Classroom writing assessment and feedback practices: A new materialist encounter

The mainstream approach to teacher assessment literacy seems to be founded on a (post)positivist paradigm leading to an autonomous model of literacy comprised of generic knowledge and skills. This paradigm obscures the non-cognitive, embodied, and affective dimensions of assessment practices. In this conceptual inquiry, I use the New Materialist philosophy to make sense of writing assessment literacy and feedback practices. In New Materialisms, the materiality of everything is emphasized, ontology is flat, reality is becoming, agency is relational, knowledge is entangled practice, and language is a resource in communicative assemblage. Using the noted conceptual tools, I try to provide a materialized conceptualization of writing assessment and feedback practice arguing that from a New Materialist perspective, feedback practices are an assemblage of rhetoric, IELTS, institution, materiality, art, cross-lingual resources, social relations, affect, and embodiment.