Authentic assessment as relational pedagogy

ABSTRACT

This article troubles a pervasive concept within higher education studies: authentic assessment. Authentic assessment is well-established within higher education, and yet its common usage leaves it limited in possibility. Often understood as a practice focused on tasks, where assessments represent a ‘reality’ beyond universities, authentic assessment praxis has missed engaging with wider literature exploring authenticity as an emergent quality connected with being and becoming. In this article, I first consider the utility of concepts in education, and then spotlight a change in how authentic assessment is being understood. I then move to explore how relational pedagogies might offer further insights into how assessment can be conceptualised and enacted, sketching shapes for thinking differently about authenticity in assessment. Extending the exciting conversation that is redirecting praxis, I argue that thinking with theory can help us think and enact assessment in a more meaningful mode, where assessment becomes a relational, ethical, act.

KEYWORDS:

• Authenticity
• assessment
• relationality
• relational pedagogies
• higher education

Introduction

This article troubles the widely used concept of authentic assessment in higher education and continues and extends the exciting work that seeks to explore how it might be engaged differently. Often understood as a practice focused on tasks, where assessments mimic a ‘reality’ supposedly external to universities, the work on authentic assessment has to date missed opportunities to make connections with more expansive theorisations of authenticity, or to the ontological dimensions of learning as an emergent practice, as opposed to the cognitive acquisition of knowledge or skills. This picture is changing. As a result, this article will contribute to and expand an emerging conversation that seeks to think with theory in order to understand authentic assessment anew, for example drawing on the value of ideas from philosophy and critical theory (Ajjawi et al. 2024; McArthur 2023; Vu and Dall’Alba 2014; Vallis 2024). Building on this work, I will argue that engaging ideas from research that has begun to articulate and explore the value of relational pedagogies can also be generative for our thinking differently about assessment.

After elaborating what authentic assessment as relational pedagogy might mean, I detail how educators might enact relational approaches with respect to assessment practices. I suggest that authentic assessment as relational pedagogy involves asking questions: how does our assessment strategy develop relational connections, and encourage a shift away from a focus on individualised agency? What is the role of trust, dialogue, and care within assessment processes and practices? What freedom do we enable for diverse learners to approach their learning in different ways? Interpreted in this vein, authentic assessment also creates openings for further questions, highlighting that assessment is a human intervention, underscored by power relations. I close by suggesting that more relational and ethically affirmative assessment practices, that understand assessment ontologically as affective, embodied and relational practices, hold the promise of giving students greater agency in their educational experiences. This article will conclude that, despite its slipperiness, authentic assessment is still a valuable concept for educators − but one that deserves disruption.

Thinking with theory: what do concepts do?

Theory has power. Theory offers us alternative ways to see the world and opens ‘new possibilities for thinking and doing’ (Maclure 2010, 277). In education, this is particularly important, as dynamic and ‘supercomplex’ (Barnett 2000) contexts mean that it is imperative that educators continue to question and engage thoughtfully with changing learning and teaching landscapes. As educators, theory helps us to look again at what we might otherwise take-for-granted. Elizabeth Adams St Pierre explains that one of the things that happen when you read theory − and especially when you study ontology − is that our thinking changes: ‘the old words don’t work anymore’ (see St Pierre’s interview with Guttorm et al 2015, 15). For St Pierre, this is particularly the case in science, where so many words and ideas are grounded in epistemology ‘with hardly a nod to ontology’ (2015, 15). At the same time, educators are often busy practitioners who may (understandably) become reliant on entrenched assumptions, and who may feel that they do not have time to read, question and critique. And yet, concepts matter. Ideas shape our thinking and our world; they have power to continue and uphold the status quo, or to help us to change direction. As Brian Massumi explains: ‘a concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window’ (1987, xi). In higher education, we must take time to re-evaluate how concepts are understood, how they are used, and what common concepts in education actually do.

