(Re)making Assessment in the Trans-Systemic Space Shaped in the Meeting of Personal, Indigenous, and Relational Ways of Knowing and Being

ABSTRACT Inquiring into Trudy, Shaun, and Janice’s experiences alongside Anishinabe Elder Dr. Mary Isabelle Young’s living pimatisiwin (walking in a good way) and pimosayta (learning to walk together) with us, we show how her living in these relationally ethical ways grounded our creating and offering an Assessment as Pimosayta course in two Canadian teacher education programs. The authors built from Mary’s teaching to include the experiences, knowledge, perspectives, and worldviews of Indigenous community members and scholars. These beginnings shaped openings for attentiveness to relationally ethical assessment through Indigenous, holistic, narrative, and relational ways of knowing, being, doing, and relating. Learning to dwell in enduring tensionality has been central, as this tensionality has emerged in Trudy, Shaun, and Janice’s attempts to create with the teachers the trans-systemic process and spaces imagined by Battiste. Trudy, Shaun, and Janice see that the enduring tensionality experienced in this middle space opens potential to begin to live the respectful, ethical, relational, and … ecological relationships described by Donald and the resultant ethical relationality that needs to ground these relationships.