‘Stop Measuring Black Kids with a White Stick’: Translanguaging for Classroom Assessment

Abstract

In this conceptual paper, we explore the opportunities and challenges that translanguaging may provide for students from Australian Aboriginal backgrounds and their teachers. We use examples taken from Australian Aboriginal students who may speak Standard Australian English, Australian Aboriginal English, creoles (Kriol being the common one across the north of Australia) and traditional languages (e.g. Kija, Martu). We begin by examining the concept of translanguaging and show how Australian Aboriginal students can move fluidly between their various linguistic resources, dialects and repertoires to make meaning, express their thoughts, understandings and feelings, create their identities, and do so in often playful and creative ways. The principles of fair and valid assessment are explored and the role that translanguaging can fulfil for assessment purposes is considered. We also document some of the social, cultural and linguistic biases that underpin aspects of assessment, and make suggestions for improvement. In particular, we examine how teachers could approach assessment so that students with Aboriginal backgrounds are able to draw on their full linguistic repertoire and, in this way, address the issues surrounding discriminatory assessment practices that are founded on monolingual mindsets. We also take up the gauntlet to ‘stop measuring black kids with a white stick’ and seek positive and embracing ways for all students with Aboriginal backgrounds to engage in assessment practices.

“From the Bottom to the top”

“…When they were confident that the questions were correct, they again worked with the researcher and teacher to make the questions more natural and culturally appropriate, namely using a 'yarning' approach (Bessarab & Ng'andu, 2010, Shay, 2021. Yarning is how Aboriginal people make and share meaning by retelling, re-visiting, and representing their languages and cultures (Steele et al, 2022). They then trialled this approach with each other and with past-enrolled students living in the community near Kutja School.…”

Review of selected research in applied linguistics published in Australia (2015–2022)

“…A small number of other studies have explored the impact of traditional language use and AAE on developing positive self-identity (e.g., Oliver & Exell, 2019Tankosić et al, 2022). It also should be noted that because of the burgeoning interest of applied linguists concerning unique contexts, as with the other themes described in this review, several Australian researchers working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants have published their work internationally, rather than in national journals (e.g., Disbray & Martin, 2018;Macqueen et al, 2019;Oliver et al, 2021;Simpson & Wigglesworth, 2018;Steele et al, 2022).…”

Affordances and Borderscapes: Language Ideologies, Nationalisms, Generations and Geographies of Resistance in Cyprus

“…Moving on now to the literature on translanguaging, one key body of work is that which relates to translanguaging for inclusive education as a decolonising pedagogy (Fang et al 2022;Steele et al 2022). This is because translanguaging as a linguistic practice takes a step further from multilingualism in that the process of translanguaging itself challenges, according to Li (2023, p. 203), "raciolinguistic ideologies that view bilingual learners as having separate languages and languaging lives".…”