This article examines whether the concept of authentic assessment relies on ‘old words’ that no longer work to help educators think critically about assessment practices, and whether these words need to be re-understood. It suggests that authentic assessment is in danger of becoming one of the many ‘encrustations of buzzwords’ that too often permeate education discourses and constrain thinking (Maclure 2010, 278). At the same time, the spirit of my article is not meant to be pessimistic. Neither is it meant to minimize the previous rich and valuable scholarship in the field, for example the many helpful exemplars and assessment design ideas that educators have usefully shared. On the contrary, taking inspiration from Mieke Bal (2009, 17), I suggest that concepts are ‘dynamic in themselves … While groping to define, provisionally and partly, what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what it can do.’ Moreover, Bal argues that it is in the ‘groping that the valuable work lies’ (Bal 2009, 17). Bal continues to explain that:

concepts are not fixed. They travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods and between geographically dispersed academic communities. All of these forms of travel render concepts flexible. It is this changeability that becomes part of their usefulness (2009, 13).

Concepts then are transient. And it is this potential for change that offers utility, and spaces for regeneration. I now turn to begin to explore the ways in which authentic assessment, as a well-worn concept in higher education, is changing, and to suggest further openings to think with this mobile idea.

Authentic assessment as a concept in higher education

In their work exploring the value of concepts, Bal also reminds us that this search for a shared and useful meaning of concepts is a collective endeavour (Bal 2009). It could certainly be argued that a collective change is afoot in discourses around assessment within higher education studies. Authentic assessment is experiencing a resurgence in contemporary discussions within higher education scholarship and practice. This idea has long been suggested as a helpful approach, and as a key characteristic of assessment design which promotes learning. However, today it is being presented (hyperbolically) as a potential solution to some of the most pressing challenges in higher education: ‘the rise of artificial intelligence, threats to academic integrity and a need for greater student equity’ (Ajjawi et al. 2024, 1), as well as a possible solution to the sector’s assessment problems (Ajjawi et al. 2024).

Authentic assessment is commonly understood as ‘assessment linked to real-world tasks, the world of work, or authentic knowledge’ (McArthur 2023, 86). The authentic assessment aims to replicate the tasks and performance standards typically found in the world of work as a means to prepare students for employment (Ashford-Rowe, Herrington, and Brown 2014), and it aims to enable students to deal with significant challenges through problem solving, and to develop key skills and competencies (Chabeli, Nolte, and Ndawo 2021). Underpinning these conceptualisations is the assumption that authentically designed assessment tasks serve to mimic a supposedly ‘real’ world situated beyond universities (Murphy et al 2017), requiring students to ‘use the same competencies, or combinations of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, that they need to apply in the criterion situation in professional life’ (Gulikers et al. 2004, 69).

However, a contemporary refocusing on authentic assessment has also been accompanied by an increasing awareness of – and dissatisfaction with – the limitations of how the concept has been understood (Arnold and Croxford 2024). Literature exploring the topic of authentic assessment in higher education is currently redirecting the conversation regarding how we might make connections between assessment and authenticity in more nuanced and meaningful ways (see for example Vu and Dall’Alba 2014; Forsyth and Evans 2019; McArthur 2023; Ajjawi et al 2024; Vallis 2024). These discussions accompany a parallel dissatisfaction with the somewhat siloed nature of assessment and feedback literature and a call to engage ideas from related disciplines to invigorate educational research (Gravett 2022; McArthur 2022, 2023; Nieminen and Carless 2023). As a result, this field is being reenergised with studies that think with theory to offer new insights into how assessment might be enacted and understood.

The first insight surrounds an awareness of ontological omissions, how the student’s (and teacher’s) being is engaged and develops through the teaching-learning interaction, which resonates with the comments from Elizabeth Adams St Pierre in the previous quotation. For example, Thuy Vu and Dall’Alba (2014, 779) write that:

authentic assessment is not an end in itself; rather, it is an opportunity for students to learn to become who they endeavour to be. Through engaging in assessment processes, students can learn to develop their ways of being and inhabiting the world with other people and things. In this way, authentic assessment can prepare students for living and working in a changing world.

Drawing on Martin Heidegger, for Vu and Dall’Alba, authenticity is not so much an attribute of tasks but, rather, an opportunity for students to learn to become ‘who they endeavour to be’. Authentic assessment is more about a student’s becoming, and to have value for students, assessment practices need to ‘engage the whole person: what they know, how they act and who they are’ (Dall’Alba and Barnacle 2007, 691). Likewise, the work by Vallis (2024) uses insights from ontology to trouble conceptions of authentic assessment. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, Vallis explores how our understanding of authentic assessment might expand beyond human/real binaries to encompass the contradictions of the ‘more-than-real’ (2024, 1).

Another important observation prevalent within recent critical literature on authentic assessment surrounds the term’s under-theorisation, as educators begin to explore what may be gained from making connections across the literature within both the field of higher education studies and the broader social sciences and humanities. For example, Jan McArthur (2022, 86–87) explains that:

Much of the authentic assessment literature uses a fairly disarticulated and ahistorical sense of authenticity, with little or no reference to the significant philosophical discussions of the term … Consider, as a comparison, the expansive way in which the term authentic is used when we write about ourselves: our profession as academics and teachers or the idea of authentic academic life. It is very often far richer than simply ‘real world tasks’.

Like Vu and Dall’Alba, and Vallis, McArthur draws on theory (and specifically the work of Theodor Adorno) to discuss how authenticity and assessment might entangle together in new ways. As shown in the quotation above, McArthur also notes that the assumption underpinning authentic assessment, that universities are somehow dislocated from an external ‘reality’, is a key concern. Indeed, its reliance on binary categorisations that have been critiqued as limited ways of understanding a complex world: self/other; inside/outside; real world/simulated world; authentic/inauthentic; traditional/authentic, again suggests the need to think about authentic assessment in more nuanced ways.

Recent critical research on authentic assessment has also identified an absence of authentic assessment designs that engage with the new complexities of teaching and learning within a digital world (Nieminen, Bearman, and Ajjawi 2023), with digital aspects of authentic assessment receiving ‘surprisingly little elaboration and theorisation in the literature’ (Nieminen, Bearman, and Ajjawi 2023, 529). Likewise, Phillip Dawson and Margaret Bearman have identified how much of the authentic assessment literature has focused on assessment design for a supposed present, missing opportunities to consider future possibilities within evolving disciplines (Dawson and Bearman 2020, 292).

The notion of authentic assessment is troubled further when we consider that authenticity itself has been shown to be a tangled idea that so often eludes our grasp. There exists a rich and established scholarship on authenticity in higher education (Gravett and Winstone 2022; Gravett 2023; Kreber et al. 2007; Kreber 2010; Palmer 1998; Noddings 1986; Ramezanzadeh and colleagues 2017; Schwarz 2019; Wimpenny and Savin-Baden 2013). This literature often explores both the utility, and complexity, of authenticity as a meaningful concept for educators. For example, Harriet Schwarz (2019, 131–139) argues that authenticity is a significant idea for higher education teachers and intertwined with notions of trust and of mattering:

When I think back to my most important teachers and mentors, I realise that feeling as if I mattered to them was a common thread in all the relationships … Only when we are authentic will students trust our words, and this trustworthiness gives expressions of mattering their credence and value … When we convey to students their thinking matters and their ideas have influenced or inspired us we reduce the hierarchy in the relationship.

