Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment 833
Also, to function independently individuals need to be able to self-assess rather than rely on
external assessments by other individuals. Authentic assessment strategies need to be acquired
because when the assessment need arises, it will be in a real-life context, not in a decontextualized
classroom context. How then are these requirements of multiple and authentic assessment in later
real-life situations best met? The answer is found in how professionals engage in assessment.
They use journals, rubrics, portfolios, and peer and self-assessments.
Teachers and Students as Scholar-Practitioners
Reconceptualized education requires teachers and students to perform roles that are quite
different from their roles in a technical rational system. One term that can be used to capture
this very different role is scholar-practitioner. Scholar-practitioners are individuals who have the
attitude and ability to utilize scholarly and experiential knowledge and skills, viewed by them
as dynamically interrelated entities, in their understanding of phenomena and in their solution
of problems. Teachers as scholar-practitioners are not the deskilled technicians of technical
rational systems, but individuals who as scholars can use scholarly knowledge and skills to better
understand and shape their practice. They are practitioners who can use their practical knowledge
to critique the formal theory and the theory that emerges from their practice. Above all, scholarpractitioners
are critical in that the theory that they engage and the practice in which they are
involved is critically interrogated with a fundamental concern for the promotion of social justice,
an ethic of caring, and democratic participation. Through their scholarship and practice, they are
not micro-managed individuals but self-empowered professionals who engage in a critical praxis
in their classrooms, schools, and communities.
Teachers such as this are skeptics and critics who, through their critical interrogation of
social phenomena, strive to facilitate the construction of egalitarian, caring, and democratic
communities. In the context of educational communities such as the classroom, the school, and
the larger community in which the school is nested, they use their interdisciplinary orientation,
critical thinking, and postformal perspective to construct effective and egalitarian pedagogical
environments. As researchers, they are bricoleurs who utilize a wide range of inquiry methods and
knowledge bases to build egalitarian communities through the use of a critical pedagogy. They
understand the situatedness of their own teaching and learning, and critically reflect upon their
understandings as they are socially constructed in relation to the changing context of their place
and their social interactions with others. They are critically pragmatic in that they are consequence
focused, and critically interrogate their actions and the consequences of their actions. They value
self-assessment and engage in continuous authentic and multiple assessment of themselves and
their activity.
Likewise, students in a reconceptualized educational environment are scholar-practitioners in
training. Unlike technical rational systems, students are empowered and active constructors of
knowledge within authentic contexts. As student researchers, they are personally empowered
through a critical pedagogy that requires them to experiment, discover, create, problem-solve,
think, and act. By developing cooperative skills and dispositions, they learn the value of fostering
community and the necessity of critically focused participation within a community. Through
authentic assessment, they experience the validation and empowerment that is the result of
personal growth. And in the end, they are transformed into life-long learners.
FURTHER READING
Thornburg, D. (2002). The New Basics: Education and the Future of Work in the Telematic Age. Alexandria,
VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.