Policy as praxis: Senior educators’ enactment of assessment policy reform

Abstract

This article reveals the multifaceted ways in which policy enactment was expressed as praxis in the context of assessment reform in Ontario, Canada. The research explores the way in which the Growing Success assessment policy was interpreted variously by different educators occupying senior roles within the district office in a single school district in northern Ontario. Drawing on neo-Aristotelian theorising, the research reveals how ‘policy in practice’ was expressed as a form of praxis, where such praxis is understood as morally committed and informed action oriented towards excellence in a field (in this case, education). While recognising the complexity of policy enactment, and how policy enactment can result in unforeseen and sometimes problematic outcomes, the research also reveals how policy enactment can have productive outcomes in relation to what are construed as the ‘internal goods’ of education. In the research presented, these productive outcomes included the capacity to facilitate teachers’ learning within and across elementary and secondary school sites; a critical, constructive focus on standardised measures of student learning in relation to academic outcomes; and the enhancement of student learning opportunities via cultural inclusion, particularly in relation to First Nations, Métis and Inuit students. In this way, the research validates a conception of policy as praxis and foregrounds how policy enactment can be understood in ways that promote the intrinsic integrity of educational practice, and the need to draw on these ‘internal goods’ in such enactment.

Introduction

This article presents recent research into senior educators’ responses to assessment policy reform in a regional school district in northern Ontario, Canada. While indicating the challenges that attend policy enactment, the research also reveals how policy enactment is productive, cultivating conditions for informed and engaged learning on the part of educators dedicated to enhanced teacher and student learning opportunities. The article analyses these practices in relation to neo-Aristotelian theorising of practice as praxis, salient literature on the nature of policy enactment, and in relation to senior educators’ practices. Specifically, the research utilises MacIntyre’s (2007) notion of practices, and related work, as characterised by particular ‘internal goods’ that can only be made sense of within a given field, and must be actively cultivated as part of the practices of the field to ensure its maintenance and development. In this way, the research foregrounds how policy enactment exists not only in multiple ways, but also as praxis – in this case, in relation to assessment as and for student learning, and not simply of student learning. Such enactment is what we describe as ‘policy as praxis’.

The research draws on the perspectives of three senior educators – educators who occupied significant senior roles within their school district. This included a policy officer with responsibility for policy enactment more broadly in the district, another educational officer with responsibility for curriculum reform across the district, and a third educator who worked as a School Resource Teacher responsible for a diverse portfolio, including literacy development, First Nations, Métis and Inuit (FNMI) education, and teacher professional learning. The research firstly outlines the nature of policy enactment in schooling settings, particularly in relation to the work of senior district educators. It then elaborates notions of practice as praxis, before applying these understandings to how the three senior educators focused on in the research sought to enact assessment policy reform in Ontario. The article seeks to elaborate the enactment of this assessment policy by these senior educators as a form of praxis – ‘policy as praxis’. The article concludes with an account of the importance and value of a policy-as-praxis approach.

Conceptualising policy enactment amongst senior district educators

The nature and challenges of policy enactment in schooling settings have been well rehearsed by scholars in the field. Ball et al. (2012) refer to the multiplicity of practices that characterise enactment of policy, and to the difficulty of determining specific outcomes. Such research, in a more critical tradition, foregrounds the ‘messy’ reality of actual policy enactment and how this contrasts with more traditional, ‘rational’ policy-model approaches (Taylor et al., 1997).

Some research on policy enactment focuses attention on district officials. The specific behaviour of these leaders, involving studies of what they actually do in response to their specific circumstances, has been particularly cogent (Spillane et al., 2004), contributing to how these district officials/leaders have been understood as key figures in the enactment of educational policy. Within what might be construed as more cognitivist approaches, processes of ‘sensemaking’ (Weick et al., 2005) have also focused attention on how educators contextualise their understandings of policy. Such cognitivist approaches have foregrounded the particular conceptual knowledges that senior educators bring to any given circumstance, and that may influence their learning, including in relation to more distributed processes (Spillane et al., 2004). Such approaches construct sensemaking as involving a distributed process, whereby people, material and practices are all enabled in meaning-making (Spillane et al., 2006). Educators are framed as interpreting policy via a ‘rich knowledge base of understandings, beliefs, and attitudes … and attempt[ing] to connect understanding with practice’ (Spillane et al., 2002: 391).

