In this section I focus on forms of assessment that are designed, administered, and evaluated by teachers themselves. Although, as I mentioned earlier, I believe that all forms of assessment have moral meaning, assessments by teachers of their own students carry particular kinds of moral significance.

Assessment and the Teacher-Student Relation
However we evaluate our students, when we come to do so we are always and inevitably faced with an insurmountable moral problem. In all that I have read on testing and teaching, I have nowhere seen it better expressed than by Nel Noddings (1984). In the following passage she begins by reaffirming the paramount importance of the teacherstudent relation: Teaching involves two persons in a special relationship. Usually, there is a fairly well-defined “something” in which the two engage, but this is not always true. Sometimes teacher and student just explore. They explore something, of course, but this something is not always prespecified; nor need it remain constant or, for that matter, even lead somewhere definite. The essence is in the relationship. In the relationship, the teacher has become a duality; she shares the view of the objects under study with the student. Then suddenly, grindingly, she must wrench herself from the relationship and make her student into an object of scrutiny, (p. 195) This “grinding” quality of assessment practices is an unavoidable consequence of the teacher-student relation. If we were merely technicians conveying information, there would be no moral dimension to assessment. However, we are not, and this dimension 65 Values in English Language Teaching not only exists but is of central importance in our approach to assessment. As teachers, we wish to be supportive—to push our students, yes, but to do so in ways that make them feel challenged yet also free to fail without consequences. At the same time, the need to evaluate—which, as I argued in the preceding section, is also a moral imperative—not only does not promote that kind of relation but actively works against it. It is important to point out that this moral dilemma does not go away when teachers do not have control over the testing practices used in their classrooms. They still participate in the processes of evaluation; from the point of view of the teacher-student relation, the net result is the same: the “grinding” sensation described by Noddings. The only difference is that the teacher has not had a voice in determining what material counts as knowledge for the purposes of the examination. In the previous section, I mentioned several ways in which assessment procedures cannot help but influence the teacher-student relation. One other crucial aspect of this influence must be mentioned here: the question of trust. Implicit in a great many aspects of testing is a lack of trust toward students: Everything from seating patterns to the meticulously controlled matter of test security are established in ways that assume a default tendency to cheat on their part. Trust, in turn, is an implicit belief in the fundamental goodness of the other. Absence of trust, by the same token, indicates a lack of a belief in the other’s basic goodness. In our mechanisms of control we are passing moral judgment on our learners.

