional Pacific crafts from relations; in researching the confiscation of their tribal land by colonisation and composing a mōteatea (chant) in response; and in the deep conversations they have with friends and flatmates as they discuss their projects at the dinner table. For others, this project enables reflexive thinking about how the material relates to their own experiences growing up and their understanding of self: these have included intimate reflections via poetry, painting, or short stories; writing and performing waiata (Māori songs/music); crafting, carving or embroidery projects. In all these examples, assessment becomes a ‘more lively affair by enfolding it into the things that matter to students’ and in so doing ‘takes better care of their developing subjectivities as learners’ (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2024, 399).

Challenging the conventional individual focus of neoliberal education, creative assessments also invite students to consider their learning in relation to others, and often these involve creating or exploring relationships with community members: such projects have included creating street art; conversations with private or public figures; curating social media feeds; visual or interactive provocations within the university setting. While traditional authentic assessment may encourage collaboration on the basis of it being a key skill needed in most workplaces, in creative assessment collaboration has a different accent. Creative projects invite critical reflexivity on a student’s relationship with their learning and with others, and in particular a consideration of audience: who is the project for, and what are its aims? Many students undertake creative projects with the hope of engaging community members in their learning, often framing their contributions as civic and/or democratic interventions. As Motta and Bennett (2018, 636) note, this ‘attentiveness to collaboration, collectivity, and critical reflexivity…  is centred as part of the conditions of possibility for the emergence and nurturance of democratising educational praxis. The pedagogical space thus extends outside of the classroom, and into the creation of the infrastructure of possibility of democratising, caring and care-ful multi-dimensional work’. Collaboration is thus not simply a means to an end – a skill that allows for successful completion of hypothetical projects in the workplace – but an opportunity for encounter (Inayatullah 2022), opening up possibilities for democratic engagement and education.

Alongside being deeply relational projects, promoting community that extends beyond the classroom, creative assessments can be better suited to neurodivergent students. Offering an alternative to the traditional essay form is an ‘access move’ (Straumsheim 2017) and ‘vehicle for radical inclusion’ (Nieminen 2022, 2) that demonstrates attunement to difference and care of students who prefer to communicate their learning in creative form. Moving away from relying primarily on text-intensive assessments can be an ‘act of care’ (Jenks 2022, 144, 155) that creates a more inclusive learning environment for students whose learning is more comfortably expressed in non-traditional formats for a variety of reasons, including neurodiversity, learning disabilities and cultural context. In doing so, we communicate to our neurodivergent students that access goes beyond the minimal individualistic ‘reasonable accommodation’ that is the hallmark of most disability services on campus. By intentionally integrating access moves into course design – including assessment design – we demonstrate care for the diverse range of students in our classes, including those whom traditional forms of learning and assessment often exclude.

3.2. Uncertainty and vulnerability

Another aspect of creative assessments that supports our ontological pedagogical practice is the way that they foster an openness to uncertainty or ‘not knowing’. The assessment structure gives students agency to decide not only what they focus on but also how they express their learning – an open-ended invitation that invites exploration and an emphasis on process rather than outcome.

In offering open-ended assessment practices that invite and welcome alternative approaches to knowledge creation, we invite students to bring their whole selves to the exercise and to eschew the imperative to know and argue with certainty that is centred in much of the academy. Instead, we seek to cultivate an attitude to knowledge that is willing to ‘tarry with uncertainty’ (Schick 2018, 94) and to explore what it might mean to situate ourselves more firmly in our work. In their meditations on ‘making friends with uncertainty’, Roxani Krystalli, Shambhawi Tripathi and Katharina Hunfield (2023, 253) refuse the assumption that uncertainty is something to be avoided or contained, instead reframing it ‘as a research ethos and epistemological practice that can shape knowledge, knowledge-making practices, and the knowledge creators themselves’. They speak of the hope they find in explicitly welcoming uncertainty into the classroom, saying that embracing uncertainty opens up ‘the possibility of a gentler, more generative community of thought, with more humble relations to the creation of knowledge, and more possibility for whole selves to feel they can belong as students, scholars, teachers, and subjects of world politics’ (Krystalli, Tripathi, and Hunfeld 2023, 263). Inviting students to reflect on their learning via creative media encourages them to bring themselves to their projects and to make friends with uncertainty in the context of community, deepening their sense of belonging as they learn with, from and alongside other students as well as family, friends, and mentors.

