Assessment can be unwieldy. It cuts time up into knowing and unknowing without any sensitivity to what will come later, or how context could shift understanding. I started each class on my practicum with an introduction and discussion of mindfulness and reinforcement of art class as a safe place to make mistakes and learn new things. Many students appeared to believe that they either had artistic talents or they didn’t based on previous successes or perceived failures. I worked hard to convince them that the range of success was much wider than they knew and to be open minded to their ideas and the ideas of others. I also wanted to shift their idea of final assessment from being so entirely final to being one stop along a much longer road. If they keep working then no assessment is final.
I did accept re-submission of work that students continued to refine outside of class. I did accept late assignments without penalty, but there was always an acknowledgement that the timeline existed and all attempts should be made to meet deadlines so that we could freely move on to other projects without getting bogged down.
I also came to recognize that not every student in my class is there to be an artist. Some of them take every art class they can fit in their schedules, some have no idea why they are there, others are daunted by their vulnerability and lack of previous exposure and never feel like they are making progress. I think part of my job in assessing their work is to point out the progress they are making. Technical skill can be learned, but the creative aspect of art is subjective and success in this is often hard to see as a student, especially when you are conditioned to see success as a linear progression in nearly every other class.
Sometimes the biggest success a student can have in art class is a risk that ends in an unexpected result. The student response to this is often disappointment, but in my view, the risk is worth more than the product. Gambling on an idea is life blood of meaningful discovery in the arts as well as in academics and more importantly in life. To make assessment of learning something that turns the process of learning into the production of a series of expected results is missing the bigger picture. In life we almost never know what will happen and I believe the assessment process in art class should reinforce resiliency and feed into healthy perceptions of risk and reward.