Likewise, Carolin Kreber argues that pedagogies that are authentic can be understood ‘in the wider sense that the student’s being is engaged in the teaching – learning interaction’ (2010, 191). Similarly, Parker Palmer (1998) explores notions of authenticity as associated with ‘relational trust’ (1998, xvii), viewed as the critical ‘inner work’ (1998, xvii) of a teacher. And yet, authenticity is a troublesome idea. Poststructural thinkers, Indigenous and feminist scholars have long critiqued coherent notions of selfhood, argued that there may be many ‘authentic’ stories told about one particular event, and that meaning is multiple and open to a plurality of interpretations. As we know from the concerning biases acknowledged within students’ evaluation of teaching (Heffernan 2022), students’ experiences of learning, and teachers of teaching, are ultimately a subjective experience. Such ideas problematise the notion of any objective authenticity that can be located and locked in within a task, interaction or practice.

Clearly there are a number of issues with the ways in which authentic assessment is commonly understood if we want to claim its ongoing utility for conceptualising and developing assessment practices in contemporary universities. While its practical resources may be useful, authentic assessment remains conceptually threadbare and, in its current definition, lacks mobility as a concept that can meaningfully travel between disciplines, communities and into the contemporary digital world. The literature on authentic assessment often doesn’t engage with parallel educational literature unpacking authenticity within teaching and learning, omitting to consider the complexity of these theorisations for understanding assessment practice. And so, key questions remain. How can such an elusive and dynamic notion be connected coherently within assessment tasks? Where are the spaces within assessment designs for multiple meanings and diverse knowledges – recognising that authenticity is so often in the eye of the beholder (Ajjawi et al. 2024)? Thinking about authenticity in relation to teaching, learning and assessment must also include an awareness of the difficulties in thinking with the concept of authenticity, as a notoriously opaque and complex idea, open to multiple interpretations.

My article therefore arrives in the middle of an exciting conversation of voices that have begun to both problematise and to regenerate the concept of authentic assessment. Building on this promising opening for critique, I now turn to explore the value of thinking with relational pedagogies for offering further opportunities to think in more expansive ways about this important area of higher education praxis.

Relational pedagogies

The next section of this article will begin to explore the ways in which thinking about authenticity in connection to assessment remains a valuable idea, and how this concept might be revitalised and understood in new ways. In particular, I explore how thinking ontologically and relationally about authentic assessment, creates new openings for thinking differently. Continuing this conversation, I now draw upon research exploring relational pedagogies in higher education (Bovill 2020; Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2024, Gravett 2023) to explore assessment as an entangled doing, a becoming, a practice that matters.

Relational pedagogies offer a new way of approaching assessment as something that matters, that is premised on relational connections, and that trouble the taken for granted use of authentic assessment to describe a teacherly practice, ‘done to’ students in preparation for a supposedly future world of work. In sketching shapes for authentic assessment as relational pedagogy, I entangle ideas from posthumanist and new materialist theories, including concepts of mattering (Gravett, Taylor and Fairchild 2024), intra-action (Barad 2007), and affirmative ethics (Braidotti 2013). Putting these ideas to work, I suggest that we can rethink assessment as an intra-active mattering. Assessment is understood as relational, affective, and embodied. I suggest ways in which teachers might think and enact assessment in a more caring, response-able mode, and that via these opportunities for connection we might make, find and enact authenticity through assessment praxis.

Relational pedagogies rely on the notion that teaching is a dynamic relationship: between students and teachers (the human), but also that teaching and learning are entangled with the nonhuman, objects, spaces and materialities, in situated and evolving ways. Teaching and learning interactions, or intra-actions, are understood as messy, affective, embodied, material and discursive. Thinking about authentic assessment as relational pedagogy involves considering how we connect and respond to our students, the learning environment and the situated particularities of students’ learning journeys, through our assessment processes. Rather than approaching assessment purely by thinking about ‘tasks’, and future ‘realities’, relational pedagogies ask us to think about both our students’ and our own evolving connections, relations and subjectivities as learners. Crucially, and resonating with posthumanist theory, this involves a shift away from thinking about learning as a cognitive experience that takes place within individuals. Rather, relational pedagogies disturb our assumptions regarding individual agency to understand educational practices as co-constitutive, and as part of assemblages or ecologies (Taylor 2018, 372). Relational pedagogies also involve designing pedagogies and assessments underpinned by an ethics of care, in which students have opportunities to feel like they matter. This means assessments in which students have a stake, and in which they can participate in generative ways. Such an approach also warrants thinking about the potential for multiple interpretations of authenticity within a diverse world. These ideas resonate with calls for an ‘ontological turn’ in the literature, for example the work of Vu and Dall’Alba, who explain that ‘we would not be teachers without our students, our teaching tools, or our educational institutions … Together with others and things, we form the world. In this sense, being does not reside in individual human beings or things. Being is relational; it is being-in-the-world’ (2014, 780).

