Paper presented to Australian Association for Research in Education, Adelaide Australia, November-December 1998.

Jeanette Rhedding-Jones

Faculty of Education

Oslo College, Oslo NORWAY

Email: Jeanette.Rhedding-Jones@lu.hioslo.no

The thesis of this paper is that evaluations and ethics are always located, and that teaching (English, in this case) is between the two. Given todayÝs globalisation however, matters of competence and excellence are not as they were. A new ethics in evaluation needs to take into account todayÝs changing world, which includes different valuings and definings of skills and knowledges. Norway and Australia provide some examples of the historical shifts between summative and formative assessments of students' work. These are seen in relation to British work regarding educational assessment. Implicitly the paper points to changes in Higher Education practices, to the matter of changing English itself, and to what it is like to teach as a foreigner. The paper is a result of one year's teaching of (Australian) English in Norway, with teacher-students visiting London and Oslo schools. The paper deals with (1) the students and the context, (2) evaluation and assessment, and (3) ethics.

For the European Autumn and Spring semesters of 1997-8 I have been a teacher in Norway, of future and practising teachers of English. These comprised some 70 Norwegians, aged from about 23 to 50, and all requiring the following: academic qualifications; experiences in using the foreign language; confidence and developing abilities in speaking, writing, reading and listening; further knowledge of the cultures and literatures of English-speaking peoples; and ideas for how to work in English with Norwegian children and teenagers. As an immigrant pedagogue (from Australia) I inherited Norwegian didactic or pedagogical frameworks and structures, set texts and the histories of English curricula in Oslo. Given a radically changed location for my praxis, I have been working on ideas related to the evaluation of my teaching practices, and to how the students are assessed.

In Norwegian language the one word vurdering is used to mean both evaluation and assessment. This blurring of assessment with evaluation appears to avoid the problem of fixed meaning for each. Curriculum documentations in the English language, however, refer to assessment as the formal or informal testing and judging of studentsÝ performances. Evaluation, more broadly, is about the actual teaching and conduct of courses. Together they are supposed to give directions for new pedagogical strategies, and indicate where teachers should make changes. As such 'the processes of assessment and evaluation are interwoven with the processes of teaching and learning, and are the means by which teachers identify new directions for teaching and learning' (McGregor & Meiers, 1986; 7). Assessment carries an additional weight: it determines what happens as the working and studying and economic future for each of the students. In this sense assessment functions as a form of power.

Well organised students accordingly work out what counts, and organise their academic and private time from there. Not telling them what counts, at the start of their study, is an ethically unacceptable silence. Students need not only a list of aims and a statement about course content. They also need to know what percentage of marks their work for each particular assignment and end-of-semester task can yield, what the nature of the differentially marked testing will be, when and how all of this will occur, who will do the examining, and what the criteria for excellence will be. All of this, however, may be seen as against formative models of evaluation, where an educational assessment is beyond testing (Gipps, 1994).

In Teacher Education the matters of evaluation and assessment are at all times related to what happens and what is intended with curricula in schools. Hence the policy documents and actual practices of grunnskoler (primary and secondary schooling) are intertwined with the ways people work at høgskoler (the tertiary) level. Judging by my experiences in the Oslo schools, as the visiting lecturer speaking a mixture of 'good' English and 'bad' Norwegian, the evaluation problem sets in at the point where the marks begin. Here the freedom of the teacher dissipates, the happily-grouped tables become four straight rows facing the front, the teacher retreats to talk-and-chalk monologue and the teenagers to text-book tasks. This scenario is not unique to Norway. The movement towards formality, the sudden upping of teaching so that external examiners will rate oneÝs students well, is not a new phenomenon. Despite the rhetoric of curriculum documentations, policy statements and teachers researching their practices for their next Higher Education achievements, schooling and teacher-educating remain fixed on the all-important exam system. PeopleÝs futures count more than their presents; and the past becomes the model to emulate. Hence a twenty-five year old student-teacher impersonates the stereotypes of forty years ago; and I run thankfully off to my computer to write this.

In the case exemplified for this paper, the students are studying English as a foreign language. Some of them are already teachers of it. Others are in their last year of pre-service Teacher Education. None of them speaks English as a first language, but the English spoken is excellent: because of schoolings, Americanisations, world travels, television, the all-pervading colonisations of the lingua franca. What is to be evaluated, however, as student learning, is a matter of shifting values, because of the times we are living in. The usefulness of particular skills, and the relevance of yesterdayÝs knowledge, are now being questioned. Even the people doing the learning and the teaching are not the same as we were a decade ago. Technology has changed our work; globalisation has extended our horizons; ethnicity and citizenship are questioning our differences; the ways we talk and write are changing the qualities of lectures, publications and everyday interactions.

This paper touches on the 'what', the 'how' and the 'why' of evaluations and assessments. From these it begins to theorise an ethics for pedagogy. As data for its developments, it draws on an archive of examples from teaching practice: photocopies of typed assignments, hand-written annotations, a teacher's descriptive assessment of reports and essays, course outlines and students' own evaluations of their learning. These are related to (Norwegian and Australian) curriculum documentations and policies. The developing theoretical insights are intended as pointers to new directions for praxis; and as links between what happens in one country and what happens in another. A premise here is that the (re)searching of what one does, as a teacher, is an ethical and professional action (Stenhouse, 1975). The key experience that has prompted the writing of this paper is thus the transference of academic, linguistic and pedagogical skills to a foreign setting (Kristeva, 1991).

As an Australian in Norway I have noted the following:

1. Relationships between student teachers and academics/teachers are friendly and informal; even during the oral exam this relationship is maintained.

2. Student-teachers are hard-working, serious about wanting to teach, and highly able as scholars; towards the end of the academic year they seem to be highly stressed and much overworked.

3. There is a high level of skill in spoken language; not always so high in written language.

4. In the schools the student teachers work co-operatively with each other and with the supervising teachers; this is immediately followed up with critical reflections as shared and open discussion.

5. Much of what happens in the tertiary classroom can be spontaneous; as the year progresses the students must focus more and more on what will be examined.

6. Technology can play a large part in the finding of information, spell-checking, editing and re-writing throughout the year; finally it is a hand-writing marathon that counts.

7. Colleagues spend much time designing the exam papers in advance; criteria for excellence as student responses to it may not be stated.

8. External examiners (censors) earn large amounts of money; national, uniform levels of performance and of course content are desired.

Having provided a list of debatable attributes, I shall later present some specific students and their learning contexts. This presentation will verge on ethnography; with added theorisations related to globalisation. Firstly though, I provide information about English teaching in Norway more generally, and about my own practices of curriculum evaluation here.

Primary and secondary schools in Norway take English seriously. Children from the age of six begin to use it for about five minutes a day, by singing songs, naming objects and playing games (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1996; pp. 223-232). For the first few years (småskoletrinnet), the emphasis is on being confronted with English speaking and English writing. Later (mellomtrinnet) the emphasis is on actually using English, and later still comes a knowledge of English itself and the cultures of the people who speak it. Older teenagers are expected to know about their own use of a more sophisticated English, and how to continue learning it. In Primary School there is no formal assessment of English, but by the end of Secondary School marks are given.

English in Norway is supported and developed by the formal teaching of student-teachers (Høgskolen i Oslo, 1998, pp. 16-18) and by in-services (etterutdanning). Students are evaluated in the pre-service phase regarding the English language itself, its literatures, its cultures and various ways of teaching it. In all literate societies, writing is usually the last of the language skills to develop, whether this is first language learning, second language, third or fourth. Most Norwegian student-teachers of English, however, are already highly skilled as writers. But despite the fact that all teachers in primary school (grunnskole) are expected to teach English, the study of English in pre-service Teacher Education is voluntary.

