Assessing interdependent responsibility

Abstract

Education has the potential to engage youth and make space for them to step into their power as they experience and critically consider themselves part of the wider world. This type of learning and teaching is becoming increasingly challenging in an educational climate where education policies and assessment measures are based on a sense of responsibility as accountability. In this rejoinder, we argue that accountability mandates lead youth away from the type of responsibility that leads to a responsive and engaged population in interconnected worlds and explore more evolved, organic types of responsibility as integral to our learning with youth in education. These types of responsibility rest on conceptions of learning as transformative. We discuss how we can measure this sort of learning and responsibility in schools. Drawing on voices of participants involved in a service-learning experience, we explore the consequences of an education that fosters these types of responsibility and emphasize the potential of an education that fosters interdependent responsibility: