Professor Paul Kleiman, Higher Education Consultant with Ciel Associates and Visiting Professor
Drawing on Experience: Revealing the emotional impact of and responses to assessment through visualisation
‘The first thing I thought about was being lost in darkness. When I was a student the analysis of clumsy assessment made me lose all touch with my own instincts. A failure and alone. As a teacher I am afraid of doing that to them. Also, of missing the good stuff that some students are not making apparent.’
‘This is where I’m at regarding assessment. Student work is expansive, multi-dimensional, multi-coloured. Dynamic and non-linear. This is how I sometimes feel when I come to quantify (assess) a student’s work – like I’m funneling a wild and wonderful rainbow into a grid better suited to game of noughts and crosses.‘
Strong emotions and attitudes often swirl around assessment – whether one is an assessor or being assessed (Holmes, 2023; Kleiman, 2022; Wass, Timmermans, et al., 2020). But we tend, typically, to avoid talking about the affective aspects of assessment. Instead, we adopt a ‘professional objectivity’ that frequently masks very real issues and concerns about assessment. Those concerns are both personal and for and on behalf of our students.
Exploring and opening up ‘difficult’ topics through imagery and visual narratives is an engaging and memorable technique compared to traditional textual and auditory methods. It is successful in bringing out aspects of both the emotional and cognitive experience of assessment, including hidden assumptions (Zhao, Cox, et al., 2021).
This interactive workshop explores feeling and attitudes towards assessment using visualisation techniques. It is open to colleagues from across all disciplines and, be assured, no experience of drawing or art-making is required. This image-making or visualisation technique can be used with students or staff as a way of exploring any topic.
Biography
Paul is a Higher Education Consultant with Ciel Associates and a Visiting Professor. His work and research on creativity and innovative assessment is cited widely in books and journals across a range of disciplines and has a national and international reputation as a consultant and speaker. He was a keynote speaker at AHE 2023. He originally trained and worked as a theatre designer, and worked successfully – as a designer, director, performer and writer – before ‘accidentally stumbling’ into teaching in further and then higher education. He was a founding tutor of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts where he devised and implemented a negotiated approach to assessment. From 2000-2014 he was Deputy Director of PALATINE, the LTSN (then HEA) UK Subject Centre for Dance, Drama and Music. In 2014 he established, with Jo Richler, the Ciel Associates consultancy. To escape, he and his partner (plus the compulsory dog) spend time on an old narrowboat which they restored.
ahenetwork.org 