In the case of my own teaching, I wanted to know what the Norwegian student-teachers thought of what I did with them, as lecture-workshops, and as set assignments with given feedback. Accordingly, and after IÝd been there for a semester, I designed a one-page evaluation and asked them to fill it out:

Points 1-10 on the evaluation sheet thus regarded speaking, writing, reading and listening, and text genres and curriculum genres, with an emphasis on how each person judged their own learning. Most students wrote sentences as additional evaluative comment. 'I've had a lot of pressure to create some quality writing during this semester. What do you think?' wrote one. 'I donÝt like to speak in front of an audience, I disslike (sic) it a lot because I don't speak any good English then,' wrote another. Just about all of their circled responses were that lecture-workshops were useful, and that their own speaking, reading and writing of English had developed, this last semester, 'a great deal'. What does this mean? Amongst other things it means I have something concrete to write about, and to think about. It could also be that they wanted, anonymously, to please me - after all I had not finished with them. My intention was that they shifted the focus a little, from what I did to what they did. Evaluating learning, not by judging efforts as an outsider, but by asking the people themselves what they learned, is not a new strategy. But this is not how exam systems work, and neither is it how discrepant assessment functions.

The report writing, the essay writing and the narratives counted not at all towards these student-teachers' end of the year 'results'. Except that all writing eventually feeds itself into something else. I produced individualised descriptions for the student-teacher writers, about their uses of genres, idiomatic English and academic conventions. At the start of the year (in September, this is the Northern hemisphere), they produced a page each, no more and no less, using a computer. This was quite strange for them, as were my pencilled ticks (for points well made) and circles (for grammar, word choices and spellings unable to be corrected by computers), my cryptic comments and my hand-written scrawl. Later they wrote 1,500 word essays about the novels, plays and short stories we had read, and I produced a one-page filled-out sheet for each, commenting on each personÝs consideration of topic, expression of ideas, use of English and structuring of writing. Again, I also did the ticking, circling and handwritten commenting, in pencil, on the essays themselves. There were 70 of them.

Quite often the Norwegian writers' skills in English did not match their literary or their analytic skills. Conversely, other students were highly skilled in English, but lacking in experience when it came to the work with cultural themes, or the related disciplines of literature, politics, geography or sociology. I was determined that content not become subordinate to expression. Everyone knows you usually get a good mark by writing what is easy, making sure you spell it right and having it look nice. I wanted to challenge the convention - and not 'mark' at all. Accordingly I commented on their structuring of their writing, their consideration of their topics, their uses of both what they had read and of their own experiences, their abilities to present and format lists, critiques, charts, drawings, stories, explanations, maps.

At this point my reflections of practice abruptly end, so that I can give you the promised ethnographic picture of the scene, and so that I can introduce some related theorisations of globalisation. These should then be kept in mind throughout the second and third sections of the paper, where I discuss evaluation more broadly, and where I introduce a contemporary ethics of teaching. What follows as the ending of this first section, about the students and their learning contexts, will occasionally blur the subjective and the objective, the literary and the factual, the intellectual and the everyday. Some of it is written in the present tense, as a form of research journal.

In November last year I went to London for a week. With 52 of the Norwegian student-teachers who are studying English with me, in the Faculty of Education in Oslo. Amongst other places we visited London schools, which provided introductions to: 1. English language in use; 2. English systems and practices of language and literacy learning; 3. English teachers' ways of being together with their pupils; 4. English staff-room conversations; 5. English parents encountered in corridors; 6. English playground play; 6. English Infant Assemblies.

None of our visiting and witnessing could have taken place without the (mature age) Norwegian student-teachers being highly skilled at speaking and understanding English. It is the conditions of globalisation that make such transportations of a language possible. Thus, in a global society (Giddens, 1994; 96-7) many integrations and inter-dependent organisings are taking place. This allows not only the transference of linguistic skills, but access to the cultures of the other. Accordingly English textbooks in Norway, usually written by Norwegians, include information about social, political and geographical conditions in Britain and USA. Novels, plays and poems for study are selected from both 'the literary canon' and today's internationalised writing (Fugard, 1996; Guterson, 1995; Morgan, 1987; Shapcott and Sweeney, 1996). Film, multi-media, everyday print genres and ordinary conversations are dealt with in lecture-workshops. The study trip to England was part of the course. In Norway, the pedagogy of other-language learning requires language in use, authentic texts and elevvurdering uten karakter og elevvurdering med karakter (student assessments with and without marks), (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1996).

I shall exemplify some of the Norwegian student-teachers' writing, to document (with their permission) their skills with their English. Included are their reactions and reflections regarding schoolings: those of both England and Norway. 'Does it matter', one of these students asked me at the start, 'if my accent is American? I went there as an exchange student when I was a teenager.' Others speak with an English accent much better than mine. In Norway, English is construed as grammar, phonetics, literature, social studies and so-called 'method'. I get to do what I would call Cultural Studies and Literatures of English-Speaking Places, packaged within a context of Pedagogies (which Norwegians speaking English call Didactics). A colleague does the Grammar and Phonetics and Method. I am highly conscious of the fact that not many foreigners get to teach their own language in the foreign country.

Featherstone (1995, p. 6-8) sees globalisation as 'the extension outwards of a particular culture to its limit, the globe'. Applied to the English language, it is speakers and writers who do the extending, in much the same colonial ways as did earlier generations of emigrants. Norway, however, is not about to be over-run by other sets of nations: English is just an adjunct, an extension for Norway itself into the worlds outside it. Norwegian-ness is maintained; despite the encounter with the other and the language of the other. Here is an example. The writer is a Norwegian woman in her forties. She has just visited an English school, as one of the student-teachers described above:

I had asked the student-teachers to write a 3,000 word report about schooling, as education was one of the chapter headings in their set textbook about Britain (McDowall, 1993). My task next was to comment on their reports. They need to know how they are going, as end of the year exams are coming up. This writerÝs grammar is OK, and theyÝre all using English spell-checks before they print out. I remind myself that I am not employed to teach Comparative Education, so I take the easy way out and do a generic description of what they have written. As a concession to my position I put little pencilled circles around any of the words and phrases that are Norwenglish. I see many differences between these student-teachers and the ones I worked with last year in Australia. I also see that, compared to the former's English, my Norwegian is absolutely terrible. Such evaluations are unavoidable.

Here is another extract, this time about the teaching of English in Oslo:

Mistakes? Who decides how to pronounce English? Isn't the English of a global culture different? What kind of flexibility might there be with pronunciation, and for that matter, with grammar and the choice of words? I begin to see that evaluating English elsewhere is quite complicated: that is, if I let myself think about todayÝs cultural shifts, and consider the ethics of what I am paid to do. As this student-teacher points out to me, maybe I should be correcting how she sounds. What is my responsibility here? They will have both a written exam and an oral (Ongstad, 1997). Moreover, what I think of their English will count for only half of the marks they will get. The other half is determined by an examiner who is external. I ask some questions and find out that this will be a Norwegian. I wonder what she will value about English. I open the dictionary again, to decode the Norwegian in my inherited policy documents (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1995). And go and have a talk with my colleagues in the English Department. We decide that I should phone the examiner and talk about it.

The student-teachers, meanwhile, become preoccupied with problems of cultural differences. Here is a part of another report about what was seen in England:

Aha, here is some grammar I could fix up. There are rules about plural and singular verbs etc. Another of the report writers tackles evaluation herself:

These writers, though the medium of English, struggle to come to terms with pedagogical differences, as do I in my new location in Norway. Normative integration between England and Norway, say these students in their everyday English, could in fact come about. Many of them argued that adopting (English) order, teacher rule and ability streaming would make Norwegian teachers' paid work easier. In their efforts to take up the language of the other, it was difficult for some of them to not also take up the apparent values regarding the foreign schooling. In writing this paper I am similarly located, as the very words of another language work to stop you from thinking in the ways you did in the language you learned first. The new language, with its inherent cultural values, regulates what you desire - because of what you can and cannot say (Rhedding-Jones, 1995; 1997a).

Becoming the same, however, by giving up the values (and the grammar) you had earlier, is not the only possibility for globalisation in postmodernity (Featherstone, 1995, p. 13). A unified culture is one possibility, but a field of discordant and clashing cultures is another. Thus the modernist idea of climbing up and following oneÝs betters may be supplanted by the postmodern idea of living with differences. When the Norwegian student-teachers are torn (as above regarding their reactions to English pedagogy) this appears to be because they attempt to resolve the problem of diversity by replacing it with homogeneity. In other words, they donÝt know what do with their locations in todayÝs global culture; they want to put themselves into a system where one value replaces another, where positives and negatives fight each other for supremacy. Producing a hybrid identity (Connell, 1997, p. 2) is thus for them not an option. These student-teachers felt they had to make either-or choices: either they liked the English ways of teaching or they didnÝt.