This research seeks to extend the boundaries of this work by focusing more strongly on the dispositions of senior educators engaged in assessment policy reform in schooling settings. In this context, such dispositions are individual educators’ understandings and approaches to the world which are not construed as limited to more individual knowledges and beliefs, but as understandings cultivated within various ‘traditions’ in the ‘field’, including those that pertain to specific subjects or disciplines, as well as how to serve more marginalised students. Dispositions are particular ways of engaging with the world, developed through exposure to particular experiences that have been formative for the particular inclinations subsequently developed. We also recognise that disciplinary knowledge is historically hierarchical and connotes differential prestige and power amongst its practitioners, and those who come within its remit (Melville and Bartley, 2013). Consequently, any reform efforts require that senior educators work through (and with) teachers’ closely held beliefs, even as they may seek to identify, understand and challenge existing practices and power structures (Sanger and Osguthorpe, 2013). In order to foster a more educative approach in such value-laden contexts, Sergiovanni (2005: 112) has argued that senior educators must ‘behave consistently, almost instinctively, in moral ways … know and focus on what’s important, care deeply about their work, learn from their success, and [be] trustworthy people’. Such dispositions, it is argued, can act as an exemplar of ‘how life in the unit ought to be lived and how that life will enable students to acquire requisite habits of mind and moral sensibilities or dispositions’ (Dottin, 2006: 28).

Practice as praxis

In order to help make sense of the dispositional nature of senior educators’ enactment of policy, we draw on Aristotelian-inspired philosophical resources. Such resources make it possible to better understand educators’ efforts to foster more substantive assessment practices, in context. This section presents such efforts as a form of practice as praxis.

In Book VI of The Ethics, Aristotle (1976) delineated three forms of reasoning – theoretical, technical and practical – influenced by specific dispositions and resulting in particular forms of action. The action of theoretical reasoning, or theoria, is informed by a disposition of episteme. The action of poiēsis entails means–ends or instrumental reasoning to produce a particular ‘product’, and is informed by a disposition of technē. The third action, praxis, entails acting wisely under specific circumstances – demonstrating practical wisdom – and is informed by a disposition of phronēsis. The disposition of phronēsis entails the cultivation of wisdom and prudence through deliberation about what it is best to do in response to particular circumstances. From an Aristotelian perspective, ‘good’ practice requires not only theoretical reasoning (theoria) and technical understanding (poiēsis), but also practical wisdom (praxis).

The focus on action is central to this conception of praxis, and reflected in Aristotelian conceptions of practice as praxis. The actualisation of desirable qualities – the ‘virtues’ – is only operationalised in action:

the virtues we do acquire by first exercising them … Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it: people become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarly, we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones. (Aristotle, 1976: 91)

Furthermore, particular sets of traditions are central to the acquisition of the virtues. Drawing on these Aristotelian insights into the virtues, MacIntyre (2007: 127) argues that ‘there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them from a series of predecessors in which series heroic societies hold first place’. Excellent practice is inherently constitutive of particular traditions and is the product of acting within these traditions. On this rendering, a practice is

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (MacIntyre, 2007: 187)

Informed by such understandings, in the context of educational settings, Kemmis and Smith describe praxis as a form of action designed to facilitate improvements in light of particular traditions within a field, in order to make for a better world:

Praxis is a particular kind of action. It is action that is morally-committed, and oriented and informed by traditions in a field. It is the kind of action people are engaged in when they think about what their action will mean in the world. Praxis is what people do when they take into account all the circumstances and exigencies that confront them at a particular moment and then, taking the broadest view they can of what it is best to do, they act. (Kemmis and Smith, 2008: 4; original emphasis)

On such a rendering, praxis is ‘action that aims for the good of those involved and for the good of humankind’ (Kemmis et al., 2014: 26). If ‘good’ practice requires not only theoretical reasoning (theoria) and technical understanding (poiēsis), but also practical wisdom (praxis), the implementation of assessment policy requires evidence of an understanding of assessment as, of and for learning. While assessment of learning might be more easily associated with theoretical reasoning (theoria) and technical understanding (poiēsis), the ongoing nature of assessment as learning and the emphasis of assessment for learning more broadly points to a much more praxis-oriented or practical-wisdom approach that positions assessment as integral to learning, and not simply to gain evidence of understanding as an end point in itself. The implementation of assessment policy is also predicated on a sophisticated understanding of disciplinarity. A naïve view of the disciplines, emphasising the disciplines as static bodies of knowledge, can only realistically support assessment of learning, and does not enable assessment of the syntactic knowledge of the discipline – of how disciplines are dependent on particular inquiry traditions that help ensure their currency and sustainability. To be meaningful in context, technē and episteme, vis-à-vis assessment, need to be understood through the lens of phronēsis. The technē described in/of assessment policy has to be seen through the episteme of rich and robust understandings of disciplinarity, as a precursor to developing a praxis-oriented stance – an orientation to act that is grounded in deep contextualised knowledge of given circumstances. Finally, because a praxis-oriented approach is inherently situated in specific sites (Schatzki, 2002), it needs to take the needs of specific students into account, including those traditionally disenfranchised; it is through detailed understanding of specific students’ circumstances (‘situatedness’) that the needs of marginalised students become foregrounded. Once such knowledge and understanding become apparent, it becomes impossible to ignore these specific circumstances, and such realisation serves as a stimulus for the development of an ethical commitment oriented towards trying to respond more appropriately and substantively to the needs of these students. In this research, this relates particularly to FNMI students.

