Do it with joy, and you are the solution: Practical philosophy as conversations about assessment in school

Abstract

This article is about assessment, school reform and research considered in a simultaneous and integrated manner. The goal is, through deconstruction and deconstructuralist methods, to develop a more open and nuanced education language for use in assessment, in the school and in research into assessment practices. In conversations about quality in both education and research, language might become that quality of turning pedagogy or research into a discursive field and, ultimately, school into a discursive institution. Hopefully and happily lost, it might then be possible to close the door to authoritative words, thoughts, knowledge, methods, reforms, models, systems and/or institutions, not to forget them but to avoid being captured by them. Knowledge production is regarded as a reflexive and circular inter- or intrasubjective activity through language and a view of school as an institution primarily educating subjects.