Although many students welcome the opportunity to learn differently, they sometimes express a sense of trepidation at choosing the creative option because of the risk they perceive in taking on a project with so much unknown and unspecified at the outset. This perception of risk is twinned with excitement and both speak to the element of surprise that attends a pedagogy marked by vulnerability and uncertainty (Schick 2021). Krystalli and colleagues talk about one practice of welcoming uncertainty in the classroom in which they invite students to reflect on what surprised them. This practice, which unsettles the norm of speaking via settled or rehearsed arguments, opens space for ‘multiple truths to coexist, for contradictory feelings and reactions to the readings and themes of world politics, and for more expansive relationships to uncertainty’ (Krystalli, Tripathi, and Hunfeld 2023, 263). Working with discomfort can also ‘result in re-narrativisations of self, other and society, as well as foster new relationalities and possibilities’ (Motta and Bennett 2018, 636). For most students, this is the first time they have had the opportunity to work on a creative project in political theory classes and combining creative expression with critical reflection is a novel and unfamiliar format. Inviting students on a journey of exploration through these projects ‘complicates [their] relation with knowledge: learning becomes a more intimate and relational affair’ (Schick 2021, 93) as they quite explicitly bring their selves into dialogue with the ideas they are encountering on the course. In doing so, they move away from the production of knowledge that sits at some remove from the self and from one’s communities and instead move towards knowledge cultivation, which is ‘a necessarily creative pursuit’; the student can choose to ‘[enfold] her/himself in the communal matter of her/his enquiry’ (Shilliam 2015, 25) via their creative engagement with course content in the context of community.

The decision to opt into creative assessments in lieu of conventional assessments is not only risky and unknown for students; offering alternative assessment options is also risky for educators. In inviting students to undertake creative assessments, we make ourselves additionally vulnerable – not only are we not directing what students choose to explore in their research projects, we are now no longer directing how students present their learning for assessment. In doing so, we cede control in a way that can feel uncomfortable; the vulnerability it asks of us as educators goes against the teacher-centred pedagogy that dominates the academy. Brantmeier argues that the shift away from modes of teaching that prioritise knowledge transmission over deeper learning and engagement requires significant unlearning that ‘challenges the traditional authoritative, dominant and subordinate role sets in schooling environments and the unequal power relationships in wider spheres of our world – including economic structures’ (2013, 97). Building on Brantmeier’s (2013) ‘pedagogy of vulnerability’, Daniela Mangione and Lin Norton (2023, 383) argue that ‘daring to be vulnerable’ involves having the courage to try pedagogical innovations that are different and risky and being willing to accept potential push-back from students and colleagues. The courage required of educators and students in taking on the challenge of alternative assessment modalities is akin to the courage required to engage in vulnerable conversations in ‘brave spaces’ on campus – accepting that there is no way of eliminating risk and being willing to embrace the potential discomfort and difficulty of stepping outside the usual comfortable assessment formats (Arao and Clemens 2023).

In embracing a pedagogy of vulnerability, we engage in a ‘lived curriculum’ (Brantmeier 2013, 97), which recognises the ways our lives and past experiences shape how and what we learn. As educators, we draw on our own lives to discuss course material, modelling vulnerability by bringing our whole selves to the class (Timperley 2024, 34). For example, when discussing Marx and alienation, we discuss our lived experiences of work in those terms, offering reflections on our varied experiences including often hidden dimensions of academia. By offering creative assessments, we invite students to draw explicitly on the lived curriculum, bringing their personal experiences, histories, cultures, and interests into dialogue with the content of our courses. In this way, our experience as educators and co-learners is deepened and enriched as students allow us to journey some of the way with them via their creative projects and self-reflections. Taking pedagogical risks that invite uncertainty also lays the groundwork for deep learning, which Brantmeier characterises as ‘learning that sticks’, learning that endures beyond the course and its assessments and that can be ‘applied to contexts where the stakes are high and the problems are messy’ (2013, 96). We argue that taking pedagogical risks such as offering creative assessment alternatives facilitates deep learning that sticks, as students apply their learning to lived contexts outside the formal curriculum.

Inviting vulnerability and uncertainty posits risks for both students and educators, including opening up conversations for which students or educators are unprepared, grappling with challenging ethical tensions, and making visible the complexities of the human experience in our learning spaces. All educators face these challenges, whether or not they explicitly invite vulnerable conversations, but intentionally acknowledging the messy and complex human condition means we are more likely to encounter them. We argue that despite valid concerns about the deliberate introduction of vulnerability into the classroom and assessment, holding vulnerability at bay is potentially as harmful as not inviting it in. In recognising our complex lives, relations and world(s), we embrace our humanity and create space for students to be authentic in their engagement with us and our teaching.

