Towards a Critical Assessment Practice

• Main Authors: Ebony Magnus, Jackie Belanger, Maggie Faber
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: In the Library with the Lead Pipe 2018-10-01
• Series: In the Library with the Lead Pipe
• Subjects: assessment; critical assessment; critical methods; library assessment
• Online Access: http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/towards-critical-assessment-practice/

This article explores how librarians might meaningfully engage critical perspectives to interrogate the structures of power and methodologies that both motivate and facilitate assessment work in academic libraries. The authors aim to expand the current discussion of assessment in order to recognize and more effectively address issues of inclusion and inequality in this work. The article considers critical approaches employed in LIS, student affairs assessment, institutional and educational research, feminist and indigenous methods, and critical data studies, and draws on questions posed by these fields to imagine what inclusive assessment practices might look like for our own institutional contexts and to engage librarians in nuanced critical discussions about every stage of the assessment cycle.