‘Staying with the trouble’: New possibilities for assessment and feedback in Higher Education
Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor of Higher Education, and Head of the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey, UK.
This keynote will explore how we might respond to some of the most critical challenges surrounding assessment and feedback in contemporary higher education. Teaching today is a complex, evolving and troubling practice, and yet meaningful teaching still has the power to both inspire and change lives. Educators work in difficult times: financial constraints have caused turbulence across institutions, and the impacts of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) are destabilising the ways in which we understand what it means to teach, learn and assess learning, and blurring the boundaries between human and machine. Within these troubled waters, sit assessment and feedback, arguably the most challenging areas of practice to make ‘work’. Already a site of temporal strain, assessment and feedback practices lead to lower ‘satisfaction’ scores, and regularly provoke conversations regarding teacher labour and value. Questions such as: how to respond to the vulnerability of assessment within an AI-mediated era, how to evolve our feedback processes, or how to make sense of a cacophony of efficiency discourses, have become pressing. In this keynote, I draw upon my theory-practice to respond to some of these questions, and think with Donna Haraway (2016) to argue that it is critical that we stay with this trouble. I will share some examples of responses that include assessment redesign, a feedback manifesto, and research that seeks to surface students’ experience of the AI-mediated university. Assessment and feedback in higher education is experiencing a significant period of uncertainty and challenge. I will argue that responses to this will be collective, creative, and rich with new possibilities.
Biography
Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor of Higher Education, and Head of the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey, UK. Karen’s research focuses on learning and teaching in higher education and has been funded by the Society for Research into Higher Education, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, The UK Literacies Association, The Association of Learning Developers in Higher Education, and The British Association of Applied Linguistics. Karen is an Executive Editor for the journal Teaching in Higher Education and a member of the Editorial board for Learning, Media and Technology. She is also a a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA) and an Honorary Associate Professor for the Centre for Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE) at Deakin University.
Karen’s latest books are Reconceptualising Teaching in Higher Education: Connected Practice for Changing Times, Critical Practice in Higher Education, and Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education.
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