Speaker Announcement: “Resisting Assessment” – an Interview with Sara Martín and Bill Phillips

The first presentation to be announced for The Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE2021), held concurrently with The Barcelona Conference on Arts, Media & Culture (BAMC2021) is an interview session titled “Resisting Assessment” with Sara Martín of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and Bill Phillips of University of Barcelona, Spain.

The BCE/BAMC2021 Organising Committees are currently calling for papers to be presented at the joint event. Submit your abstracts by October 8, 2021 to participate.

To participate in BCE/BAMC2021 as an audience member, please register for the conference via the conference websites. (Registration for either conference will allow delegates to attend sessions in the other.)

The interview will also be available for IAFOR Members to view online. To find out more, please visit the IAFOR Membership page.



Abstract

Resisting Assessment

We are probably all familiar with students asking us the question “Will this be in the exam?” Given that we are educators, it should be obvious to us that it is we who have trained our students to ask this question. We – or the educational system of which we form a part – have taught them that it is assessment and certification which counts, not education. When considering means of assessment, as we are often required to do in staff meetings and training sessions, do we ever begin by actually reflecting on its purpose?

Giving examples from the teaching of modern languages in Catalan schools and universities, Bill Phillips will look at how assessment determines teaching content and how this can have devastating consequences for learning. Sara Martín will be describing her experience of teaching project-oriented courses in which the habitual system of exercise-based assessment is abandoned in favour of the collective production of an online e-book, and in which self-assessment is as important as the teacher's assessment.


Speaker Profile

Bill Phillips

University of Barcelona, Spain

Bill Phillips, University of Barcelona, SpainBill Phillips is a senior lecturer in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Barcelona, Catalonia. He has published widely on poetry in English, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, science fiction and crime fiction. Together with other members of the Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, based at the University of Barcelona, his most recent research has been on postcolonial crime fiction and he is currently working on the Sean Duffy novels of Adrian McKinty, and the crime novels of Jacob Ross.


Sara Martín

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Dr Martín specialises in Gender Studies, particularly Masculinities Studies, which she applies to the study of popular fictions in English, with an emphasis on science fiction. Her most recent books are Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in British Fiction: From Hitler to Voldemort (2019) and Representations of Masculinity in Literature and Film: Focus on Men (2020).


Posted by IAFOR