Dialogising Video Assessment in Higher Education: Students and Lecturer-Teacher Voicing Our Lived Experiences of Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

Video assessment in higher education, especially initial teacher education (ITE), has been linked to enhanced knowledge acquisition, creativity and critical thinking. Conversely, the stipulated benefits of video have been claimed to, at times, reach beyond what can be known. Modern, epistemic crises within higher education are bringing these tensions of video assessment to the fore. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is unsettling traditional forms of academic integrity, whilst politically motivated pedagogical reforms position university-based ITE as antiquated, and thus inadequate at producing ‘ready’ graduates for vocational training. This article enters this discursive landscape with a dialogue of students and a lecturer-teacher, each voicing their everyday, lived experiences with video assessment, situated within a university-based ITE degree. Employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic philosophy, these authors form a polyphony, each with an equal right to speak in a chorus of unmerged voices. Their dialogue suggests video assessment can encourage student voice as an ethical, visible encounter, decentring the authority of written academic conventions. With video posing an epistemic, localising provocation, it is further signalled as having potential to subvert an over-reliance on GenAI and bridge the perceived theory to practice divide of vocational degrees.