We can draw upon some helpful concepts to understand further what relational pedagogies in assessment might look and feel like. The first concept we might think with is the notion of mattering, and particularly pedagogies of mattering (Gravett, Taylor and Fairchild 2024). Mattering is both the materialities of learning: the material connections, tools, objects, technologies and spaces. Further, it also involves thinking about who and what matters in assessment, and how we can encourage our students to feel that they matter, that they are valued, and that assessment is a more emergent, entangled, and equitable practice. Arguably, developing pedagogies of mattering – where students and teachers feel that they are valued and cared for – has never been more critical than in today’s uncertain times. Educators are increasingly grappling with questions pertaining to how to engage students, and how to promote experiences of belonging (Gravett and Ajjawi 2022 ), and a concerningly high number of students report feelings of loneliness and disconnection (HEPI 2023). Thinking about mattering involves an acknowledgement of the role of care within assessment, as well as the need to recognise and respond to students’ diverse experiences and situated practices. Thinking about assessment through pedagogies of mattering help us to understand assessment as a relational process where connections can be created – or alternatively missed. Through this approach, we can think about how authenticity is developed and enacted through relational connections that can be generated, or inhibited, by assessment designs.

Another helpful concept for thinking about relational pedagogies is Karen Barad’s (2007, 2014) conceptualisation of intra-action. Barad defines intra-action as a notion which suggests that the ‘self’ comes into being in relation with and through the entanglement of, oneself with others. Intra-action represents a non-individualised view of what it means to be human. From Barad’s perspective ‘nothing exists in and of itself … everything is always already in relation’ (Fairchild and Taylor 2019, 1). Karen Barad also argues that every intra-action matters (2007). This idea of intra-action (as opposed to interaction) evokes both the idea of the entangled nature of relationships and the idea that every relational connection, even the smallest moments as found within everyday teaching, learning or assessment practices, may be significant. Thinking about intra-action in connection to authentic assessment reminds us of the relational connections between the assessor, assessed, and the task, resources and materials that constitute the assessment experience.

A third idea we might put to work is the notion of affirmative ethics (Braidotti 2013, 2019). For Rosi Bradiotti, affirmative ethics provides a means to consider what is produced by posthuman relational pedagogies and how these encounters happen between staff and students. Affirmative ethics offer a new way to think about communities (2019), and ‘is based on the praxis of constructing positivity, thus propelling new social conditions and relations into being’ (Braidotti 2013, 129). Thinking with the idea of affirmative ethics within higher education leads us to, wherever possible, engage in practices, modes of knowledge production, and ways of acting that are collaborative and non-competitive. Affirmative ethics, then, offers a potentially radically different way of thinking about assessment, as a mode of caring, collaboration and connection, as opposed to measurement and competition.

