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Critique: Assessment and the Production of Learning by Elisabeth Soep — 2006Education researchers and classroom teachers have argued that the constant pressure to measure and rank students makes it difficult to shape assessment as an episode of learning. Yet we know little about how learning moves in and through assessment of any kind. Building on two national multisited studies, the research reported here uses ethnographic techniques to examine learning within critique. Critique is a form of assessment through which young people jointly judge their own work and that of their peers. The article focuses on episodes of critique within two nonschool sites for collaborative production involving ethnically and economically diverse groups of youth—a community-based video project and an organization in which young people create radio stories for local and national broadcast. Learning environments such as these draw voluntary youth participation and are organized around sustained projects released to outside audiences. Findings indicate that critique manifests itself as an episode of learning by engaging young people in joint assessment events that are improvisational, reciprocal, and oriented toward the future of the work under review. Intra- and cross-site comparisons suggest that critique is likely to arise within specific conditions: when stakes are intense, metastandards are subjected to review, accountability is mutual and interactively sustained, and interdisciplinary practice is mandatory. The article reviews various ways to conceptualize learning and argues in the end for a theory of learning as production, a way of making. Implications include new ideas for research methodologies and new understandings of youth-adult collaborations in learning and production.To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropropriate membership. Please review your options below:
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- Elisabeth Soep
University of California, Berkeley
E-mail Author
ELISABETH SOEP received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research, featured in various journals and books, centers on youth discourse and media practices in nonschool settings and on artistically grounded methodologies. Dr. Soep coedited, with Sunaina Maira, the forthcoming volume Youthscapes: The Popular, The National, The Global (2005, University of Pennsylvania Press). She is also the education director and a producer at Youth Radio, where she collaborates with youth reporters on stories for local and national public radio outlets. Youth Radio has been recognized with honors including the George Foster Peabody award, the Edwards R. Murrow award, and the National Association of Black Journalists award.
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