A feature of this case of my own teaching and of the new English-learning in postmodernity, is the fact that it cannot be evaluated in the old ways (Gipps, 1994; 175). A beginning here is the opening up the teaching of English, so that it goes beyond the structures of the language itself, to literary and cultural studies, to feminism and to a range of disciplines (Burgess, 1996, p. 60). Standard English however, as a symbol of a developed and literate culture, remains an aim. In this regard we teachers of English must deal with the 'formidable educational legacy' (Burgess, 1996, p. 62) left to us historically. Introducing change into the language itself because of the cultural and linguistic location of other-tongue English speakers, is thus not (for evaluation purposes) an option. In this sense English has a coloniserÝs power, and globalisation has modern, not postmodern, effects. Given this position in theory then, a natural practice that follows is the modernist examination of the knowledge of English by regurgitation of facts, names of authors, quantities of texts read, given literary analyses recalled, and accuracy of the produced English-ness.

But critical interests, regarding discourses, curriculum genres and social power, would appear to be the issues taken up by the student-teachers who wrote the above. Asking them to produce some report writing about their visits to the English schools was perhaps not so wise, given what they are supposed to be learning. In any case, describing a socio-cultural situation 'how it is' is always impossible, and this is a further dilemma for the English teacher, whose teaching must always be about something. Following this, will an evaluation value the something, or only the language? If both, then where will the emphasis be? (Rhedding-Jones, 1997b, p. 62).

It can be argued that the quality of a text must be allowed to vary given global conditions. These conditions include the grammar of the language spoken in the mother-tongue, the habits of addressing, the genres that are usual, the discourses that are absent or frequent. In other words, allowing for difference, by altering what is acceptable, can be seen as a practice of respect for the local. The implications of this, for the teaching and evaluating of English would be quite far-reaching (Gipps, 1994: p. 129). What, for example, should I do with a piece of writing presented, as a narrative, by a Turkish-Norwegian studying English? In my estimation he is highly skilled regarding his use of the language. In someone elseÝs estimation he fails. Here is his writing.

What was my focus, that I failed to register the seriousness of this writerÝs errors? I am excited by the tempo of a text, the placement of a body in water, the imposition of the Aegean into the core of a Norwegian classroom. It is the literary me that takes over, clouds my judgment, makes me desperately want him to pass. I write on his page. 'You tell this really well. ItÝs like reading a short story.' Unethical of me? Yes, I should have told him that poetics and rhythms are never enough. Besides, I rationally know he carries a multi-language battery-operated translator in his pocket.

It can be seen from the above that my dilemmas as a teacher stem from my desire for a more formative assessment practice than the Norwegian system allows, especially at examination time. Facing the situatedness of students' and teachers' evaluations of their own performances and each other's, is, I would argue, the praxis of pedagogical work. The summative, which takes place at the end of a 'teaching time' is often for the information of outsiders to the course. In this paper its supposed infallibility as a measurement object, indeed as a desirable object, are brought into question. Following Gipps (1994; p.1-3) 'we need to develop a new way of thinking about assessment to deal with the issues that are emerging as assessment takes on this broader definition and purpose.' What Gipps proposes is a 'new educational assessment paradigm', which appears to go against 'the formal written exam'. As she points out, assessment should support learning. The politics of this, though, is that any practice can be justified as educationally sound: Norwegian students having written a six hour exam paper, or having 'done an oral' will say it was good for them, for example.

Presenting any alternative assessment is problematic when it claims singular applicability or relevance, such as in USA where new forms of assessment are considered as the (definite article) way of reforming the system (Gipps; p.15). In Australia and also in England the shift towards descriptive assessment, saying what students can and cannot do, is a move away from norm-referenced approaches and the pretence that assessment is an exact science. Here the discourses of modernity and postmodernity produce differing effects, as disinterest and detachment from teachers/examiners are differently construed (Gipps, p.167). What Gipps calls 'educational assessment' seems to me to quite close to what Norwegians call vurdering, The intent of a term, however, is not necessarily what happens as practice, as I have been attempting to exemplify. Here reconceptualising practices, and not only naming purposes and qualities, are what radical changes in evaluation are about (Gipps, p. 174). Like Gipps, I am convinced that the increased professionalisation of teachers is the key to more sophisticated and pedagogically useful evaluations.

As a way of working towards this professionalism, I next present information and histories regarding the formative and the summative, within Australian and Norwegian contexts of assessment documentations for schools. As has been said, Teacher Education relates closely to these, although the practical links may be forgotten in our efforts as academics efforts to upgrade our work, and claim intellectual status for our disciplines, rather than letting the students claim the advancement of their own knowledges and abilities. Ignoring the pedagogy of Higher Education learning, I would argue, is the temptation of getting a job as an academic. From this perspective, Education as a discipline offers much, and English or Language within it offers understandings of the functionings of texts, discourses, genres, communications and constructions.

Australian teachers have accepted the fact that 'assessment will primarily be for students and parents, while, at other times, it will be for the teacher herself or for a group of colleagues evaluating the program' (McGregor and Meiers, 1986; 7). At the end of 13 years of schooling, however, Australian teenagers are subjected to the major stress of the formal examination system. This system determines who goes where after schooling is done. For those working in Higher Education, the students are neatly graded on their arrival. They in turn then neatly grade the people they have 'taught': for future employers, or further study. Thus assessment is not only as McGregor and Meiers say; it functions for the purposes of outsider institutions and groups.

Basically there are two forms of assessment: formative and summative, although what Gipps calls 'ipsative ... in which the pupil evaluates his/her performance against his/her previous performance' (1994: vii) is also in evidence. 'Summative assessment should derive from the learnerÝs involvement in the program and her understanding of the goals to be attained, and should help all those concerned to know what the student can do, where she is headed and why, and how far she has gone' (McGregor and Meiers, 1986; 7). In practice this becomes what happens at the end of the teaching time, with varying degrees of 'accuracy' from who does the assessing. The ending of this statement carries more weight than the first part, about involvement. Some students can be highly involved in coursework, benefit enormously from the coursework and what they have done because of it, and still get 'bad marks'.

Formative assessments on the other hand, 'remain confidential to the teaching and learning situation, and ... they may be seen as inappropriate to the more distant audience of employers and selection panels for entry into later stages of education' (1986; 7). Here then lies the heart of the teacher, within the privacy of the learning situations, the inter-personal aspects of pedagogy, the crafting of knowledge with the learners. In practice though, teachers are often too busy, too stressed and sometimes even too out of control to do very much, given large their numbers of students and teaching hours. Furthermore, what counts in the long run is not this, but the other kind of assessment. Yet it is the relationship between the two that comprises the accountability of the teacher to the learners; and this is based on the particular ethics of the teaching profession and of the individuals within it.

Following McGregor and Meiers, the State documentation (Department of School Education, 1991), translated the two forms of assessment into the formal and the informal. Thus 'Much assessment is not deliberately set up but goes on incidentally in the classroom. This form of assessment is born of practice and experience.' And: 'Assessment of a more formal and systematic kind is necessary to ensure that students are making progress in all aspects of the subject' (Department of School Education, 1991; p.7). Here what is implied is that if we donÝt have formal/summative assessment, students will not be seen to 'make progress'. In other words the professionalism of the teachers is in question, and their 'practice and experience' becomes demoted to second place. Another reading is that the students will not bother to learn unless they get a formal assessment.