Thinking with these concepts about assessment practices, and about authenticity in assessment (Ajjawi et al 2024), we might see each of these ideas of mattering, intra-action, and of affirmative ethics, as offering generative insights into how we think about assessment praxis. Firstly, these ideas help us to unpack the critical relationship between assessment practices and power. Assessment is often a site of discomfort, anxiety and of power relations (Raaper 2016). Power resides in the teacher’s hand, the purpose is to categorise and to measure, not to make connections, or to develop feelings of mattering, care or joy. Second, relational pedagogies encourage us to consider how we connect and respond to students via our assessment practices. It is taken-for-granted that assessment is an individualistic process (Boud and Bearman 2024). But what would assessment look and feel like if we sought to design assessment with notions of mattering, care, or affirmative ethics in mind? What would assessment look and feel like if we aimed to consider the significance of each intra-action, and to ask ourselves how we can be more response-able and collaborative with one another?

Thinking in this vein may have significant implications for how we respond ethically to our students as well as for how to design more meaningful, inclusive assessments. In re-working assessment, relational pedagogies that prioritise connection and mattering can create spaces for more creative modes of learning which shift away from individualisation, division and hierarchy. More relational and ethically affirmative assessment practices may be able to give students a greater voice in their educational experiences and to engage students in new ways of producing knowledge. Crucially, through the development of spaces for connections and mattering it may create openings for authenticity (with all its subjectivity and complexity) to make itself felt.

Taken together these ideas help us to think about how relational pedagogies may hold power for how we think about assessment, and for how we understand, create and make spaces for authenticity in assessment. In the following section, I put these ideas to work in exploring an illustrative example of teaching, learning and assessment. This illustrative example is drawn from my own recent pedagogy and practice within a higher education teaching programme.

A conversation

One potential space for developing and enacting authenticity in assessment might be glimpsed within the experiences of educators and participants undertaking our Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in HE (PGCLTHE). The PGCert is a programme designed for new teachers but also includes established teachers who are looking to develop and attain a formal teaching qualification. Participants include colleagues from across the institution’s three Faculties as well as from professional services departments such as the Library, Learning Development, or Postgraduate Researchers. Participants include approximately 120 higher education staff each year. To disrupt conventional linear programmatic structures, and to think and do assessment practices differently, colleagues and I redesigned the programme to comprise of six overlapping themes, engaging a programmatic design that includes a summative oral conversation assessment. The oral conversation is scheduled at the close of the programme but is informed by a formative portfolio that is developed and supported with opportunities for feedback throughout the programme. Rather than prioritising written reflective assignments, the portfolio is designed as a thinking space that informs the dialogue. During this hour-long conversation, participants have the opportunity to respond to questions that surface the work and thinking that they have engaged in over the past eighteen months. Assessors include the participant’s personal tutor, a second tutor from the institute of education, and a third external colleague who is invited to act as an external observer. This third colleague is an educator from one of the University’s Faculties or Professional Services Departments.

This mode of assessment offers a rich opportunity for authenticity to be supported, made and enacted, and for practising higher education pedagogy differently. The conversation offers a moment where learning can happen, an intra-active mattering, a pause in the busy and frenetic working lives of contemporary teachers. Learning is emergent: via an assemblage of teachers, participant, portfolio, literature, technologies and meeting space. Presence matters. Resonating with some of the ideas explored above, as part of relational pedagogies in assessment, assessors work to make the assessment an affirmative experience.

Assessors seek to generate a dialogue with participants, that enables the surfacing of the particularities of diverse students’ learning journeys. In doing so, we explain that the oral conversation does not require a single ‘right answer,’ and should instead reflect the participant’s own journey and specific teaching and learning context. Assessors explain that the oral does not represent a summation of all participants have learned, with the view of presenting a coherent, finished self who has all the answers to educational problems, but offers a space for problematising and articulating what questions remain. This design resonates with Thuy Vu and Dall’Alba (2014, 779) who contend that:

authentic assessment is not an end in itself; rather, it is an opportunity for students to learn to become who they endeavour to be. Through engaging in assessment processes, students can learn to develop their ways of being and inhabiting the world with other people and things.