There are also risks that students pretend to be authentic in their creative assessment, seeking to please their instructor by offering up personal narratives that they think will earn them high esteem or good grades (Maloney et al. 2013; Birden and Usherwood 2013). Simultaneously, as instructors we may be poorly equipped to recognise authentic accounts, especially from students with different life experiences to us – as Ajjawi et al. note ‘“authenticity” is in the eye of the beholder’ (2023, 4). We also recognise that not all students have the desire, interest or capacity to undertake creative projects for a variety of reasons. In acknowledgement of students’ differing orientations to alternative assessments, in our courses creative projects are optional, rather than required. The accompanying critical reflections are also open-ended in format rather than formally prescribed. As Birden and Usherwood (2013, 409) note, ‘over-formalised requirements’ can result in students writing inauthentic reflections designed to get particular grades rather than authentic reflections on their learning. Although it is potentially possible that students might ‘game the system’ (Birden and Usherwood 2013, 406), the likelihood of this is radically reduced not only by giving students space for authentic engagement on their own terms (Higgins et al. 2019) but also by embedding the assessments in a classroom context where reflection is an integral part of each class and collaborative learning is normalised. Because relational, reflective and embodied engagement are everyday and unremarkable, undertaking a creative project and accompanying critical reflection is less ‘risky’ than it otherwise might appear.

3.3. Wonder and joy

Moving away from a model of education as mastery and towards a more uncertain and relational vision of learning invites exploration – and accompanying wonder and joy – as students cultivate knowledge alongside one another. By inviting students to wonder – ‘to be awed, excited, and inspired by ideas’ (hooks 2009, 188) – we invite an opening up of new connections and possibilities as we ‘learn-teach-learn’ (Ramos and Roberts 2021, 35). Creative assessments naturally elicit wonder, as students are able to direct their own learning and explore ideas that hold meaning to them in relation to the course themes and materials. Being able to decide what medium and form to present their learning also enables students to draw on their individual talents and connect their learning to other aspects of their lives, which opens up possibilities for wonder as they encounter what is familiar through potentially unfamiliar lenses.

The act of wondering at the world is central to liberatory education. Wonder involves looking anew at the world, marvelling at its beauty or the ways in which its taken-for-granted properties are contingent and have been developed over time by particular actors, structures and historical processes. Sara Ahmed describes wonder as ‘learning to see the world as something that does not have to be, and as something that came to be, over time, and with work’ (Ahmed 2014, 180). Wonder can be ‘a sense of surprise’ at how the world is (Ahmed 2003, 250), it can open up ‘space for something new to emerge’ (Ramos and Roberts 2021, 35), and it encourages grappling with uncertainty through its challenge to ‘fully know’ (Ramos and Roberts 2021, 36). Iris Marion Young further suggests that wonder contains a logic of non-domination, as it ‘does not try to seize, possess, or reduce this object, but leaves it subjective, still free’ (Luce Irigaray, quoted in Young 1997, 357).

Wonder is also deeply relational. In wondering at the world, we consider ourselves in relation to what we know – or thought we knew – and we position ourselves in relation to others as part of this wondering. Ahmed emphasises wonder as ‘an affective opening up of the world … not as a private act, but as an opening up of what is possible through working together’ (Ahmed 2014, 181). She argues that wonder ‘opens up a collective space’ through which the world becomes ‘see-able or feel-able’ (Ahmed 2014, 183), challenging the taken-for-granted contours of the world. In the context of learning, wonder is experienced in relation to others and our material, spiritual and social context: it stirs reflection on the ways things have come to be, revealing the world as structured by particular processes, actors and events. This revelation has the potential to be transformational, as through revealing the world-as-different, individuals might reconsider their relationship to each other and the assumptions on which their engagement with the world is based. Ramos and Roberts also stress wonder’s ‘non-dichotomous relational logic’ that works through ‘a non-appropriative relationality making space for the new’ (2021, 35), highlighting its disposition of non-domination: to truly wonder at the world requires openness towards others and oneself, which Young suggests results in a new and increased understanding across difference (1997, 358).

Young cautions, however, that while wonder can have an ethos of non-domination, this disposition is not integral to it. She points to the possibility of wonder translating into ‘a kind of distant awe before the Other’ or becoming ‘a kind of prurient curiosity’ (Young 1997, 357). In such cases, wonder becomes ‘a dominative desire to know and master the other person’ (Young 1997, 357), rather than an openness to coming to know oneself and others across difference. Bonnie Mann also questions the tendency of theorists to see wonder as an unambiguous good, pointing out that Irigaray’s concept of wonder relies on a promise of happiness that fails to acknowledge the ways in which wonder can be linked to negative feelings like pain, anger or rage (Mann 2018, 54). These two challenges to wonder’s positive valence are especially relevant in the context of learning, where wonder can result in exoticising tendencies, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, where humans are the subject of study. In wondering at the world and different cultures, students and teachers may unreflexively reify harmful stereotypes or tropes. Similarly, the assumption that wonder results in feelings of happiness overlooks the possibility that wonder might, instead, provoke anger, pain or rage. In finding the world not-as-expected, students might respond in negative ways, feeling unsettled or even threatened by new ways of seeing or experiencing the world. Cultivating a pedagogy that embraces wonder, therefore, requires sensitivity to these possible negative effects.