The history of assessment practices and its rhetoric in the Australian State of Victoria is that the new Liberal Government (the Conservative Right) then introduced more stringent measures (Board of Studies, Learning Assessment Project, 1996). Although these were unpopular with teachers they were nonetheless put into practice. At this time many of the more radical teachers left the educational profession, taking their early retirement packages with them. In a section labelled 'Who is assessed?' the answer is given bluntly: 'All students in Year 3 and Year 5'. (aged approximately 8 and 10) (Board of Studies, 1996; 16). Known as the LAP test, this form of summative assessment produces statistics useful to State bureaucrats with agendas of an economic rationalism; and the promotion of a non-ethnic, non-indigenous middle class. Further, the LAP test serves to divide schools of 'excellence' from schools without it, and with todayÝs school-based administration rather than a central administration, the financial and social benefits of scoring highly from such assessments are huge.

In practice, Victorian primary school teachers are busy working out the meaning of the new terminology and striving to do what is required. Teacher work, for example, becomes 'preparing for the centrally assessed tasks', 'administering the centrally assessed tasks', finding the 'equipment and materials required for the teacher-assessed tasks', understanding 'assessment criteria for the teacher-assessed tasks', filling out an 'Assessment Tally Sheet' and an 'Assessment Log Sheet' (Board of Studies, 1996). Until 1996 such matters were the prerogative of only upper secondary school teachers, with students in their late teens. Now it is a major concern for those teaching a much younger age level.

In contrast, Norway appears like a breath of fresh air. Here the given curriculum documentation regarding assessment reads as follows (translations are mine):

How can we get the students to be active in evaluating their own work? What links can be made between formal and informal assessment? How can school assessment become a part of the schoolÝs pedagogical competence? Does a centralised and national administration mean standardised assessment/evaluation? (Norsk Lærerlag, 1994; 19)

Here many of the political and theoretical problems of the Victorian situation are avoided. Binary divisions between formal and informal, between teachers and students, and between school and State are erased, at least in intent. Further, the documentation operates, at this point within the text, by the asking of questions rather than by the making of statements. In practice Norway avoids, so far, the summative and formal assessment of its pre-teenage students. These get 'individual assessment without marks'; the 'individual assessment with marks' being reserved for those at the end of their schooling (Kyrkje-, utdannings-og forskningsdepartementet 1996; 3). Further, the State documentation says, 'It is important that the students and the parents or care-givers understand the reasons for the assessments.' Such consideration is missing from the Victorian rhetoric, itself a reflection of political difference from Norway. Regarding process/formative assessment, for the 10 years of schooling with students aged 6 - 16, NorwayÝs received pronouncement is that 'the assessment must be more about process than result.' (1996; p. 9), that 'there must be more stress on teaching and less on ranking' and that 'students must take part in the judgments made.' Further, 'assessment must be made from contexts appropriate to the studentsÝ lives'; 'alternative forms of marking will be valued'; and 'test forms must be varied. Open book exams are an example' (1996, p.9, my translations). Here it can be seen that this particular rhetoric is at odds with some of the evaluation practices in Norwegian Teacher Education. Indeed, putting it into practice, at the tertiary level, proved impossible, certainly for me.

The above rhetoric however is not for the summative/national assessment, with older students only. Here 'quantitative and more qualitative examination' (Kyrkje-, utdannings-og forskningsdepartementet 1996; p. 19) is used for 'measuring knowledge and competence' (p. 20). So whilst it seemed that radical steps regarding assessment have been taken, the final crunch of schooling presumably carries the same referents and discourses as the Australian practices, the difference being the targeted age group. A consideration of the changes taking place over time, between the curriculum documentation in Norway of some ten years ago (known as M86) and of what is commonly known as L97 (1996, p. 79-84), shows that there may be political agendas here with faint echoes of the changed positionings in the ten years of documentation regarding assessment for Victoria, Australia. A chat with those personally engaged in implementing the curriculum changes further indicates that this is a distinct possibility.

Apart from these particular politics, the difficulties of assessing the learning of English, especially in another country, are huge. According to Norwegian Course Outlines (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1995; 51) all evaluations, even of separate assignments, should follow official statements. But words themselves are always slippery, and meanings can never be fixed to texts. For example: 'English is an aesthetic discipline, a knowledge discipline, a proficiency and a communication' (my translation for 'Engelsk er et estetisk fag, et kunnskapsfag, et ferdighetsfag og et kommunikasjonsfag.') Communication easily becomes reduced to communication between candidate and examiner/teacher. Aesthetics becomes a variable subjective judgment of literary qualities. Knowledge gets reduced to what got published as exposition in the set textbook. Proficiency which can be measured, becomes the focus, with rightness and wrongness able to be seen (read from an exam paper) and heard (listened to, in an oral exam). Another reading of this documentation, in its entirety, is that it is remarkably close to that of the Languages Other Than English documentation in Victoria (Board of Studies, 1995) and to what has been happening with English curriculum statements and profiles for Australian schools (Meiers, 1994).

A difference, though, is in the place of grammar. Perhaps an emphasis on proficiency explains the long hold that grammar has had on (foreign) language pedagogy (O'Rourke & O'Rourke, 1996; p. 42). Indeed 'the role of grammar in the extension of literacy needs to be re-examined and reformulated'. Obviously it is time that grammarÝs place in other-language learning is critically examined, because teaching a system of discrete rules, which is the traditional pedagogy of grammar, is very much alive and well. English has an awful lot of rules, although an art of using any language well, and of keeping pace with cultural shifts, is to sometimes break them. What is needed is 'a process of grammatical consciousness-raising about communicative values and communicative strategies' (O'Rourke & O'Rourke, 1996; p. 42). Working with this kind of process (developing listening and reading), rather than testing products (of writing and speech), would appear to be appropriate. As processes, in institutionalised pedagogies, we have contact time in classrooms, lecture-workshops and what happens when people get together. But these are not what usually gets evaluated: texts do.

Reflecting a valuing of doing something, rather than having something produced, thus seems reasonable, especially for teachers, who must act and make decisions about what to do, and who are constantly engaged in the here and now. It is after all a process writing stance. Further, doing is in line with second-language conditions for learning (Wales, 1989; p. 30), where 'a needs-based, functional approach to curriculum and syllabus design and a communicative approach' is 'encompassed overall by a learner-centred approach to pedagogy'. Read like this, a functional approach is not about some fixed state of concrete products, such as the perfection or otherwise of final-draft texts. Further, 'in a learner centred approach, curriculum topics will be selected on a basis of relevance to students themselves', which makes me feel better about my request for a report about schooling. However, in a negotiated curriculum, the students decide together with the teacher what they will do - and how, by building in evaluation components at each end-point (Wales, 1989; p. 32). The idea here is that evaluation is an integral feature of what happens, as learning and teaching; and it means that the teacher must constantly evaluate what she/he is doing also. Thus, self-centredness, or writing and talking about oneÝs own teaching, is a necessary component of this kind of professionalism. However, even the fact that I am now writing for a journal outside Norway, with an audience of people-like-me, is a manipulation of my locations, and hence another claim for (English) power.

Apart from the language they are in, the Victorian Australian Curriculum and Standards Framework documents (Board of Studies, 1995) are quite similar to the ones in Norway (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1996), known locally as L97. If one reads the Australian LOTE (Languages Other Than English) advice and basis for curriculum (Board of Studies, 1995), and compares it to the Norwegian English-teaching documentation, a number of similarities can be seen: strategically, text types or genres are introduced in meaningful situations, with the spoken and written (other not mother) language used for personal, social and informational purposes. Exam situations, however, are another matter altogether, and tactfully left off the list of suggestions advising teachers of what to do. Similarly, radical texts regarding pedagogy (hooks, 1994; Stone, 1994) leave evaluations, assessments, the markings of assignments and the judgments of others off their agendas. This is despite the acknowledgment that learnings and knowledges themselves are culturally constructed, and that it is cultural diversity that marks todayÝs postmodern climate.

Institutionalised assessments and evaluations, nonetheless, are firmly in place to 'discover' studentsÝ knowledge, skills and understandings. Surely it is time now to do more than ignore the existence of the systems and the people that/who do the evaluating and assessing? We must look at what is being tested by exams, and at what is currently valued as students' assigned writing. Wales (1989, p. 33) wants to 'ensure that the purpose of the test is not being sabotaged by linguistic or cultural factors'. I submit that this is impossible given today's locations in globalisation. Moreover, it may not even be desirable. In postmodernity, isnÝt it cultural and linguistic difference, actually in English, that we should be celebrating and developing? And isnÝt it testing we should be sabotaging?

