What are the relationships between educational democratic culture and assessment models?

Abstract

The paper is a case study centered on teachers’ discourse as posted in asynchronous discussion threads on an online conversational platform created within the framework of the Pestalozzi Programme of the Council of Europe. This programme was conceived as a means of professional development of teachers from 47 member states. Indicators to scrutinize participants’ discourse on assessment supplemented thematic and lexical analysis. Particular attention was paid to the question of democracy, at the center of the discourse of participants who, in the course of conversation, formed the contours of a community sharing a micro-culture. If, for these educators, formative assessment represents the form of evaluation par excellence, the discussions between members of the community raise questions that concern the range of possible implementations as well as the possibility of developing the approaches in assessment in the face of institutional and societal injunctions. It reveals a tension between "what we know we should do" and "what it is really possible to do". This discursive tension, beyond the cognitive dissonance it provokes, has the effect of nurturing a strongly shared aim to promote democracy and to reach the means of achieving more democracy in environments that are not fundamentally democratic. Results suggest a “blind spot” in the present literature regarding principles of formative assessment, namely the question of democracy in education: with its different dimensions such as cultural sensitivity, social justice, addressing effects of poverty and discrimination, ethos and the relationship between policy makers and practitioners.