Learning from each other: school-university collaborative action research as praxis

Abstract

This paper reports on the processes and outcomes of a school-university project in the context of language assessment reform in Hong Kong through the lens of collaboration as praxis, showing how participation in the project helped both teachers and researchers make sense of new assessment theories, discourses and practices. Abstract (300 words) This paper explores the tensions and complexities of developing common understandings of assessment literacy through a collaborative action research project in the Hong Kong sociocultural context. Hong Kong’s education system has been undergoing major assessment reforms since 2000, exemplified by the introduction of a school-based assessment (SBA) component into the high school English language curriculum in 2005. The challenge many teachers faced at the time of the reform was making sense of the new assessment for learning principles and practices that started to enter the English language teaching discourse. At the same time the researchers initiating the reform needed to theorise what it was that worked – and what it was that didn’t - thus enabling continual refinement and improvement of the key assessment principles and protocols. Drawing on the principles of critical discourse analysis and sociocultural theory, we share textual data (interviews, emails and meeting transcripts) from a large scale action - research study to show how ideas and theories were teased out, tested and taken up (or not) in practice. The results suggest that both teachers and researchers negotiated assessment practices that were highly pragmatic to meet their individual as well as institutional needs and learning goals. Teachers and researchers who collaborated to investigate a common topic may or may not have shared the same motivations for collaboration, so collaboration principles were contextualized and negotiated. The study showed how assessment principles and practices were socially organised and managed through sociopolitical and sociocultural discourses and norms circulating in the Hong Kong context at the time of the project, and this informed and shaped theory-building in ways which provided the assessment reform with long-term sustainability and legitimacy. The implications for school-university partnership as praxis for the professional development of teachers in the context of assessment reform will also be discussed. Key words: English language teachers, school-university collaboration, praxis; professional development, assessment reform; collaborative action research