‘Next thing you know, her hair turned green’: absurdity and uncertainty in high-stakes teacher test space

ABSTRACT

This article explores what happens behind the closed doors and in the ‘black box’ of high-stakes educational testing. Our specific concern is licensure exams that are often gatekeepers into teacher education programs and the profession. Leveraging the spatial turn across critical social theory and other disciplines, we conceptualize the test space of these exams in order to account for the powerful reach that test companies have into teacher education and the ‘ideal’ restrictive space that test takers navigate. Against this conceptual background, we share findings from a larger qualitative study to illustrate how test takers ‘practice’ test space into something more manageable and familiar by leveraging various affordances presented to them. Overall, our study accounts for the spatial dimension of high-stakes educational tests and initiates productive ways to begin thinking about the structure and agency of these spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality/social exclusion in education
• poststructural/postmodern/critical theory
• teacher education
• assessment
• evaluation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emery Petchauer

Emery Petchauer is an associate professor of English and teacher education at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA, where he also serves as English education program coordinator. He is the author of Hip-Hop Culture in College Students’ Lives (Routledge, 2012), Schooling Hip-Hop: Expanding Hip-Hop Based Education Across the Curriculum (Teachers College Press, 2013), and Teacher Education Across Minority Serving Institutions: Programs, Policies, and Social Justice (Rutgers University Press, 2016).

Kira J. Baker-Doyle

Kira J. Baker-Doyle is an associate professor of education and the coordinator of the literacies, technologies and citizenship studies program in the School of Education at Arcadia University, Glenside, PA, USA. Her research centers on teacher professional development, social network theory, and community engagement, especially in urban schools and communities. She is the author of The Networked Teacher: How New Teachers Build Social Networks for Professional Support, published by Teachers College Press.