Culture-centered reflexivity as critical assessment

ABSTRACT

In this short piece, we argue that, in light of issues with traditional grading practices, critical assessment activities, particularly through guided reflexivity, can support equitable and social justice–oriented education in communication and beyond. The article posits that a culture-centered critically reflexive self-assessment empowers learners to use communication as an inquiry into and as a challenge to taken-for-granted dominant ideologies. We present prism visualizations as an assessment practice of critical reflexivity informed by the culture-centered approach (Dutta, M. J., Moana-Johnson, G., & Elers, C. 2020. COVID 19 and the pedagogy of culture-centered community radical democracy: A response from aotearoa New Zealand. Journal of Communication Pedagogy, 3, 11–19. https://doi.org/10.31446/JCP.2020.03) and consider lessons from the implementation of this practice in an interdisciplinary graduate course on relationship-centered teaching.

Notes

1 Similar considerations of the interplay of culture–structures–agency are concurrently present in other academic and applied fields, such as social work’s liberation health model (Belkin Martinez & Fleck-Henderson, 2014).

2 We’ve used the prisms, for example, to examine health disparities (in a biology course) and (racialized) meanings of mindfulness (in a communication course).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Alfond Foundation grant for “Gateways to Success” projects to develop and test approaches to supporting learners’ persistence in undergraduate courses in which 3% or more of students withdrew or received grades of D or F in at least one semester over the last three years.