Besides, spoken and written language is much more than can be tested. Language is always a means to something else. Taking away the something else makes a mockery of the functions of language, produces a delusion that words can be grasped, that transience can stand still. When the language used is not our first, the same functionalism applies: we are using the other language to continue our own learning. All we have done is switch the linguistic code, by moving into the grammar and the lexicon and the idiosyncracies of the other.

There is another reason why the examining of English may be even more unethical than that of other curriculum areas. This is because the study of literature has introduced and validated the personal to the reader/student. Confronting students with the possibilities of the personal, of even inscribing themselves in written language (Prain, 1996), is thus out of line with the assessment procedures that may follow the classroom activities in the English class. This is reflected also in current dilemmas regarding excellence of academic writing, when subjectivity is allowed to rear its ugly head (Rhedding-Jones, 1997c). The practice of autobiographical writing in schools, however, ensures that the students' words keep flowing, that the (m)other language is used meaningfully, that the 'social, historical and discursive influences on subjectivity' (Prain, 1996; p. 17) result in productions of required texts. To then betray oneÝs students by rubber-stamping writing as 1, 2 or 3, A, B or C, becomes a very nasty task, and one best accomplished after the usual classroom interactions of laughing, talking and sharing are well and truly over.

I conclude this broad discussion of evaluation and assessment with some references to Scandinavian research. Kvale (1995, p. 2-4) asks whether examinations are 'tests of students' or 'tests of knowledgeÝ. He uses the terms 'evaluation' and 'examination' interchangeably, as if each is the same as the other. Whilst this may be because he writes English as a Norwegian living in Denmark, the word shift allows him to query exams as constructions of knowledge, and to say that, in education, evaluation pertains to the evaluation of the studentsÝ knowledge. He argues that 'the form of evaluation itself promotes certain values', and goes on to say that 'with evaluation as the de facto goal of learning, the forms of evaluation come to influence and transform the studentsÝ learning'. From this, and following Foucault, Kvale considers 'the contributions of examinations to the social construction of the knowledge of a discipline'. Teaching and learning may thus become negated, or at the least depreciated, by evaluation/assessment anticipations. In practice then, students work towards the knowledge that counts. And counting is, theoretically, a quantitative act. English, of course, isn't.

Kvale outlines six implications for the knowledge being evaluated. Here a modernist question regarding the learning of English is: do we want knowledge or do we want skills? I have argued that what matters is what gets done. This I would see as being between being skilled and having knowledge. Partly this being between is a poststructural position; partly it is a philosophical position; and partly it makes the work-load easier, because doing, in (English) language, involves the processing of texts and talk. So I would want to read KvaleÝs six implications as six 'doings' of knowledge, although judging 'doings' will always be problematic. Kvale outlines 'knowledge as discourse, knowledge as differentiation and fragmentation, knowledge as privilege and commodity, and finally the castration of knowledge' (1995, p. 8). Evaluating each of these, by looking at what people do, is I think relevant to the teaching of English. Questions following this can then become: what discourses has this student accessed via the language? How has this teacher presented this knowledge as only ever fragmented and differentiated? Whose English is this that some English writers and speakers are privileged over others? And what has been cut off by an unnecessary emphasis on an evaluation act itself? Kvale says 'Evaluation of knowledge may extract the force and potency of the knowledge. A strong focus on grading, with high stakes for the students in the outcome of the grading, may further an evaluative erosion of knowledge' (1995, p. 11). In my terms, where knowledge is doing-related, the erosion occurs as people decide not to do what is valuable; but decide instead to do what will give them, or their students, more marks. It is at this point that the matter of ethics appears.

3. Ethics

For the ethics that I consider as always local and always personal, an awareness of people, bodies and subjectivities is crucial. Further, getting away from essentialism is a sign of what is happening with postmodern pedagogical shifts; and this is why we cannot evaluate peopleÝs learnings, and our own teaching, in the ways that we did. This is because the relational, the conjunctives and the dynamics of ethics and evaluations become, in postmodernity, unfixed. In short, essentialism has gone, and with it are the essentials of 'good' English, 'good' learning and 'good' assessment.

At this point I depart from the work of Gipps (1994; p.17) who also writes of ethics, but who takes it in the directions of ethical assessment practices, which could be construed, by what I have written as the end of the last paragraph, as discourses of goodness. The ethical issues she considers are the influences assessment has on the lives of the assessed, and the need for 'assessment criteria to be made available to pupils and teachers' (1994; p. 166). Whilst I agree strongly that this should happen and that lives matter very much, I want to now take ethics into more philosophical domains. In other words, I am changing the use of the term 'ethics' from the ways I have used it earlier in this paper, when perhaps the word 'moral' may have been better. It seems to me that ethics in its more philosophical domains has the possibility of clearing a space for other forms of pedagogical practices. In fact, what I am about to say is a beginning attempt to theorise today's professionalism of teachers and the work that we now do. Or try to do.

The reason why this article has taken so long to get to this stage of its development is that I have had to spell out not only today's complex shifts regarding the assessments and evaluations of learning, but also a teacher's personal location in regard to her students and her praxis. At this point the teaching of English in Norway can be read as simply a means to write about a philosophical ethics. Thus the final section of this paper considers how a pedagogical situation, of today's shift from summative to formative assessment, as a reflection of today's world, might be theorised. It does so by presenting some contemporary work regarding ethics, and by reconsidering what has been presented already.

Weber (1951, in Featherstone, 1995, p. 38) writes this of ethics and religion in China: 'The puritan viewed the world as material to be fashioned ethically whereas Confucianism asked for adjustment to the world.' An ethics of adjustment to worlds is, as I have presented it, what is desirable for the evaluation of English. This notion of adjustment may be seen, following Weber, as an Asian contrast to Christian morality, which attempted to convert the world to its own moral values. Dictionary definitions also stress colonial or conversion attributes for ethics (Flew, 1979, p. 112): 'a set of standards by which a particular group or community decides to regulate its behaviours - to distinguish what is legitimate or acceptable in pursuit of their aims from what is not'. This, Flew hastens to add, is the layman's ethics. Philosophical ethics, says Flew, are 'systems that are intended to guide the lives of men' (p. 113). In modernity then, a slippage between ethics and morals was acceptable, as were the sexist values now apparent.

Instead of defining, de Lauretis (1990, p. 266) describes 'an ethical drive that works towards community, accountability, entrustments'. Here is a postcolonial ethics of going towards a set of values, of not superimposing the one over the other. For teachers, a sense of community could be the classroom and its equally valued participants; accountability could be towards the people doing the learning rather than to external institutions; entrustments could be towards privacy at appropriate times, sensitivities towards particular circumstances. All of these aspects of ethics go in the direction of an ethics of eros (Chanter, 1995), following Levinas (Chanter, 1995, p. 201). Here it is presence that challenges (p. 207): 'In ethics ... the presence of the other in the eyes of the one that challenges me ... is the condition of morality. The face to face founds justice.' I would argue that it is the presence of the other, as a body in the classroom, and in the text as the personal writer, that produces an ethics. Most assessing and examining, however, requires the removal of the examiner or assessor from the student. In other words, non-ethical evaluating requires non-presence.

Evaluating students differently, by not comparing one against another, and by not assuming that all examiners have the same set of values, would be a radical change. Such a change could be seen as ethics coming before all else, in that the teaching/learning situation is judged by it, and constructed by it. Thus Levinas (1979) places ethics before being. 'Levinas argues for the priority of ethics, a term which he employs in a different sense from traditional ethics insofar as the latter tends to assume the universal applicability of moral principles, and an essential similarity between individuals' (Chanter, 1995, p. 182). Here Levinas' concept of ethics starts not from an analogy between the self and the other (the teacher and the student? the Norwegian and the Turkish-Norwegian?) but because of the differences. Dealing ethically with these differences, and not desiring similarity, not measuring the one against the other, is another position in theory. In practice, such an ethics cannot produce 'motivated and anticipated' descriptions, discussions, answers and responses.

