Abstract:

This work-in-progress paper discusses, in context of our workshops for programming data analytics APIs, the student disengagement problems. The problems arise during designing the workshops to enable culturally responsive Formative Assessment (hereafter FA) for freshmen students with different culture backgrounds. The workshops are organized as informal and optional offers in context of our university STEM courses. In our culturally responsive actions for FA, our main difficulty is to ensure that the challenges in goal-definition is calibrated to student’s available skills and student’s needs (e.g. psychological needs) at cultural or social contexts. While goals that are very high challenging lead to a student’s anxiety, goals that are too easy generate student’s boredom. Being in psychological states of boredom or anxiety increases the possibility of disengagement phenomena. To investigate and better understand the disengagement phenomena in different cultural oppressive structures, the paper suggests a practice-method conceptualized as helping tool for trainers. It helps trainers practice how to use and integrate Csikszentmihalyi’s flow-model [1] and Freirean Dialogues for FA. it enables three responsive functions for FA: namely 1) function for flow-model based diagnosing of student’s emotional states (e.g. boredom, apathy, worry, and anxiety) that hinder his/her engagement, 2) function for analysing student’s oppressive cultural structures/lived situations that hinder his/her engagement, and 3) function for assessing student’s available cognitive skills to facilitate matching balance between challenges and skills in goal-definition. To put it differently, we have integrated the flow-model as goal-codification form in Freirean dialogue for action and reflection. In this form, the trainers can codify the challenges and skills of a goal in a measurable style for better analysing and understanding the dis‎engagement problems. Finally, we present how trainers and students can perceive our practice-method as inquiry process for co-humanists who are interested in investigating the act of knowing as act for liberation and reclaiming full humanity.

Keywords:

Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory, humanist psychology, Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, humanist pedagogy, formative assessment and measurement.