Contextualising the research

The Growing Success policy

Discursively, the Growing Success assessment policy was developed as part of an ongoing ensemble of policy reform in Ontario (known as ‘Student Success/Learning to 18: The Student Success Strategy’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2004)). This meta-policy explicitly sought to promote the well-being and educational advancement of all students. Within this broader context, the Growing Success policy argued that ‘assessment, evaluation, and reporting practices and procedures must be fair, transparent, and equitable for all students’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010: 2; original emphasis). The principal focus of the policy was to ‘ensure that assessment, evaluation, and reporting are valid and reliable, and that they lead to the improvement of learning for all students’ (6). Specific attention was given to the difference between assessment for and as learning and assessment of learning. Assessment for and as learning was seen as a necessary corrective to excessive attention to assessment of learning, construed as evaluation:

Assessment for learning and as learning requires that students and teachers share a common understanding of what is being learned. Learning goals clearly identify what students are expected to know and be able to do, in language that students can readily understand … [while e]valuation is based on assessment of learning that provides evidence of student achievement at strategic times throughout the grade/course, often at the end of a period of learning. (33–38; original emphasis)

The policy also advocated ongoing teacher learning and that such learning be collaborative. However, such discursive advocacy does not guarantee that educators ‘in the field’ will be similarly disposed. Consequently, understanding how such policy is enacted is important.

The Northern Rivers school district

In order to better understand assessment policy as enacted, the research draws on the perspectives of a district administrator and two teacher leaders working at the district level and responsible for teacher professional learning across schools in one district in regional Ontario. The district was centred on a city with a population of approximately 100,000 people. The district operated 25 elementary schools and 4 secondary schools, employed almost 1000 teaching staff and had an enrolment of just under 15,000 students. The four secondary schools (Grades 9–12) served students from a variety of socio-economic circumstances, with around 1000 students in each site. The district was responsible for enacting provincial education mandates and policies (including Growing Success), and reporting on student success to the Ministry of Education.

The senior educators referred to in the research worked closely with one another. A district administrator, Paul, had overall responsibility for the enactment of the policy. ¹ As part of this work, and together with other senior educators at the district level, he advocated for a mathematics-based ‘Family of Schools’ as a way of fostering enhanced learning within the district, which involved collaboration between mathematics teachers in each secondary school and their colleagues in individual feeder elementary schools. This reform was also supported through the Program Branch (focused on curriculum-related issues), which had responsibly for delivering professional learning opportunities across all schools. Paul had developed strong professional relationships with teacher leaders in the schools over the many years he had worked in the district. For the Family of Schools structure, he worked closely with Anthea, a former secondary mathematics department chair. In working with the Program Branch, he also worked with a secondary science teacher, James, who was appointed as a School Resource Teacher with responsibilities for literacy development, FNMI education and teacher professional learning. James had also developed a provincial reputation for his capacity in applying the policy to science programs (Melville, Jones and Campbell, 2014).

Methods and methodology

Our data comprises individual semi-structured interviews with three senior educators in one district. These educators were purposively selected (Bryman, 2012) because they were primarily responsible for facilitating teachers’ understanding of assessment policy reform in their district. The key questions informing the semi-structured interviews were developed from previous research into policy enactment in the district (see Hardy and Melville, 2013), and particularly in relation to Growing Success. These questions related to how Growing Success was enacted at Northern Rivers, how senior educators understood the policy, the professional relations they fostered to help support teachers in engaging with the policy, and the professional learning practices supported to foster teachers’ enactment of the policy. Each interview was approximately 80 minutes in duration and conducted at the participants’ workplace in accordance with all of the ethical requirements of the authors’ respective universities and the district.