For Levinas (1979, in Chanter, 1995, p. 182-3):

Furthermore, the face-to-face is the beginning and the continuing of spoken and written language. To then deny the faces, by excluding the bodies, the lives, the difficulties, the diversities, is from this position in theory, unethical.

A second theorist of ethics is Deleuze (1997), who critiques classical frames of representation. Here the metaphor for knowledge is of rhizomatic root systems underground, rather than single-trunked trees above ground (Lather, 1995. p.55). In other words, knowledges and their doings are not always visible, cannot be represented in neatly matched categories, and may appear to hibernate. Further, a philosophy where people/subjects are seen as constantly in the processes of becoming, rather than as having arrived at discernible points and hence able to be categorised, raises the question of how ethical it is to assess/evaluate at all. For Deleuze, ethics dwells within the person (Deleuze, 1997). What counts is the life you lead, and what you do with it. DeleuzeÝs translators produce some almost impossibly difficult English, which no doubt is the counter-part of his original French. It seems to me that over-simplification, such as I have just demonstrated, must be risked if his ideas can be applied to everyday situations, such as the ethics of the busy-ness of teaching and learning. At this risk, then, I say the following: with a Deleuzean ethics the focus is on what goes between a subject and an object. Here, the subject could be English, the object the student who learns it. Or: the person could be the subject(ive) learner, and the English (language) the object of the learning. It makes no difference for the moment which labels you decide on. The point is that it is the in-between that is the new idea, for ethics. Saying that you cannot determine how much somebody knows (about English or anything else) is thus philosophically justifiable.

The word that is associated with DeleuzeÝs ethics is 'immanence'. For Deleuze, ethics belongs to the person. As an example (Deleuze, 1997, p. 4), he describes the function of the definite article, in relation to 'a' person. Once the 'a' person becomes a 'the' person the situated ethics alters. This is also the experience of teachers, who know their students differently, according to how closely they position themselves. This transcendence of the indefinite 'a' student to the definite 'the' student happens not just with classroom interactions. It also happens through texts, with the links between reader and writer able to be those of teacher-writer and student-reader, or student-writer and teacher-reader. Unfortunately, the latter pairing is the more usual, with the power position of the teacher allowing her/him to reduce 'the' student to an 'a' student. It is at this point that an ethics of immanence (an indwelling ethics, which resides within the life of the one doing the teaching) is different from other ethics.

Thus philosophies of doing, rather than philosophies of being, are what todayÝs shift of philosophy itself into ethics is about (Deleuze; Levinas). Making your teaching itself ethical, which means it is accountable to your own integrity, is in this way a doing of what you know. For Deleuze, philosophy repositions itself as beyond the dichotomies of emotion and reason, which is what I think an experienced teacher attempts to do too. Not valuing just the emotional or just the rational is an ethical dimension of pedagogy, and it actually requires life-skills in both the rational and the emotional spheres. This is why a new pedagogical ethics, following Deleuze, must come back again and again to the life of the one who is called the teacher, and to the lives of those who are called the students.

Following a Deleuzean ethics further, a teacher works between obligation and impulse (Goodchild, 1997; 39). Here the ethics is of the unconscious, which demands the break-out from duty: the duty to produce expected lectures, workshops, group interactions, assignments from students and task designs that are like someone elseÝs, or like last year's. Yes we have a responsibility to be rigorous in the preparation of our classes, our reasoning as to why we select the tasks and the activities we do, the feed-back we give students about their writing. We are obliged to conform to the stipulations of course requirements, the various policy documents and the organisation that funds our teaching. We are also ethically accountable to the needs and imagined desires of the others we are answerable to: primarily our students, but also our colleagues, and our own selves. Teaching the impulsive, in addition to the obligatory, is a melding of the conscious to the unconscious, and this is new for pedagogy to acknowledge, especially for those of us in Higher Education.

A traditional ethics, based on a traditional (modern not postmodern) philosophy is that 'only a disembodied mind or a pure idea of justice can be an impartial judge.....Such an idea judges life from the perspective of one who does not liveÝ (Goodchild, 1997, p. 40). This description sits uncomfortably close to the position of the un-named examiner, of so-called objectivity. Regarding evaluation, Deleuze (1984, p. 1) says: 'Evaluations, in essence, are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge.' Linked to his theory of ethics as coming before being, evaluation thus fits into another order, an order that is not doing. This of course is traditionally how schooling has worked: first you teach and then you test. Further though, 'We are never judged except by ourselves and according to our states' (Deleuze, 1984, p. 40). These states, says Deleuze, (1997, p.3) are only ever temporary. Even if we insist on evaluating students, assignments, exam papers, coursework and even classroom doings, the very transience of their states makes nonsense of our judgments and descriptions by the time we have written them down.

One more point: in stressing 'the passage from one to the other as becoming' (1997, p. 3), Deleuze theorises 'futurity and temporality' as relational (Goodchild, 1997, p. 48). In so doing, he leaves the past behind, together with interactions, texts and discourses that are not part of a process of becoming. This, for Deleuze, is to focus on a 'transcendental field' (Deleuze, 1997, p. 3), to seek the doings that go beyond, the events that allow for surpassing what has already been. Too esoteric for teaching? 'Transcendence is always a product of immanence', says Deleuze (1997, p. 5). And what is immanence? It is a life (Deleuze, 1997).

In conclusion then (Goodchild, 1997p. 41), Deleuze's ethics are:

Not having representations, but having 'real' writing and 'real' speaking is problematic for education, which itself is based on removal from primary interests and instead produces substitutes. Creating authenticity, with texts and events, is, following Deleuze at this point, an ethical responsibility of the (English) teacher. If we follow him further, it is the only ethical action, as evaluation in education is always a matter of representations of skills and knowledge, rather than the actual skills and knowledges themselves.

NOTES

1. A paper by the same name was presented as an Invitational Seminar at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, 23 April, 1998.

2. An earlier version was presented at Nordisk Förening För Forskning (Nordic Association for Research in Education) Lahti, Finland, 12-15 March, 1998.

3. A related paper entitled 'Assessment in Teacher Education: practices, ethics and accountabilities' was presented as an Invitational Plenary to Allmennlærerutdannings profesjonsdidaktikk (National Seminar for Teacher Education), Saltstraumen, Norway, 6 August, 1998.

4. This paper has been rewritten following the advice of the referees of an international journal and is now resubmitted to its editor.

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JEANETTE RHEDDING-JONES is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Oslo College, Norway. She has backgrounds in literature, linguistics, writing, drama, language and literacy learning. Before migrating to Norway she worked for twenty years in Teacher Education in Australia. Her recent publications are in The British Journal of Sociology of Education, The Journal of Curriculum Studies, Nora Journal of Nordic WomenÝs Studies, Nordisk Pedagogikk etc, and (in press) Qualitative Studies in Education. After a one year contract as Associate Professor of English in Norway (August 1997-8), Rhedding-Jones has taken up a tenured position with postgraduate and undergraduate students in Pre-School Education. She now teaches Research Methodology and Pedagogy, using a mixture of English and Norwegian. Her two sons are teaching English in Japan.

Førsteamanuensis Jeanette Rhedding-Jones

Avdeling for lærerutdanning

Førskolelærerutdanning

Høgskolen i Oslo

Pilestredet 52

N-0167 Oslo NORWAY

email: Jeanette.Rhedding-Jones@lu.hioslo.no

Dear Jane Miller,

I have changed the paper to follow the recommendations given. As can be seen from the endnotes I've done quite a lot of work around it since March. Thanks for the help about how to reconstruct. Hope the time delay is not too terrible. I've changed jobs here and now have to teach in Norwegian.

Regards,

Jeanette Rhedding-Jones.

