deleted from student reflections:

Eli: The students’ process of shaping the event, which will hopefully be allotted some class time, could be likened to an amorphous ball of clay that is progressively shaped and molded, gaining a more unique shape and more precise detail as the process continues. Imagine also that this clay ball is not shaped by one set of hands, but many working together. Each set of hands focuses on the particular aspect of the sculpture they most want to see, and no particular vision of the final work takes precedence. This does not necessarily constitute a radical break from traditional modes of assessment. As you can see, many of its ancient foundations remain. This is not a paradigmatic shift but rather a careful attention to what aspects of assessment could be tweaked, slightly shifted, hopefully in favour of the student experience and of the process of learning itself. Our aspiration is that these subtle shifts not only lead to better designed assignments, but by considering the design of assessment in the first place we can reconceptualize and defamiliarize assessment from a “matter of fact” to a “matter of concern;”moved from the realm of academic hegemony and thereby becoming something that can be engaged with critically and evaluated (Latour).