Analytically, such questioning was deployed to better understand the ‘milieu, the contexts in which teachers live’ (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990: 2). Applying such an approach to these senior educators, in light of understanding practice as praxis, we were interested in exploring the narratives of each and how these provided insights into their dispositions towards their work, particularly the disposition of phronēsis. This desire to understand the links between phronēsis and practice situates the participants as actors within a broader narrative of potentially productive policy enactment. Notions of practice as praxis, and attendant dispositions, provide a conceptual apparatus – a ‘thinking with theory’ approach (Jackson and Mazzei, 2017) – for further interpreting what has typically been understood as participants’ ‘cognition’ and its relation to action. Our approach draws on these educators’ stories as a way of better understanding ‘the intentionality of human action’ (Czarniawska, 2004: 7). We argue that richer insights can be garnered into educators’ accounts of their practices if we endeavour to account for the dispositions that underpin cognition and arise through participation in particular fields – in our case, senior educators’ enactment of assessment policy reform. To this end, the data was interrogated in light of theorising policy enactment as praxis, with a focus on the interactions between an individual’s dispositions (particularly phronēsis) and their practices.

Findings and discussion: senior educators’ enactment of policy reform as praxis

Our analysis of the data indicates that senior educators’ policy enactment was expressed as praxis – as a form of moral action – in three key ways: the capacity to facilitate teachers’ learning within and across elementary and secondary school sites, particularly through a collaborative learning approach described as the Family of Schools; a critical focus on standardised measures of student learning in relation to academic outcomes; and advocacy for culturally inclusive learning opportunities, particularly in relation to FNMI students.

Facilitating teacher learning: district-wide learning and the Family of Schools

Facilitating teachers’ learning was an important focus of attention for these senior educators. For James, helping teachers to see how their knowledge related to more productive assessment practices, as encapsulated in Growing Success, was evident in how he challenged teachers about their assessment practices and sought to foster alternatives, including more active attention to meaningful feedback for students: ‘Now we have teachers actively engaging in talking about feedback much more … We’re trying to improve teachers’ ability to give feedback in a meaningful way so that students can actually use it and make it actionable’. This focus on enhancing teachers’ ability to improve student learning through assessment, via meaningful feedback, was a morally informed action that sought to reorient teachers’ practices; assessment for learning was much more evident.

Moral commitment was evident in the way James believed that it was important to ensure teachers’ understandings of assessment were not tokenistic, but instead informed their pedagogies, such as providing more substantive feedback and ensuring this was culturally appropriate: ‘I have created professional development focused on science and math, with a little geography, where we try to integrate culturally appropriate components into all classes’. This more praxis-oriented approach was also evident in how the School Resource Teacher sought to assist teachers’ learning by ensuring that learning goals, outlined as part of the focus on assessment, were not enacted superficially. In keeping with the focus on assessment as and for learning, he also sought to ensure that students were given multiple opportunities to experience success in achieving specific targets:

We’re working hard to make sure that learning goals don’t simply become ‘word walls’. What I mean by that is that just slapping up a learning goal on the wall, or throwing up a learning goal every day, is not enough. You have to understand why we do it … They are trying to develop an understanding of what good success criteria are and how they connect to learning goals and curriculum expectations. Where I see the biggest change now is that teachers are understanding that it’s better to take more shots at less targets than to have tonnes of targets and only one shot.

This process of ‘working hard’ to avoid more superficial practices and understanding ‘why we do it’ reflects a form of excellence and moral commitment in relation to the best educational traditions of providing substantive learning experiences for all students, and doing so in ways that build understanding amongst teachers; in this way, the ‘goods internal to that form of activity [education] are realized’ (MacIntyre, 2007: 157). Advocacy for substantive understanding amongst teachers about learning goals and success criteria constitutes evidence of policy enactment as praxis in relation to assessment as and for, and not simply of, student learning; such enactment is a form of what we describe as ‘policy as praxis’.

There was also evidence of the centrality of teacher learning for student learning in relation to various forms of collaborative learning communities of teachers to develop teachers’ understandings of all aspects of their work, including assessment practices. This included the way in which in-school professional learning communities (PLCs) were promoted within individual school sites, ² and how evidence of student learning was central, even as this was recognised as challenging work:

We are revisiting the schools’ training in how PLCs should run; we remind [those in schools] that students are at the heart of it. It is about student work, and there needs to be that drive … That was recognised this year. We saw that the current structures weren’t meeting the needs of everybody … If we want them to actually better serve their students with their needs, the teacher needs to grow. (Anthea)

This advocacy for teachers’ learning in the district also included support for the cross-school collaborative learning in the Family of Schools, which involved both elementary and secondary schoolteachers working and learning together. The facilitator of the Family of Schools, Anthea, led this initiative:

It was a collaboration of those interested in creating a family … it was specific schools that fed the high school and we designated a specific Family of Schools for each site. I help support the research [and] professional learning that is required, and report on what the needs are to inform the elementary folks.