CUTS FROM CHANGING ENGLISH (ie NOT IN SEPT 98)

From my experiences in Teacher Education in Australia for two decades, the changing of assessment practices happened at the tertiary level because:

1. Teachers/academics decided that what currently happened was no longer appropriate.

2. Times themselves changed, and assessment practices needed to match cultural shifts.

3. Students demanded change and teachers/academics listened.

4. Policy documents for schools pointed to the need for consistency of practices.

5. Funding problems meant that the current rate of expenditure could not be maintained.

Blah

However, at the same time as the assessment statements were issued for each of these two countries, each country's also issued this put into practice what the Curriculum Documents and Policies for schools were advocating. (In my State, Victoria, the Curriculum Frameworks Documents 1995 are the equivalent of Norway's L-97). The Victorian documentation for schools regards negotiated learning; drafting and processing of writing rather than focusing on end products; linking small group projects to authentic texts and real life situations; more action for school students and less for teachers; using everyday language; dealing with interest, need and engagement etc. In these ways, it seemed that we acted on the last of the criteria I have named above: funding problems meant that the current rate of expenditure should not be maintained. This, however, was also related to the policy documents for schools pointing to the need for consistency of practices. Here our challege was to practice what we preached as curriculum theory and pedagogical desirability, to demonstrate how schools today assess their school-goers: to move evaluation/assessment from summative to formative models. This required a rethinking of the historical developments causing our practices to be the way they were; and to think about the global developments and technologies requiring us to change. In this way we came to decide that what currently happened was no longer appropriate. Hence handwriting marathons were replaced by the editing facilities of the computerised word processor; the set readings for coursework became guidelines only, with scope for student teachers to individualise in what and how much they read; being up to date with reading the most recently published material and from it developing oneÝs own theories was considered of greater importance than being able to say what famous men of the past had said; many forms of excellence were to be allowed for; links between practice and theories were to be the original thinking of the student teachers and based on their own experiences in the schools, and/or as parents, and/or in their own earlier boyhoods and girlhoods.

Englishman Ion Drew, who has lived in Norway for 20 years, has just completed his PhD about the teaching and learning of English (Aftenposten, 1998). He wants more emphasis on students' writing, in schools and in Teacher Education, as writing and learning go together. I agree, but 'my' students already have to go through a six hour handwriting marathon as part of their examination process, so presumably it is not more of this that Drew is wanting. Halliday (1985) also stresses the importance of writing. In doing so, he actually presents two thirds of a page of his own handwriting, warts and all (1995; 100). This is to demonstrate that if written language functions like spoken language, then redundancy, changing oneÝs mind, crossing out, over-writing and adding in are signs that a writer is thinking, and that the writing is being constructed with an eye to its quality. Taking this into consideration, the donÝt-stop-just-write-nicely convention of the exam room becomes quite inappropriate to the production of thought. And this of course is just what happens: what gets produced in exam conditions are copious amounts of text, with the producers most concerned about the surface details of the language, and the regurgitation of whatever can be remembered of what the teacher and the textbook said. And testing and examining in the electric lights postmodern technologies may not be much different.

In everyday life evaluating comes easily. As observers we evaluate all the time, because we make sense of what we see happening, in the same ways that readers make sense of what they read, or sky-watchers predict the weather. Dictionary definitions are not so different (Turner, 1987, p. 356). Here to evaluate is to 'ascertain amount of, find numerical expression for, appraise, assess'. To assess (Turner, 1987, p. 55) is to 'fix amount of, estimate value of, estimate magnitude or quality of'. In education terms, at least in Australia, assessment norms have led to the ranking and rating of students, and supposedly of what they know. The professionalisation of the teaching force has led to assessment being either the number crunching done by examiners or the judgments made by teachers and linked to reporting (Department of School Education, 1991; Meiers, 1994). Evaluation readily becomes the task of academics, who have the luxury to indulge in many words (Codd & Kemmis, 1982; Kvale, 1995; Smythe, 1988). I belong with this lot, although I challenge the dichotomies by presenting my own teaching. Further, I have been using the term 'evaluation' as if it were 'assessment', and thereby attempting a discursive shift regarding how we see our work. In Norway, the one word (vurdering) does for both judgments and values. Also, it is standard practice in Norway for small groups of student-teachers and a couple of lecturers (called 'teachers' by Norwegians speaking English; the Norwegian word for teachers lærere is more like 'learners', and itself a interesting construction of difference) to sit around together to evaluate each lecturer's teaching. This evaluating takes the form of an easy-going conversation, with positive and negative points discussed openly. For an Australian it was quite a surprise.

The following papers and University course-work about evaluations, however, are neither local nor personal. Codd and Kemmis (1982) and Kemmis (1982) have focused on evaluating curriculum and programs; Smythe (1988) has focused on evaluating teachers; Kvale (1995) has focused on evaluating students and knowledge. Each of these presents evaluation directions that are critical, and closely related to the times of their publication. In applying them to the case being considered now, I decide to read them as relating to my particular case of English (in Norway) and globalisation. Thus quotes from Codd and Kemmis, for example, will omit the qualifier 'curriculum', so that a broader view of evaluation may be seen; and quotes from Smythe will omit the qualifier 'teacher' etc. For example: 'the process of ... evaluation should be directed towards the ultimate goal of justifying educational action' (Codd and Kemmis, 1982, p. 7). Here we are directed to consider who learns what, and to how we conduct ourselves with students and texts. Further, 'evaluation should take account of each programÝs own particular circumstances and processes'. Applied to globalisations, the relations of our circumstances to our own locations are what count; not external and culturally imposed yard-sticks. The implication here is that evaluations must be different for different people. Further still, evaluation should be a critical inquiry (Codd and Kemmis, 1982), leading to an increased professionalism in the teacher work-force, not its denigration. Especially then, we should be creating an evaluation consciousness, which promotes rather than denies deliberation. In theory here, evaluation is a part of a professional process, and not divorced from the people who are engaged in learning and teaching. This is because of an ethics of professionalism.

KemmisÝs principles of evaluation (Kemmis, 1982) include autonomy and responsibility, self-interest, plurality of value-perspectives, propriety in the production and distribution of information, appropriateness to the setting. Applied to a studentÝs assigned writing, and to what a teacher does, these could be read as leaving no room for an external examination system; nor indeed room for teachers to assess anyone except themselves. Here, my personal comment is that as Stephen Kemmis's student myself, in 1983 studying Curriculum Theory in an MEd, I learned the hard way: he refused all of us discrepant assessment, and I lost my chance for a High Distinction. In theory then, the participants must do the evaluating because that is how they learn.

Smythe (1988, p. 3-4) says that what he does 'is question the very existence of the social practice of ... evaluation'. He emphasises the personal and the historic in the construction of meaning, and goes on to denounce 'the evaluation of the reductionist kind that generally tends to occur'. A mechanistic and conformist approach, he argues, produces 'little hope of developing in pupils the kind of critical inquiry necessary for them to live in a democracy' (1988, p. 6). He then advocates a socially critical articulation of teaching practices, including one's own (p. 46). As a conclusion, he values 'collaboration and non-evaluative dialogueÝ (p. 138). For English teachers, who may perhaps be expected to be more articulate than teachers not so focused on language, this collaboration is also putting into practice a theory of how languages themselves work socially. Within globalisation, emailing people on the other side of the world, for example, writing for international journals and going to international conferences all serve social purposes. Smythe's naming of non-evaluative dialogue is more problematic. The problem is not that this doesnÝt happen, but that the dialogue itself is not regarded highly. In theory then, we need a shift away from usual heirarchies of valuing and fixed grids for excellence: towards an unfixed schedule, a range of choices, even a refusal to evaluate. In short, we need to query our practices and their theoretical relationships to our times.

for Changing English Rewritten following editor's advice. Sept 98.

Jeanette Rhedding-Jones

Faculty of Education

Oslo College, Oslo, NORWAY

The thesis of this paper is that evaluations and ethics are always located, and that teaching (English, in this case) is between the two. Given todayÝs globalisation however, matters of competence and excellence are not as they were. A new ethics in evaluation needs to take into account todayÝs changing world, which includes different valuings and definings of skills and knowledges. Norway and Australia provide some examples of the historical shifts between summative and formative assessments of students' work. These are seen in relation to British work regarding educational assessment. Implicitly the paper points to changes in Higher Education practices, to the matter of changing English itself, and to what it is like to teach as a foreigner. The paper is a result of one year's teaching of (Australian) English in Norway, with teacher-students visiting London and Oslo schools. The paper deals with (1) the students and the context, (2) evaluation and assessment, and (3) ethics.

