Re-examining the tensions between educators’ beliefs about assessment and its enactment in practice: a collaborative symbiotic autoethnographic study

As Higher and Further Education colleagues working within three English universities and one further education college, they came together in an informal writing group to share their experiences and expectations of assessment and feedback. They work in teacher or education professional development. Between them they have been involved in secondary, further, higher education and health professional education. Assessment has been a core feature of their roles baffling and hampering their work as educators with students or staff colleagues. They are in uneasy times, faced with the explicit recognition of the purpose and context of artificial intelligence influences on assessment submissions (as one example). In the paper, they present a curation of autoethnographic narratives drawn from a range of educational experiences as student and teacher. Their stories are placed deliberately to challenge or add to what has already been read and to provoke your reflections on some of the uncomfortable truths of assessment processes and practices in education worldwide.