The way in which the facilitator was able to elaborate on the nature of the learning occurring in one school, where she worked, displays her own sense of the value and valuing of localised, in-depth, discipline-based teacher inquiry practices, including in relation to teaching and assessing particular mathematical domains (patterning and algebra):

The vision of that school is to work the pedagogy around the new relations in patterning and algebra, and it’s using a lot of Cathy Bruce’s work. ³ The first three years were spent on learning strategies … And we’ve just seen that cohort come through in the last three years. Last year, in the Grade 9 class, we saw some of the students that were the result of some of the work done in Grade 7 and 8.

There was a sense in which Anthea understood her discipline as a form of substantive and syntactic knowledge (including as evident through engagement with the inquiry-oriented work of Cathy Bruce) – how to use evidence of learning to identify student needs and to be responsive to these identified needs. Responsiveness to student learning as a form of assessment was reflected through engagement with relevant research (‘Cathy Bruce’s work’) and relevant strategies. Again, such approaches reflect excellence in relation to traditions within a particular field (MacIntyre, 2007) – in this case, a particular disciplinary field – and efforts to learn from evidence/assessment of student learning within that field. This necessarily required supporting active, coherent, long-term professional learning opportunities for the teachers of these students (see Garet et al., 2001). Anthea was able to articulately express her work as a facilitator of teachers’ learning – an expression of ‘what’s important’ and of her ‘car[ing] deeply about [her] work’ (Sergiovanni, 2005: 112). Such care in relation to assessment was also evident in how she sought to use outcomes to ‘track’ students’ learning across year levels in a substantive fashion, and served as evidence of a deeply felt moral commitment to ensuring students had the best learning opportunities possible.

For Paul, the district administrator with overall responsibility for supporting the Family of Schools, a sense of moral commitment and support was evident in the way the initiative was seen as a direct product of concern for teachers ‘at the coalface’, the need to be responsive to their particular students, and assessment evidence of the extent to which they felt their students were able to engage with the curriculum:

The administrators and teachers from secondary and/or elementary feeder schools would meet together to address particular issues of math. The topics quite often were identified at the system program level, or were items that were brought up. If we were meeting today and an elementary teacher said, ‘My kids are really struggling with the issue of fractions’, teachers would say, ‘Okay. On the next agenda, the high school Grade 9 teachers will talk about how they handle it, and we’ll talk about how you’re teaching it in elementary’.

This concern for localised practices about students’ results (in this instance, fractions) for ‘items that were brought up’ – a form of assessment for learning – reflects the centrality of the specific sites – the situatedness of social life (Schatzki, 2002) – within which educators’ work was located, and responsiveness to the needs of teachers and students in these sites. An example of such site-based ontologies was also evident in how Paul supported those teachers, such as Anthea, who had displayed a capacity to work productively with their students: ‘She is a strong teacher working with kids … She was an informal leader in her math department, and we had the opportunity to formalise that leadership in the school as the department chair of math’. In this case, we see evidence of the moral actions/praxis of Paul as a leader, ‘know[ing] and focus[ing] on what’s important’ and clearly trusting his people (Sergiovanni, 2005: 112), through his advocacy of his colleague, who was deemed to exercise excellence within her field (MacIntyre, 2007). Such support was also reflective of a broader disposition towards trying to ensure teachers had a clear understanding of the purpose of the reform agenda, even as this was challenging work: ‘For me it was always about having a deeper understanding of the underlying purpose of what we’re doing [in relation to assessment reform] … That understanding is not always to the level that I would like’. There was also an acknowledgement that formalised collaborative arrangements had to be flexible in order to address situated needs and develop richer understandings of assessment practices within PLCs:

In our PLCs … if teachers get off topic, and I, or a visiting advisor, happen to be sitting in, the teachers are like, ‘Oh, but we shouldn’t be on that topic!’ I’ll say, ‘No, if that’s pertinent, go for it!’ But in their minds, at times, I think that they think if they get off topic or task, it’s wrong, [but] it’s not wrong!