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These two paradoxes, profound and central as they are, do not exhaust the moral contours of assessment procedures. Assessment—any form of assessment—is moral in a number of ways. First and foremost, assessment is moral because, as I mentioned earlier, it quite literally places a value on each individual student. This value is usually given either as a percentage or some other fraction, a score, or a letter grade. In the colossal majority of cases, the student falls short of mathematical “perfection.” Assessment is also moral in that most forms of assessment in some way measure one student against another—that is, they assign not just an absolute value but also a relative value. Here issues of justice creep in: There is a delicate balance between treating everyone equally and rewarding those who do better, whether through hard work, innate ability, or a combination of these (an important issue to which I return a bit later). Furthermore, assessment is moral because it often has serious real-world consequences for learners. The grades we give our students, and the scores they obtain on standardized tests, often have huge significance in their lives: Because of these scores and grades, they get or do not get accepted into programs, they are or are not given scholarships and funds, they are or are not promoted, are or are not given a raise, and so on. (Remember the consequences faced by Peter’s Palestinian student in the story told at the beginning of chap. 1.) Our decisions form the direct or indirect sources of these assessments and thus carry great moral weight, because we have to be sure (as in fact we rarely can be) that the aforementioned kinds of decisions are just and fair, that the “best” candidates (once again a moral expression) have in fact been successful. Last, assessment is also moral because, like everything else in teaching, it is conducted in complex and morally ambiguous real-world contexts, and to be understood properly it cannot be divorced from those contexts or seen to be merely about the learning of languages. The dilemma faced by Peter in chapter 1 is an example of the way in which the world beyond the language classroom can impinge hugely on our decision making in 63 Values in English Language Teaching student evaluation: Here, the political realities of life outside class made an apparently straightforward evaluation of the student’s abilities horribly complex in moral terms. The decision that Peter made had, of course, no impact on that student’s knowledge of English. My point is precisely that sometimes, whether we like it or not, a student’s abilities are not the only thing that needs to be taken into consideration. Let me share an example parallel with that of Peter. A friend of mine, Alison, recently took a junior faculty position in the French department of a well-known private university. She had a student who wished to take a minor in French; to do so, he needed a B minimum in his language classes. Yet the student was lazy and rather arrogant and signally failed to do work at a level that would allow him to receive a B.Alison gave him a lower grade. She was called to the dean, who quietly explained to Alison that this student’s parents had donated millions of dollars to the university and that the university was counting on further donations. Like Peter, Alison reluctantly changed the grade she had awarded. I tell this story not to condemn Alison, but quite the opposite—to show how complicated the real world of evaluating students can be. As with Peter, the final grade Alison gave did not in the least represent some reassessment of the student but was a result of external factors; nevertheless, the final grade is what counts in the real world.1 Neither do the moral contours of evaluation end here. An additional moral dilemma is the constant and unresolved (indeed, unresolvable) dynamic between formative and summative functions of assessment. Assessment specialists commonly draw a distinction between formative assessment—that is, assessment designed to indicate to a student how he or she is doing—with summative assessment, which measures final achievement in a course or program (Rea-Dickins & Gardner, 2000; Torrance & Pryor, 1998). Yet in reality the distinction is not clear. Certain summative forms of evaluation take on a formative role: For example, when I received what is known as an Upper Second bachelor’s degree from my university in England—a summative qualification—I also took this as a formative indication that, without a first-class degree, I had no business returning to postgraduate education. It took me some time to revise my interpretation and enter a doctoral program. Conversely—and, I believe, more commonly—grades or marks that are meant to have a formative role take on certain summative qualities. For example, many kinds of evaluation, such as quizzes and midterms, are intended to let students know how they are doing. Yet often scores from these sources also factor into final grades; thus, the evaluation is also summative in that it forms part of the summative grade. Moreover, even when this is not the case, formative evaluations look like summative ones; they often come in the form of scores on tests in which there is little in the way of feedback. I suggest that this resemblance leads learners to see the teacher as a judge rather than as a teacher, once again affecting the teacher-student relation. 1Julian Edge has pointed out to me that there are other moral aspects to this story, too. The parents’ desire to look after their son’s interests is also morally justifiable, as are the potential benefits from the expected donations to many other students at the university, including some whom scholarship money would allow to participate in otherwise prohibitively expensive programs. The Morality of Testing and Assessment 64 Last, the truly dilemmatic nature of approaches to assessment is underscored by the fact that, in light of the paradox of the necessary evil, a decision not to use any form of assessment at all is also a moral act. By choosing not to give any exams or other methods of assessment, a teacher is of course relieving students of the stress and all the attendant vagaries of determining what counts as knowledge. However, such a teacher is also sending other moral messages to her students. Many students might believe that this decision reflects an underlying indifference to what the students learn and hence to them as people; that is, once again it will affect the teacher-student relation. Students who would normally strive to excel will have a reduced motivation to do so—in fact, only those students truly engaged in the subject matter are likely to remain unaffected and, as most teachers would agree, such students are rarely in the majority (Milton, Pollio, & Eison, 1986). Furthermore, regardless of the theoretical arguments, exams can function to help students distinguish important from less important aspects of what they cover; the absence of exams makes such distinctions much harder. In many ways, then, the moral landscape of assessment is complex and difficult terrain. Both the inner workings of assessment procedures and their broader sociopolitical context are such that questions of assessment are always also questions of values. These values, in turn, are never straightforward but always fraught with conflict.

