Education as a mode of existence: A Latourian inquiry into assessment validity in higher education

Abstract

Within professional higher education, the construct of assessment validity is used to make assumptions about the extent to which students are able to replicate in professional practice what they have learned during their studies through the provision of authentic simulated opportunities to practice. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, this article argues that the conceptualisation as well as use of the idea of assessment validity in theorising the assessment of simulation-based learning in professional courses, in order to predict the future performance of the student constitutes a category mistake that consequently makes claims for assessment validity which are unfounded. The article goes on to explore ways by which ethnographers of education might use other elements of Latour's work in order to generate rich, problematising accounts of educational practice.

Aligning assessment with the needs of work-integrated learning: the challenges of authentic assessment in a complex context

“…Dohn (2011) argues that the suppositions underlying the use of reflection in educational activities are misguided because the relation between thinking and communication, on the one hand, and acting on the other is far from simple and linear. It is jointly a problem of representation of tacit practices 'out of context' and one where knowing does not equal acting (Tummons, 2019). Interestingly, our students were well aware that reflecting on practice did not portray their ability to actually 'do' the practice and therefore were critical of the narrow focus of assessment on written academic reports.…”

On the educational mode of existence: Latour, meta‐ethnography and the social institution of education

“…In this article, I take seriously Latour’s invitation to add to the laboratory, to provide an account of an additional mode of existence that will help resolve category mistakes that otherwise risk confusing our ethnographies of the entanglement between human and non‐human (Latour 2013b). And notwithstanding the problems as well as affordances that AIME generates, I propose that education [EDU] is a mode of existence (Tummons 2020a, b), just as law [LAW] or religion [REL] are modes of existence. A mode of existence is identified through four conditions.…”

Ethnographies of Higher Education and Modes of Existence: Using Latour’s Philosophical Anthropology to Construct Faithful Accounts of Higher Education Practice

“…AIME sets out to construct a systematic description of the different ontological systems that co-exist to describe contemporary ways of being (Ricci et al, 2015). Elements of AIME have begun to be employed through explorations of legal theory (McGee, 2014), politics and postpolitics (Tsouvalis, 2016), contemporary academic practice (Decuypere and Simons, 2016), and higher education (Tummons, 2019). Modes of existence are those social, technical, semiotic and material conglomerations such as politics, or technology or morality, that constitute the empirical multi-realist ontology that Latour has concerned himself with.…”

“…And the fourth is evident in the ways in which education is distinguished by buildings, by policy discourses, by visible signifiers of participation such as uniforms or identity badges, all of which help distinguish educational structures and institutions from, for example, legal ones. From these starting points, mindful not only of the pragmatism that underscores Latour's work (Hämäläinen and Lehtonen, 2016), but also of the rich empirical work that AIME rests on, it seems appropriate to augment some earlier conclusions (Tummons, 2019) and to describe education as being a distinct, recognizable phenomenon of the world, signified by people, objects, buildings, ways of being, of talking, and of argumentation, processes, and policies. It is a subject for conversation, for political exhortation, for lampooning in fiction, and for media coverage.…”