In these ways, the senior educators engaged with the Family of Schools and the PLCs within the district exhibited a holistic, praxis-oriented approach through their support of teachers in schools in their efforts to work more substantively with various forms of evidence and assessment of student learning, and with the situated challenges of engaging in such work. This included facilitating teachers’ learning to ensure they had a good understanding of the assessment reforms, not for the sake of the reforms, but to enable teachers to be as successful as possible for the students they taught. Praxis was evident in the ways in which these educators took into account the circumstances that confronted their teachers (such as assessment evidence showing the challenges of teaching fractions) and acted (Kemmis and Smith, 2008). For Anthea, the emphasis on teacher learning for student learning, on the basis of assessment evidence, was explicit. In reflecting on her role as a facilitator of teachers’ learning, she understood her role as fostering teachers’ learning for student learning through such evidence. Similarly, for Paul, there was a deep respect for the work of teachers, and maximising opportunities for students’ learning was seen as central to teachers’ work. Concern for students’ learning was actualised through teacher learning initiatives that emphasised the episteme of focusing on subject content and the nature of evidence arising from ongoing (formative) assessment-for-learning practices. However, reflecting a policy-as-praxis approach, this knowledge was not emphasised for its own sake, but for how it informed the practice of these senior educators in their efforts to foster teacher learning for student learning.

Engaging with and beyond standardised data to enhance student learning

More praxis-oriented approaches were also evident in the more critically aware and robust ways in which educators responded to the collection of, and engagement with, standardised literacy and numeracy data within the province – data typically collected for assessment-of-learning purposes. Provincial Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) results were seen as an ‘indicator’ of students’ learning, providing some useful information about their progress and flagging whether there were particular concerns to be addressed as students progressed through school:

[EQAO data] absolutely informs as a trailing indicator … we utilise that data … this is how our students achieved overall for our district and schools. If this is how we’re performing in Grades 3 and 6, what does that say for our students in Grade 9, and what can we do in between? … It was definitely a conversation across the district. (Anthea)

While not a primary focus of concern, the understanding of EQAO data as an ‘indicator’ of students’ learning reflected a sensible approach to standardised data – one that did not focus undue attention on such assessment-of-learning tests, but utilised the data from these tests to identify where students struggled, and provided opportunities for teachers to develop consistent teaching and learning approaches to assist students. Again, traditions of excellence that characterised a particular field (MacIntyre, 2007) – use of assessment for educational (as and for learning) rather than performative purposes (of learning) – guided the work of these senior educators more broadly. This included addressing concerns about evidence of student learning in ways that foregrounded the utility of test results for informing the learning of students in subsequent years, and not simply for more performative purposes.

Used in this manner, the EQAO data (assessment of learning) was not simply followed ‘blindly’. Nuanced application of the EQAO data – an example of O’Neill’s (2013) ‘intelligent accountability’– was reflected in the senior administrator’s considered and sometimes sceptical approach to such data: ‘When I see my colleagues’ schools, and the numbers go up and down, and here and there and – there’s just so many factors’ (Paul). That traditions of excellence within the field (MacIntyre, 2007) were sustained was evident in how the specificity of students’ broader needs was also foregrounded by the senior administrator, who recognised that scrutiny of assessment results in the form of standardised test data needed to be undertaken carefully, in relation to specific students, and without drawing potentially erroneous conclusions about some groups of students based on the needs of others:

When we got the EQAO results previously, we would see that the kids are struggling in a particular area. Then we will work on a particular area. I would say, ‘Oh, look at our kids in numeracy this year; they did really poorly on the problem-solving section. So, next year, we’re going to really focus on problem solving’. But it’s a whole different set of kids we’re working on, and maybe the kids in that next grade coming up can do problem solving!

Again, a more nuanced, site-specific emphasis, informed by deep knowledge of particular students’ needs, was in evidence and guided engagement around assessment reform associated with standardised data; a focus on students’ needs, rather than the data per se, represented a more morally robust approach on the part of these educators. Assessment policy as a form of praxis was evident in how enactment of Growing Success led to an emphasis on assessment for and as learning, rather than simply assessment of learning.

These senior educators’ enactment of assessment policy reform as praxis was not simply reflected in concern for students’ academic learning, including as evident in standardised test results. Reflecting Kemmis et al.’s (2014: 26) focus on praxis-focused education as ‘oriented towards the good for each person and the good for humankind’ more broadly, including engaging with the needs of students who struggled academically, there was concern to ensure that the curriculum and its assessment were relevant to all students, including students who struggled.