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The first paradox is that of test subjectivity. On the one hand, testers place great emphasis on the goal of objectivity in testing. This seems, by and large, a worthy goal. Yet testing, more than any other aspect of teaching, is value laden—and, as we have seen, values are inherently subjective in nature (Gipps & Murphy, 1994). The selection of what to test, how it will be tested, and how scores are to be interpreted are all acts that require human judgment; that is, they are subjective acts. The preceding example of Wen-Hsing and her colleagues is a miniature example of this process. It follows quite naturally that the process of assigning and grading a test or other work by a student—that is, the process of evaluation—is precisely that: a process of placing a value on the head of each individual student. If this is not a moral act, nothing is. Furthermore, while subjectivity is on the whole not a desirable quality, flexibility is; and flexibility in testing—accepting the word playing in Wen-Hsing’s test, for example, when the official key allows only talking—can be achieved only through the subjective decision making of a particular teacher with particular students who happen to produce these answers (once again, we find ourselves back at the critical place of the teacher-student relation). The second paradox, which intermeshes with and compounds the first, is what I shall refer to as the paradox of the necessary evil. On the one hand, tests and other forms of assessment are undesirable, and a great many teachers dislike them. Not only are they unreliable and inherently disposed to unfairness, as described earlier, but they are also stressful on students (and, in different ways, on teachers, too), and they take precious time and attention from what most of us see as the real purpose of education: learning. Tests are often designed more from the point of view of administrative convenience than that of the students’ needs. Furthermore, there is an ever-present political aspect to testing The Morality of Testing and Assessment 62 that often takes over: The already unhealthy societal preoccupation with testing magnifies these problems to the point where the processes and goals of education are seriously undermined. On the other hand, however, most teachers would also recognize that some form of evaluation, though it may not be pleasant, is in fact essential not just for the convenience of the teacher or the school but for the learners themselves. Learners, and their teachers, need to have a sense of how well they are doing: of their progress, of how their work measures up to expectations, maybe even of how they stand in relation to their peers. Without this information, they can feel lost and adrift. Furthermore, many teachers (myself included) like to be able to have some way of rewarding outstanding work and giving due recognition to those who perform particularly well. Thus, while evaluation is undesirable for moral reasons, it is at the same time necessary, also for moral reasons; it is a necessary evil. These, then, are the two fundamental paradoxes with which we enter the discussion of values and assessment in language teaching: the first is the dynamic of objectivity and subjectivity in testing; the second is the simultaneous desirability and undesirability of assessment.

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I start this chapter with a very simple story about tests told to me by Wen-Hsing, a former student of mine who now teaches at a secondary school back home in Taiwan. Wen- Hsing recently sent me an e-mail about what happened when she and her colleagues were grading the English language component of an entrance exam: One section of the English test was: “According to the picture, answer the following five questions.” It was a picture of a classroom, where there is a teacher standing and six students seated. It looked like two of the students were talking to each other and the teacher was not happy about it. One of the five questions was “Why is the teacher angry? The teacher is angry because students are__.” This blank only allowed one word and the “standard” answer, according to the test-giver, was “talking.” When we were grading the answer sheet, we found there were a variety of answers and some of them that seemed possible were “playing,” “noisy,” “bad.” Thus, we voted to decide if we would accept these answers. Interestingly, “noisy” and “bad” were accepted but “playing” was rejected. The reason of the majority was that we could not tell from the picture whether these two students were playing or not. Well then, I asked them, “Can you tell from the picture that these two are bad?” The answer I got was “We all agreed not to include ‘playing’ in the answers. If we reached an agreement, it is fine.” Although I would like to give students whose answer was “playing” credit, I couldn’t do it and I graded those answer sheets the way I was told to do. This case was not unique. It happened every time I graded in the entrance exam. I don’t know why some possible answers were accepted but some were not. I think it is good to have students answer questions according to the picture they see, but is it necessary to restrict the number of answers? You know what, I always felt “not so good” after grading because there was always one or two answers that would arise dispute. The problems faced by Wen-Hsing and her colleagues reveal the profoundly moral nature of assessment in language teaching. These Taiwanese teachers are striving to adjudicate which knowledge is sanctioned and which is not; their deliberations involve drawing lines in the sand where there are few if any objective criteria unambiguously separating right from wrong. Yet the consequences of their decisions will be visited on the children of their classes and, over time, will become part of each child’s permanent record. Of course, one could argue that the item in question is simply badly designed and that what is needed is just a better test composed of less ambiguous questions. Yet I believe that anyone who has tried to write a test, whether a professional test designer or a classroom teacher, will recognize the difficulties the Taiwanese teachers face. With such a phenomenally complex thing as a language, there are limitless problems that arise in determining ways of testing students’ knowledge; the more complicated and interesting that knowledge becomes, the harder it is to test (Bachman, 2000). Furthermore, those who are most adept at writing test items—professional testers—are also those farthest removed from the classroom, and thus they lack information about what has been covered in class by particular groups of students. All of us are obliged to make do with faulty tools in the work of evaluating students. In this chapter I explore the moral dynamics underlying various aspects of testing and evaluation. During the discussion, I raise many complex moral questions both about traditional forms of evaluation such as standardized tests and examinations, and about alternative approaches to assessment such as portfolios. I argue, however, that two profound moral paradoxes underlie the entire realm of language testing and assessment.