Yet the key features of wonder as surprising, transformational, liberatory, and potentially unsettling make it a rich inspiration and resource for our pedagogy and approach to assessment, which we understand as an ontological endeavour. In the classroom, wonder can take the form of small moments of attentiveness – those ‘ah-ha’ moments of connection or understanding – as well as broader shifts in comprehension–those perspective-altering ideas or engagements that fundamentally change how we make sense of the world. Some of the most powerful moments of wonder can happen in community: for example, those magical moments in class where students collectively and deeply grapple with an idea, holding it up to the light and exploring its various facets – sometimes lighting up unexpected sides, on rare occasions shattering an idea with the force of their scrutiny. Yet wonder can also emerge for individual students or teachers in private moments, through careful reading, thinking and working through experiences and ideas. For example, we regularly encounter students who delight in writing research essays, finding the process fulfilling, life-enhancing and wonder-ful – though we notice that essays tend to remain individual and intellectual endeavours, rather than relational or vulnerable ones.

Through inviting students to work on creative projects as an alternative to traditional essays, we seek to create opportunities for students to feel a sense of wonder as they learn. Creative projects prompt students to engage with course material differently than more traditional research essays or assessments. From conception through to completion, there are multiple moments in the development of a creative project in which students might encounter wonder. In thinking expansively about how to express what they have learned in class through creative means, students are naturally positioned to think originally about the material they have encountered and how to make meaning from, with and through it. At the same time, creative projects also seek to expand students’ understanding of what education is – not just as an instrumental expression of what they have learned in exchange for a grade, but as a life-giving and joyful expression of their learning. Creative projects seek to engender wonder through ‘transform[ing] the ordinary, which is already recognised, into the extraordinary’ (Ahmed 2014, 179). Through refusing to ‘allow the taken-for-granted to be granted’ (Ahmed 2014, 182), creative projects encourage students to look at and communicate about the world in different ways, grappling with structures and expectations that are constructed despite appearing as natural.

As explored above, creative projects also invite students to tarry with uncertainty – both through the unknown-ness of the form of the assessment (many students choose to write a research essay instead of a creative project because they ‘know how to do it’ and are more confident in their success) and through the activities of developing and enacting the project itself. In accepting uncertainty and embracing ‘the impossibility to “fully know”’ (Ramos and Roberts 2021, 36), students pursuing creative projects open themselves up to the possibility of wonder. In their reflections, students often report having one or multiple ‘ah-ha’ moments, where they saw the world differently as a result of their project. While more traditional authentic assessments such as work placements, writing policy briefings, or tests that more closely mimic so-called ‘real-world’ conditions might have the potential to generate wonder, we suggest that creative projects are more likely to do so, given their basic premise is a challenge to pre-prescribed forms and expectations. In their creative project plan and final reflection we ask students to justify and explain why they chose their particular project/medium to express their learning, which encourages them to think about the distinctions between their project and more traditional forms of assessment. This critical reflection orients them away from disciplinary assumptions about the way the world works and what counts as knowledge, research or learning, encouraging them to ‘see the surfaces of the world as made’ (Ahmed 2014, 179) and leading them to disposition of ‘enlarged thought’ (Young 1997, 358).

4. Conclusion

Both the development and creation of creative projects tends to encourage a change in students’ perspectives that leads to ‘something more creative, something that responds to the world with joy and care’ (Ahmed 2014, 179). Students often report feeling excited and grateful for the opportunity to explore ideas in ways that feel authentic for them and, often, their communities via the creative assessment option. In choosing the creative option, students sometimes quite explicitly move away from an instrumental relationship with their project. Some remark in their critical reflections that they do not care what grade they are allocated; the process has been so meaningful and joyful and they feel such a sense of pride in what they have accomplished that the grade itself is tangential.

In our conceptualisation of assessment as pedagogy, we suggest that assessment is an integral aspect of teaching practice. All too often assessment is seen as an afterthought in course design, where it serves the primary purpose of reinforcing or measuring a student’s learning. Traditional authentic assessment approaches exemplifies this narrow remit by positioning students as productive future workers rather than as whole persons with dreams, experiences and relationships that cannot – and should not – be reduced to their economic value. We advocate for creative assessment as an important counter to these trends in higher education that individualise and instrumentalise knowledge. Assessment as pedagogy advances an ontological approach to pedagogy that serves as an antidote to instrumental approaches, enabling truly authentic engagement with course material that facilitates deep learning that ‘sticks’. In its attentiveness to relationality and community, its embrace of uncertainty and vulnerability, and its emphatic commitment to a vision of education as a wonder- and joy-filled endeavour, creative assessment has the potential to be transformative for students and teachers alike.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).