The Applied Mathematics course was seen as one example of curriculum innovation to address these students’ needs, and reflective of a more morally committed approach on behalf of these educators – of not leaving any students behind. A more ‘experiential’ rather than ‘abstract’ curriculum experience was seen as an important approach to take. As Anthea argued: ‘Sometimes, the curriculum that drives the pedagogy still becomes too abstract and too absent of content that is engaging for students at that level’. Support for these students was seen as having increased significantly over time, including through the broader Student Success Strategy within which the Growing Success policy was situated: ‘The teachers of the “Applied” students definitely have a lot more support. The students are afforded more of those supports through other initiatives like our Student Success initiative’ (Anthea). In this way, a more praxis-oriented disposition was evident, which was morally committed to the needs of all students (Kemmis and Smith, 2008) and not just those able to engage with a more traditional academic curriculum. This was expressed through overt support for students who struggled to engage with a more academic curriculum, and for whom more standardised measures of assessment were not the most relevant marker of student learning and achievement.

Advocating for and engaging with culturally marginalised students

These educators’ moral commitment was also evident through recognition that particular cultural groups of students had traditionally been marginalised in schooling settings, and that these students needed additional support, including in relation to more authentic forms of assessment. For the School Resource Teacher, a strong understanding of the site-based nature of assessment practice was evident in his work of integrating culturally appropriate pedagogies and assessments in relation to FNMI perspectives. A strengths-based approach was well exemplified in support for inquiry, drawing on science, mathematics and geographical disciplinary knowledge, and cultivating ‘requisite habits of mind and moral sensibilities or dispositions’ (Dottin, 2006: 28) in relation to local needs. This was evident in efforts to engage with First Nations elders in the community. For James, assessment was likely to be more authentic if students were undertaking real-world tasks and avoiding tokenistic approaches:

[We want to be] giving teachers opportunities to help plan and integrate culturally appropriate [pedagogies] … we don’t want tokenism. We don’t want maths questions where they are counting tepees or wigwams … We’re going to get some geography students to work at a local First Nation. And they are going to help GPS [Global Positioning System] tag specific sugar maple trees, do a study of the area, and then work with elders within that First Nation community to help them understand how the trees are growing over the long term. They can use that data to make good decisions, and the students can use that to understand the inquiry process in geography and science. We can integrate that in the maths classes as well. So, real-world, authentic integration of culture into the curriculum.

The strengths-based approach was seen as central to providing more substantive and productive learning experiences for students. By engaging students in culturally appropriate learning experiences, including working with elders, education can be ‘seen as the continued capacity for growth … [producing] persons who can continue to grow … become lifelong learners, and give service to others’ (Dottin, 2006: 37). Rather than simply focusing on assessment of learning, students were oriented towards long-term real-world ‘assessments’ that enabled substantive learning – that is, assessment as and for learning. These real-world tasks were reflective of the best traditions (MacIntyre, 2007) of educational practice, with their emphasis on authentically embedding assessment into students’ learning experiences in ways that enable such assessment to provide ongoing feedback to students (assessment as and for learning), rather than simply serving as a vehicle for final summative purposes (assessment of learning). Again, through such foci, policy enactment as praxis – or what we describe as ‘policy as praxis’ – was evident. In the specific case presented here, students were also empowered ‘to consider how science-based issues reflect, in part, moral principles and elements of virtue that encompass their own lives, as well as the physical and social world around them’ (Zeidler et al., 2005: 360). Notions of practice as reflective of traditions of excellence within the field of science education were apparent.

Importantly, these foci were seen as supported in policy, including at the ministry level. There was an explicit focus on student engagement and concern to ensure that students were provided with opportunities to be able to ‘connect’ with the curriculum they experienced, including through reformed assessment practices for engaged learning experiences. Furthermore, while this was understood as being an issue of concern for all students, it was particularly pertinent to FNMI students, especially in a region in which the First Nations population is a rapidly increasing part of the community. These students were not seen to be adequately catered for in the schools:

The Ministry is very concerned about student engagement … a lot of our students are coming from the north or they are urban Indigenous students. And they don’t feel connection to the culture of the classroom [through] the nature of the content that’s been delivered to them. So, we need to get students showing up more to class. We need to get our students more engaged in the learning, and then achievement will follow from that. We need to ensure that these students are achieving at the same level as all students in the district. (James)

Achievement, as the outcome of assessment, was seen as predicated on engagement in learning. For many Indigenous students, the ‘goods’ internal to excellent educational practice (see MacIntyre, 2007) had been denied them, as they experienced a decontextualised curriculum; the consequence was a relative lack of achievement, as evident in various forms of assessment. More praxis-oriented concerns, associated with a moral commitment to act (Kemmis and Smith, 2008) in relation to the needs of specific sites (Schatzki, 2002), were apparent in these concerns about FNMI student participation in formal schooling, and how this could be enhanced. In an area where students and their families experience considerable historical disadvantage across a range of educational, economic, social and health indicators, this was a particularly critical issue. The moral commitment of these educators was readily apparent in the way they knew that they needed to respond, and actively sought to do so. This focusing on ‘taking action’ (Kemmis and Smith, 2008) was also evident more broadly in the way the School Resource Teacher supported teachers who were collaborating to develop interventions to help address these concerns. In one group, teachers supported the development of a Facebook page as a form of outreach by students to members of their community, in order to help students transition from living in their home communities to a larger regional centre where they attended secondary and tertiary educational facilities. A more actively strengths-based model enabled each school to come up with its own approach to this activity, resulting in increased numbers of students and teachers self-identifying as FNMI; the latter was itself seen as particularly important for helping students identify role models in the community:

