I needed some inspiration for this post---it's hard to read an article about something that you have no connection with (mental note for teaching my own class). It's also hard to get in the groove of reading when you have to stop and re-read words every so often, but I did get the author's purpose of including the language in her article to emphasize the importance of the Maori values and understandings in this approach to assessment.
My first reaction was I think it's awesome that they developed this method of assessing the students based around the cultural values and important world views of the Maori people. Can you imagine if we were able to develop these sort of authentic assessments for the Yup'ik culture/region/communities we live in, and these were used to determine whether the student would be a contributing member to the society they live in? Instead we are up against state and federal mandated assessments that are so restricting, we have to be very creative in our teaching to embed all the required standards into our lesson plans. We have to get students prepared to test--which is a whole other can of worms.
One quote from the article that I particularly agree with is "Assessment of children should encompass all dimensions of children's learning and development and should see the child as a whole" This is the Maori idea of "Kotahitanga." I've always felt that this is very important, which is another reason high stakes testing is irritating, because it doesn't look at the child as a whole, it is one-dimensional. I think classroom assessments should give students a variety of ways to demonstrate their knowledge/skill/learning so that the teacher does get a complete view of the student.
I think there is much that can be learned from the Maori people in this study, and how we might go about incorporating some of their approaches into developing authentic assessments for our region.
P.S. hi to my class!!! I miss you all :)
p.p.s. Erin--the picture is mainly for you.
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