Decolonizing, Historicizing, and Communing

Rooted in the educational thinking of Paulo Freire’s humanizing pedagogy and humanizing research, humanizing assessment presents a shift in the framing of assessment from a focus on instrument development to how peoples encounter tests throughout their lives. Schissel (2025) explores humanizing assessment as decolonizing, historicizing, and communing interdependent acts that seek to honor the lived realities of peoples.

A Brief Overview of Humanizing Pedagogy

Humanizing pedagogy, as synthesized by Dr. María del Carmen Salazar (2013), is characterized by 5 tenets and 10 principles.

5 Tenets of Humanizing Pedagogy (pp. 128-138)

1. The full development of the person is essential for humanization.

2. To deny someone else’s humanization is also to deny one’s own.

3. The journey for humanization is an individual and collective endeavor toward critical consciousness.

4. Critical reflection and action can transform structures that impede our own and others’ humanness, thus facilitating liberation for all.

5. Educators are responsible for promoting a more fully human world through their pedagogical principles and practices.

10 Principles of Humanizing Pedagogy (pp. 138-141)

1. The reality of the learner is crucial.

2. Critical consciousness is imperative for students and educators.

3. Students’ sociocultural resources are valued and extended.

4. Content is meaningful and relevant to students’ lives.

5. Students’ prior knowledge is linked to new learning.

6. Trusting and caring relationships advance the pursuit of humanization.

7. Mainstream knowledge and discourse styles matter.

8. Students will achieve through their academic, intellectual, social abilities.

9. Student empowerment requires the use of learning strategies.

10. Challenging inequity in the educational system can promote transformation.

Humanizing Research

Paris and Winn (2014) present participatory theories and practices that offer better understandings of how to use research for positive social change. Their central question, “In what ways does our work shape, sort, and decide who counts?“(p. 2), captures a reflective stance for humanizing assessment.

Humanizing Assessment

In upcoming journal special issues, theories and practices undergirding humanizing assessment are being explored to amplify interdependent perspectives that share commitments to liberatory practices. These areas of research seek to complicate and deepen understandings of humanizing assessment, including how Schissel (2025) has described humanizing assessment as decolonizing, historicizing, and communing.

Decolonizing (p. 139)

To address conflicting agendas and interests around assessment designs and purposes. What are the limitations of the field of assessment and in such forms of knowledge production? What can testing practitioners learn about assessment from teachers and learners? Others most immediately impacted by test use? Decolonizing assessment is inherently challenging given that assessment approaches that are often most familiar are reflective of coloniality and modernity (Schissel, 2024). Operationalization of knowledge into sequential categories and subcategories, rankings, and notions of objectivity and rigor are all tied into many forms of assessment (de Souza Santos, 2019; Makoni & Pennycook, 2005; Mignolo, 2007). Yet, working to creatively reimagine assessments that are actively working toward supporting decolonizing activities can take many forms. This can include reimagining the use of assessments that are somewhat more familiar, such as portfolio or self- assessments, as well as assessments that have very little or nothing in common with large-scale, standardized assessments. Decolonizing in these ways means working with flexible, adaptable methods rather than looking toward standardized processes and procedures.

Historicizing (p. 140)

To center the humanity, the lived realities of test-takers’ lives and decenter assessments as a matter of ethics and racial justice. How have assessments contributed to harmful marginalization and discrimination? Specifically for minoritized peoples? Assessment use with language- minoritized communities has a long history of contributing to harmful actions (Au, 2022; Schissel, 2019; Shohamy, 2001). One potential outcome of historicizing is the recognition of minoritized individuals and their cumulative experiences as the priority, drawing from a genealogical perspective (Foucault, 1977) that works to destabilize the categories that assessments are often designed to reify. The development of documents such as The Standards represents some guidance on ethical issues, yet they also function to reinscribe positions and histories of actions that have contributed to decades of harm against minoritized peoples (Poe et al., 2023). Although macroethics can be a reference point, they are often ‘too generic’ to substantively inform methods to address ethical dilemmas (De Costa, 2016, p. 4). The longstanding harm that assessments have contributed to as a matter of focus, therefore, looms large in this the historicizing aspect of humanizing assessments.

Communing (p. 140)

To work toward developing relationships through communing for assessment creation. What types of relationships do test users desire to have with assessment practitioners, if any? How do all parties involved in an assessment come together in a way that facilitates trust? Relationship building is a complex process that is always in flux (Campano et al., 2010; Whetung & Wakefield, 2018). It requires the parties involved to be flexible (Smith et al., 2010) and responsive (Fine et al., 2008) to each other and their needs. In the dialogues and negotiations of actions, they must find some shared understanding of the reasons or purposes for coming together and the power dynamics of everyone involved and with the larger society as a whole. In these interactions, who sets the priorities and why is central to communing. Echoing Campano et al. (2010), these forms of communing are less about producing a particular product or meeting a shared goal– in this case, an assessment – but the process of coming together in and of itself is most valuable. These types of horizontal communication can foster positive interdependence among researchers, educators, and test users.