The conversations also offer affirmative spaces in which conventional expectations and hierarchies pertaining to assessment practices are disrupted. Participants are encouraged to feel comfortable: to bring in any literature and artefacts to aid their thinking, and to attend practice workshops to alleviate uncertainties and to understand expectations which are made transparent. Although conversations are ‘passed’, they are not awarded a numerical grade. Assessors explain that the dialogues also serve as opportunities for assessors’ own learning, together with participants.

These conversations are affective encounters (Gravett and Lygo-Baker 2024). They provide an opportunity to celebrate and pause to reflect upon the work that has been done and the changes that have occurred. Engaging in this emergent and dialogic process, with colleagues who have often deeply thought about their practice and in diverse ways, can be a source of joy. It offers what Vu and Dall’Alba describe as opportunities for students (and teachers) to learn to develop their ways of being and inhabiting the world. It offers spaces to make participants feel that their experiences are acknowledged and that they matter. Participants have to date responded that they find the assessment process rewarding, positive, and also enjoyable. This reference to joy in relation to assessment practice is surprising and encouraging; potentially, this process offers one small way in which assessment might be enacted in ways that can be both potentially affirmative and generative.

These assessments are just a one-hour everyday experience. And yet, they crystallize elements of education I value: connection, dialogue, multiple voices, engaging with ideas, the literature, reflections on practice, commitment to ongoing development despite contextual constraints. The assessment design encourages both assessors and participants to consider ideas such as: bravery, trust, empathy, connection, being. The assessment design, I hope, helps us to move away from some of the performative modes of reflective assessment used within teacher education, that have been so rightfully criticised (Macfarlane and Gourlay 2009) – and which, arguably, offer useful exemplars of inauthenticity in assessment. Instead, multiple approaches, meanings and diverse knowledges are welcomed. These values enable the conversation to offer the opportunity for an affirmative and ethical intra-action, where teacher and student may experience senses of mattering, and can engage in a genuine dialogue. The dialogue serves as a moment, underpinned by care, where mutual learning can occur. The oral conversation is also a space to reflect upon the multiple spaces for development with self, peers, teachers and curricula throughout the whole programme and therefore also offers opportunities to reflect on authenticity within a holistic process.

Of course, the role of dialogue, and of oral conversations, are not novel practices within education. However, consciously approaching these practices from a relational stance, enables us to understand and articulate their scope for advancing the kinds of pedagogies, informed by values, that we might wish to pro-actively foster. This may seem utopian. Certainly, oral conversations will not always be practically possible as an assessment option and such modes prove particularly difficult for scaling up and for supporting large cohort sizes. Neither will such an approach always yield authentic experiences for all students and teachers, free from any kind of performativity or instrumentality. I entirely acknowledge the subjectivity and muddiness involved in any use of the term authenticity. Neither am I proposing that all assessment designs mimic the same structure. However, I do suggest that, thinking about assessment practices as relational pedagogies enables us to consider the connections between authenticity and assessment in ways that are different from the modes in which we are used to thinking about assessment, as individualised processes, and as practices of domination and discipline rooted in economic discourses of competition (Raaper 2016). It may be that through thinking with relational pedagogies, and with ideas such as mattering, intra-action and affirmative ethics, we are able to ask new questions of our assessment designs that enable us to think anew about authenticity, as well as to critique the dominant notion of assessment practices being solely focused on a measurement of the individual. I now move to propose some potential questions for educators in order to think with these ideas.

Questions to consider in developing and enacting assessments with authenticity in mind

One way to think and to enact relational pedagogies in assessment, and to engage some of the theoretical ideas examined above, may be for educators to ask questions as they examine and redesign assessment processes. Below, I suggest ten questions that may be helpful to explore. These might be discussed within programme teams or between students and staff.

1. How does our assessment strategy develop relational connections and perpetuate/unsettle power relations?

2. What and who matters within our assessment design?

3. How does our assessment design incorporate dialogue?

4. Where can learners experiment within the programme?

5. How do we value unexpected outcomes?

6. What is the role of trust within assessment, and how do we demonstrate that we trust our learners?

7. What is the role of care within assessment, and how do we demonstrate that we care for our learners?

8. What multiple interpretations of authenticity are there, and how do we create spaces for multiplicity within our assessments?

