Assessment in Educational Practice: Forming Pedagogised Identities in the Art Curriculum

This paper draws on the work of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida in order to present a discussion of how students and teachers in the field of art and design education achieve their pedagogised identities. My purpose is to offer some thoughts on assessment by advocating a project of difference which attempts to embrace children’s and student’s ontological orientations of practice. Assessment discourses which assume universal and essentialist ideas of ability are criticised and shown to presuppose objective or naturalist fantasies. A valuing of difference and the singularity of practice is proposed by describing five drawings produced by Year 7 students in a London secondary school, and then by referring to the Lacanian Real in order to extricate the art object from normative assessment discourses.