There are still a large number of students who aren’t self-identifying and there are various reasons for that. To get teachers to self-identify is something that we want to look at – developing these people within our school system that the students could really connect to. (James)

This cultural connection to their teachers was vital for students, further fostering links between schools and communities. Coming from relatively remote, close-knit communities, in which they were known, to a larger urban setting, in which they were relatively anonymous, was challenging and required a very different approach on the part of teachers beyond simply engaging in ‘school-like’ practices. In this case, productive enactment of assessment policy went well beyond reductive conceptions of test scores and other forms of academic learning, and was very much grounded in broader concerns of excellence in relation to social justice in schooling.

Advocacy for more critical pedagogies for social justice also needs to proceed cautiously, cognisant of how critical pedagogies can be highly abstract and utopian, and may reinscribe the subordination of disadvantaged groups (Ellsworth, 1989). This is exacerbated by circumstances in which ‘individuals in these societies have been acculturated to feel comfortable in relations of domination and subordination rather than equality and independence’ (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2002: 90). Social-justice-oriented approaches also have the potential to reinscribe undemocratic classroom relations, reflecting already established hierarchies and perspectives (Freedman, 2007). Also, while a valuing of Indigenous knowledges is crucial in assessment and pedagogical practices, it is only part of the solution within a world in which Indigenous epistemologies are not accorded equal respect and recognition alongside dominant knowledge traditions; however, while insufficient on its own, a more critical approach ‘is a beginning’ to challenging entrenched inequalities (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2002: 118). Even as this is challenging work, more critical responses amongst the three educators referred to here reflect evidence of efforts to foster excellence within the field of education (MacIntyre, 2007) in relation to inclusion, and FNMI perspectives in particular. Advocacy for more pedagogically relevant approaches for collecting evidence of student learning, together with efforts to build pride in FNMI self-recognition, was a concrete manifestation of these educators’ moral commitment to the work at hand and a praxis-oriented disposition more broadly.

Conclusion

All three educators engaged in professional practice as praxis that was oriented towards fostering teacher and student learning opportunities, including for the most marginalised students in the district. These instances of praxis did not exist in isolation, but were in response to efforts to enact the Growing Success policy, with its emphasis on assessment for enhanced student learning. As part of a broader raft of policies focused on enhancing students’ success in learning, the policy sought to foster transformed conditions for teacher learning for student learning. The policy emphasised values such as fairness, transparency and equity, and, arguably, such values were evident in the sorts of site-specific teacher and student learning actions that these senior educators sought to facilitate within the district. Such responsiveness was a clear example of the virtues being displayed and included critiquing problematic practices and promoting productive teacher and student learning.

In keeping with Kemmis and Smith’s (2008: 4) MacIntyre-inspired (2007) call for action ‘that is morally committed, and oriented and informed by [the best] traditions in a field’, these educators sought to actively develop improved coherence between the policy and teacher and student learning. They endeavoured to facilitate teachers’ development of a praxis-oriented stance (through the PLCs and Family of Schools), including in ways that went beyond a narrow focus on standardised data and actively engaged with traditionally marginalised FNMI communities. Such a stance is not simply the product of ‘technical’ instrumentalities/expertise, but instead the outcome of a disposition of phronēsis on the part of these educators, grounded in the needs of specific students at specific sites. Such learning, coherent with the aims of the policy, fostered a more student-centred conception of practice – a praxis-oriented conception of curriculum, pedagogy and, particularly, assessment. At the same time as encouraging students’ robust and rich understandings of particular disciplines (for example, mathematics, geography and science) and cross-disciplinarity, such ‘policy as praxis’ was also evident in support for learning beyond standardised markers of attainment and in relation to society more broadly. This included fostering more respectful relations and understandings of FNMI perspectives within Canadian society. Analysing policy enactment in relation to such praxis-oriented dispositions and practices would seem to be a particularly useful vehicle not only to evaluate the effects of policy, but also to cultivate a conception of policy productive of robust, inclusive learning practices for all students. ⁴