Learner Multiplicities and Learning Spaces and Events: Assessing a Dance

This chapter argues that seemingly singular assessment techniques might be thought about as complex spaces. Complex spaces designed by teachers that learners inhabit and influence. Complex spaces that require the learner to act in a multiplicity of ways and that produce the learner in a multiplicity of ways. The chapter also suggests that learners navigate such spaces in more linear ways (as they move from not knowing to knowing, for instance). Within complex assessment spaces (within any pedagogical space), the learner draws on what they already know, may be challenged, and may venture off into territories that are currently unintelligible. Within complex assessment/pedagogical spaces, the learner is therefore produced as someone who knows, as someone who is challenged, and also as someone who has no idea about ‘x’ as yet at all. Complex educative spaces are also in relationship with seemingly external territories that travel into educative territories with learners and possibly become part of, or entangled with, those learning environments and come to be evident in the knowledge products and learning processes that emerge within educative contexts. The chapter argues that complex educative spaces involve the coming together of a multiplicity of intra-related elements and affectivities. This chapter focuses on a single assessment practice in order to notice some of the complexity of one seemingly singular assessment event.