Ways of seeing: using ethnography and Foucault's 'toolkit' to view assessment practices differently

Abstract

Tamboukou and Ball ask, what value can genealogy and/or ethnography add to the other? This article illustrates, through an educational exemplar study, how being genealogically driven can produce new ways of seeing and thinking about practices, within the field of educational assessment. To date, neither the qualitative nor the quantitative methods customarily applied to the assessment field have been able to illuminate why, since the late 1980s, accountability demands have caused New Zealand primary school teachers to prioritize the use of summative classroom assessment practices when research indicates that formative practices are clearly more productive of learning. Using ethnographic data gathering techniques and grounded theory in combination with Foucauldian tools and notions of genealogy, discourses, surveillance, and `the history of the present', it is argued, enabled new ways to think about why teachers have normalized particular assessment practices in New Zealand's self-managing schools. In short, this article argues that it is extremely helpful to mix modernist ethnographic methods that focus on the micro-practices of teaching with post-modernist theoretical tools in order to provide different ways of seeing.