Adrift Without a Life Belt: Reflective self-assessment in a post-modern age

Self-assessment is an established aspect of teaching in higher education, informing reflective practice, self-study and continuing professional development, and offering a fundamental method in student-centred approaches to the support of learning. However, reflective self-assessment is often treated uncritically by its proponents, where it is taken for granted as 'a good thing'. Self-assessment is typically grounded in a humanistic-psychological approach that fails to critically investigate its own theories of knowledge, such as the assumed transparent nature of the 'self'. Where many practitioners regard self-assessment as a radical and 'freeing' practice, a post-structuralist critique of the dominant humanistic approach to teaching in higher education exposes self-assessment as a normative and 'disciplining' educational practice, where the self is constituted, not constitutive. An argument is made for an alternative to humanistic models of self-assessment as a self-forming without invoking personal agency.