9. How do we respond to the particularities of diverse students’ learning journeys?

10. How do we disrupt notions of individualism and situate learners in relation – with other humans and nonhumans?

Through asking ourselves these questions we may be able to design with authenticity, relationality and connection in mind, as well as to challenge entrenched assumptions regarding how assessment is enacted. As Vallis (2024, 6) suggests, ‘leaving behind conventional notions of assessment might allow teachers to re-evaluate and experiment with their pedagogical approaches and respond in creative ways to the out-of-joint times we haunt.’ I do not suggest that asking ourselves these questions will necessarily lead to assessments where authenticity is always created and experienced, or that authenticity can ever be located and fixed within assessment design. However, I do propose that it may enable spaces for teachers and students to find ways to make connections that lead to experiences (however small) that matter.

Conclusions

This article has examined how we might think in alternative ways about the notion of authentic assessment, and how we might engage relational pedagogies to think and do assessment differently. Moving away from the assumption that tasks can be consistently authentic, and that authenticity can ever be fixed and locked in within assessment practices, I have suggested that we might find moments of making, creating, and enacting authenticity within assessment, through thinking about assessment as relational pedagogy.

This is not just a theoretical exercise. If we are serious about our endeavour in the sector to work in more inclusive, ethical and socially just ways then relational pedagogies can help us to refocus on who and what matters. At the very least, even just asking new questions, thinking and talking about assessment differently can help. For example, McArthur (2022, 23) explains her view that:

the key to beginning to realise assessment for social justice is being prepared not only to think differently, but to talk openly in different ways: to bring new words into faculty meetings, course team meetings or even corridor chats. Words like joy, compassion, adventure, care and kindness: all of these belong in our assessment discussions, and in using these to demonstrate our thinking differently, we can foster change.

Of course, finding spaces for compassion, adventure, care and kindness in contemporary institutions is not always easy, and a recurrent criticism of relational pedagogies is that relational and meaningful teaching takes time, commitment and energy that teachers do not have. However, I believe that this does not mean we should not at least try. Indeed, it may be that now is exactly the time when it is imperative that we do strive to value connections and relationships between students, teachers, and the environments, spaces and landscapes that we teach within. Enacting the principles of meaningful assessment may become even more important, as we prepare our students and ourselves to work and live with artificial intelligence. For example, Margaret Bearman and Rosemary Luckin argue that in a time where AI is able to work at scale and speed, it is human connections, our physicalities, experiences and relationships, as well as our individual capacity for reason, that may begin to significantly matter (Bearman and Luckin 2020). They suggest that while, to date, many of our assessments have focused solely on academic intelligence, thinking above and beyond this to what matters within assessment may be becoming even more urgent (Bearman and Luckin 2020).

This article, then has sought to join and extend the conversation that is generating new directions for thinking about two fundamental concepts in education: authenticity, and assessment. Through thinking with relational pedagogies in assessment, and through a worked illustrative example of an attempt to create spaces for authentic connections, I have sketched a new vision for understanding authentic assessment as relational pedagogy. I conclude by reiterating my belief that concepts matter. Educators need to take time to pause and to think critically about how the ideas they think with shape our world, and what we might want to do differently. This thinking is not finite; and I look forward to seeing where and how concepts of authenticity and assessment might travel next and where the conversation might go. In a time of rapid change, where we grapple with significant challenges of working towards a more socially just world and living and working with new technologies, never has there been a better time to think about who and what matters in teaching, learning, and assessment.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to colleagues from the Surrey Institute of Education for their generous feedback on an earlier version of this article. Additional thanks to colleagues from the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning for generative discussions around this topic.

Disclosure statement

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