Learning from each other: school-university collaborative action research as praxis

Hong Kong’s education system has been undergoing major assessment reforms since 2000, exemplified by the introduction of a school-based assessment component into the secondary school English language curriculum in 2005–2007, and its extension to the final 3 years of secondary school in 2007–2010. The challenge many teachers faced at the time of the reform was understanding the new assessment for learning principles and practices that started to enter the English language teaching discourse. At the same time the researchers initiating the reform needed to theorise what it was that worked – and didn’t – thus enabling continual refinement and improvement of the key assessment principles and protocols. Theorising school-university collaboration as praxis, this paper explores how participation in a collaborative action research project helped both teachers and researchers understand the new assessment discourses and practices. Textual data on teacher feedback were analysed to show how assessment theories were teased out, tested and taken up (or not) in practice. This study makes a contribution to the fields of assessment literacy and second language teacher development by highlighting some of the complexities the teachers and researchers experienced while engaging in Western theories of learning in a Confucian heritage culture. Findings showed how definitions of assessment, in this particular case, teacher feedback to learners, were socially organised and managed through socio-political and socio-cultural discourses and norms circulating in the Hong Kong context at the time of the project, and how this informed and shaped theory-building in ways which provided the assessment reform with long-term sustainability and legitimacy. Implications for school-university partnership as praxis for teacher development in the context of assessment reform will also be discussed.