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From a perspective of values, however, rejecting critical pedagogy does not really get us very far, because we are still faced with the same moral problems. I have known several teachers who found the discussions about the political role of the English language that we had in our classes to be profoundly disturbing, precisely in the sense that they presented moral dilemmas quite independently of whether one embraced critical pedagogy or not. Indeed, the dilemma ran even deeper: If the spread of English is having, and has had, such a devastating effect on peoples and cultures across the world, do I even wish to continue to be a part of it? I have not known teachers who actually gave up teaching for this reason (though I can imagine it happening), but for many teachers, once they develop an awareness of their own implication in the global processes described by Pennycook (1994), Phillipson (1992), and others, they often find that, as happened to me, their view of the world and, more specifically, their own personal and professional role in it, are radically and permanently changed. At the same time, not many take up critical pedagogy; most continue to teach in ways that are not radically different. Why is this? My feeling is that underlying this whole issue is one of the most profound moral dilemmas of the ELT profession. This dilemma lies in a moral disjuncture between the broader political processes described earlier in this chapter and the inherent goodness that teachers know for certain is an element of their classrooms. For most teachers, the immediate moral contours of the classroom are clearly delimited: There is moral worth in developing positive and encouraging relations with their learners and in acting as a cultural bridge between them and the new culture; there is moral worth in teaching another language; and there is moral worth in giving these particular individuals access to English, which, other things being equal, may well improve their lives in any number of potential ways, whether material, intellectual, or spiritual. Yet when the teachers look at the political interests vested in English, and at the history of its spread, they cannot deny that it has been and continues to be a virulent and predacious scourge on the other languages and cultures of the world. The dilemma dwells in the sheer impossibility of reconciling these two facts. On the one hand, it is a good thing to teach English, and the teaching of English is good in several ways that one would like to think of as universal values. On the other hand, the teaching of English is a bad thing, and it is bad in ways that one would also wish to see as universal evils. What is one to do in the face of this dilemma? How does one move forward knowing both that teaching itself is a moral imperative, and yet that one is simultaneously implicated in devastating social, cultural and political processes? I do not have any easy (or even difficult) solutions. The one thing I know is that each teacher must pick her own path. Critical pedagogy offers one way forward but, as I pointed out earlier, this is a way that itself requires a particular set of values and moral choices, and it is not for everyone. It is not an easy puzzle; neither can it be solved by a single decision, but like other moral dynamics it must constantly be addressed with each new group of students and each new teaching and learning situation. I only hope that by showing the problem for what it really Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching 58 is—a moral dilemma that is both highly complex and terribly important—I have helped you to be able to think about it in new and enlightening ways.


QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1. Recall the problem faced by Kay in her work in the Central African Republic. What should she do in this situation? What would you do in her place? What values would affect your decision about whether to push for mother-tongue education or whether to concentrate on French?

2. Now look back at the brief description of my work with the Dakota. What, if anything, could or should I have done in this situation? To what extent did I have a right, or a duty, to take further action? Furthermore, what do you think about the question of who was “right” in this context, Angela Wilson or the Tribal Council? What further information would you need in order to decide? Morally speaking, could this conflict be resolved? What other courses of action were open to us?

3. Consider the situation from Bowers and Godfrey’s (1985) book presented on p. 62. Are the authors of the book correct to label Yuen-Li’s situation a problem? What is your view of the situation presented in this vignette?

4. What is your response to the course of action chosen by Brian Morgan (1997) in his class? How would you have handled the same situation? More generally, how do you decide when your values should override those of your students or the alleged values of their cultures?

5. What do you think about the possibility of using critical pedagogy in EFL settings? What do you think might happen if such an approach were taken in an EFL context with which you are familiar?

6. Consider your own teaching situation. What political forces act on it? Who gets to choose what books are used, what cur-riculum is selected, or how examinations are organized? What values are brought to bear in these decisions?

7. The spread of English in the world has been widely documented. What is your view of this process? What values does the spread of English carry with it—for example, in the teaching context in which you work?

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Critical Pedagogy Reassessed

As I have explained elsewhere (B.Johnston, 1999b), I am not entirely convinced by critical pedagogy, I have several objections, all of which have a moral coloring. First, I find a lot of writing about critical pedagogy to be too abstract, theoretical, and couched in exclusionary language; in this I believe that many theorists have failed in their moral obligation to make their ideas fully accessible to others, especially practicing teachers. Second, I resent the posturing that accompanies a lot of the theoretical work in mainstream education (and is mercifully absent in most critical pedagogical writings in ELT); this writing claims the moral high ground in debates over the political nature of schooling, and I believe that such a claim does not support the best interests of teachers and learners (Janangelo, 1993). My primary point of disagreement with critical pedagogy, however, is not so much an intellectual objection as a difference of axiomatic starting points. While Giroux, McLaren, Pennycook and others see teaching as above all involving issues of politics and power, my view is that the most basic quality of teaching is its moral dimension. The ways in which political interests and power relations exist in all educational contexts is of very great importance; I have tried to underline this fact by placing the present chapter near the beginning of my book. However, my view of teaching rests ultimately on a different assumption. At heart, teaching for me is not about political interests. It is about the teacher-student relation and about the nurturing of learning. Giroux, McLaren, Pennycook and oth-ers are themselves teachers, both in university classrooms and through their writings. The reason they teach, and the reason people go to their classes and read their books, is because teaching and learning are inherently valuable processes. One of the things that attracts me to critical pedagogy, on the other hand, is that, as my own personal experience has shown me, many of the pedagogical elements of the critical approach—empowering learners, giving them voice, helping them to see the interestedness of knowledge claims and allowing them to become producers rather than only consumers of knowledge—quite simply constitute excellent pedagogy, from a moral standpoint as well as an educational one. Let me approach this from another angle. Returning to my own experiences, how was it possible for us to even live in such an oppressive context as that of Communist Poland? It was possible because life is not just about politics, power, and the struggle for social change. People lead rich and fulfilling lives in even the most repressive of regimes, simply because life can never be reduced to political oppression. While a few heroic individuals—the Lech Wałęsas and the Anna Walentynowiczes of the world—took on the political struggle, the rest of us were just trying to live ordinary lives, and for the most part succeeding. In most cases, you do not need to engage in a political struggle to love your family, to enjoy the company of your friends, and to do good and important work, and you do not need complete democracy to engage in meaningful teaching and learning with your students. Democracy, freedom, and social change are all terribly important, but for the great majority of us the real business of life can and must go on regardless, whatever our political context. The alternative view—that until equality among all people is achieved we must devote ourselves above all to the struggle for social change—strikes me as being a bleak prospect indeed, and one that denies the richness and profound humanity of relation, including the teacher-learner relation, as it is played out in whatever circumstances it has found itself. 57 Values in English Language Teaching

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