For the European Autumn and Spring semesters of 1997-8 I have been a teacher in Norway, of future and practising teachers of English. These comprised some 70 Norwegians, aged from about 23 to 50, and all requiring the following: academic qualifications; experiences in using the foreign language; confidence and developing abilities in speaking, writing, reading and listening; further knowledge of the cultures and literatures of English-speaking peoples; and ideas for how to work in English with Norwegian children and teenagers. As an immigrant pedagogue (from Australia) I inherited Norwegian didactic or pedagogical frameworks and structures, set texts and the histories of English curricula in Oslo. Given a radically changed location for my praxis, I have been working on ideas related to the evaluation of my teaching practices, and to how the students are assessed.

In Norwegian language the one word vurdering is used to mean both evaluation and assessment. This blurring of assessment with evaluation appears to avoid the problem of fixed meaning for each. Curriculum documentations in the English language, however, refer to assessment as the formal or informal testing and judging of studentsÝ performances. Evaluation, more broadly, is about the actual teaching and conduct of courses. Together they are supposed to give directions for new pedagogical strategies, and indicate where teachers should make changes. As such 'the processes of assessment and evaluation are interwoven with the processes of teaching and learning, and are the means by which teachers identify new directions for teaching and learning' (McGregor & Meiers, 1986; 7). Assessment carries an additional weight: it determines what happens as the working and studying and economic future for each of the students. In this sense assessment functions as a form of power.

Well organised students accordingly work out what counts, and organise their academic and private time from there. Not telling them what counts, at the start of their study, is an ethically unacceptable silence. Students need not only a list of aims and a statement about course content. They also need to know what percentage of marks their work for each particular assignment and end-of-semester task can yield, what the nature of the differentially marked testing will be, when and how all of this will occur, who will do the examining, and what the criteria for excellence will be. All of this, however, may be seen as against formative models of evaluation, where an educational assessment is beyond testing (Gipps, 1994).

In Teacher Education the matters of evaluation and assessment are at all times related to what happens and what is intended with curricula in schools. Hence the policy documents and actual practices of grunnskoler (primary and secondary schooling) are intertwined with the ways people work at høgskoler (the tertiary) level. Judging by my experiences in the Oslo schools, as the visiting lecturer speaking a mixture of 'good' English and 'bad' Norwegian, the evaluation problem sets in at the point where the marks begin. Here the freedom of the teacher dissipates, the happily-grouped tables become four straight rows facing the front, the teacher retreats to talk-and-chalk monologue and the teenagers to text-book tasks. This scenario is not unique to Norway. The movement towards formality, the sudden upping of teaching so that external examiners will rate oneÝs students well, is not a new phenomenon. Despite the rhetoric of curriculum documentations, policy statements and teachers researching their practices for their next Higher Education achievements, schooling and teacher-educating remain fixed on the all-important exam system. PeopleÝs futures count more than their presents; and the past becomes the model to emulate. Hence a twenty-five year old student-teacher impersonates the stereotypes of forty years ago; and I run thankfully off to my computer to write this.

In the case exemplified for this paper, the students are studying English as a foreign language. Some of them are already teachers of it. Others are in their last year of pre-service Teacher Education. None of them speaks English as a first language, but the English spoken is excellent: because of schoolings, Americanisations, world travels, television, the all-pervading colonisations of the lingua franca. What is to be evaluated, however, as student learning, is a matter of shifting values, because of the times we are living in. The usefulness of particular skills, and the relevance of yesterdayÝs knowledge, are now being questioned. Even the people doing the learning and the teaching are not the same as we were a decade ago. Technology has changed our work; globalisation has extended our horizons; ethnicity and citizenship are questioning our differences; the ways we talk and write are changing the qualities of lectures, publications and everyday interactions.

This paper touches on the 'what', the 'how' and the 'why' of evaluations and assessments. From these it begins to theorise an ethics for pedagogy. As data for its developments, it draws on an archive of examples from teaching practice: photocopies of typed assignments, hand-written annotations, a teacher's descriptive assessment of reports and essays, course outlines and students' own evaluations of their learning. These are related to (Norwegian and Australian) curriculum documentations and policies. The developing theoretical insights are intended as pointers to new directions for praxis; and as links between what happens in one country and what happens in another. A premise here is that the (re)searching of what one does, as a teacher, is an ethical and professional action (Stenhouse, 1975). The key experience that has prompted the writing of this paper is thus the transference of academic, linguistic and pedagogical skills to a foreign setting (Kristeva, 1991).

As an Australian in Norway I have noted the following:

1. Relationships between student teachers and academics/teachers are friendly and informal; even during the oral exam this relationship is maintained.

2. Student-teachers are hard-working, serious about wanting to teach, and highly able as scholars; towards the end of the academic year they seem to be highly stressed and much overworked.

3. There is a high level of skill in spoken language; not always so high in written language.

4. In the schools the student teachers work co-operatively with each other and with the supervising teachers; this is immediately followed up with critical reflections as shared and open discussion.

5. Much of what happens in the tertiary classroom can be spontaneous; as the year progresses the students must focus more and more on what will be examined.

6. Technology can play a large part in the finding of information, spell-checking, editing and re-writing throughout the year; finally it is a hand-writing marathon that counts.

7. Colleagues spend much time designing the exam papers in advance; criteria for excellence as student responses to it may not be stated.

8. External examiners (censors) earn large amounts of money; national, uniform levels of performance and of course content are desired.

Having provided a list of debatable attributes, I shall later present some specific students and their learning contexts. This presentation will verge on ethnography; with added theorisations related to globalisation. Firstly though, I provide information about English teaching in Norway more generally, and about my own practices of curriculum evaluation here.

Primary and secondary schools in Norway take English seriously. Children from the age of six begin to use it for about five minutes a day, by singing songs, naming objects and playing games (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1996; pp. 223-232). For the first few years (småskoletrinnet), the emphasis is on being confronted with English speaking and English writing. Later (mellomtrinnet) the emphasis is on actually using English, and later still comes a knowledge of English itself and the cultures of the people who speak it. Older teenagers are expected to know about their own use of a more sophisticated English, and how to continue learning it. In Primary School there is no formal assessment of English, but by the end of Secondary School marks are given.

English in Norway is supported and developed by the formal teaching of student-teachers (Høgskolen i Oslo, 1998, pp. 16-18) and by in-services (etterutdanning). Students are evaluated in the pre-service phase regarding the English language itself, its literatures, its cultures and various ways of teaching it. In all literate societies, writing is usually the last of the language skills to develop, whether this is first language learning, second language, third or fourth. Most Norwegian student-teachers of English, however, are already highly skilled as writers. But despite the fact that all teachers in primary school (grunnskole) are expected to teach English, the study of English in pre-service Teacher Education is voluntary.

In the case of my own teaching, I wanted to know what the Norwegian student-teachers thought of what I did with them, as lecture-workshops, and as set assignments with given feedback. Accordingly, and after IÝd been there for a semester, I designed a one-page evaluation and asked them to fill it out:

Points 1-10 on the evaluation sheet thus regarded speaking, writing, reading and listening, and text genres and curriculum genres, with an emphasis on how each person judged their own learning. Most students wrote sentences as additional evaluative comment. 'I've had a lot of pressure to create some quality writing during this semester. What do you think?' wrote one. 'I donÝt like to speak in front of an audience, I disslike (sic) it a lot because I don't speak any good English then,' wrote another. Just about all of their circled responses were that lecture-workshops were useful, and that their own speaking, reading and writing of English had developed, this last semester, 'a great deal'. What does this mean? Amongst other things it means I have something concrete to write about, and to think about. It could also be that they wanted, anonymously, to please me - after all I had not finished with them. My intention was that they shifted the focus a little, from what I did to what they did. Evaluating learning, not by judging efforts as an outsider, but by asking the people themselves what they learned, is not a new strategy. But this is not how exam systems work, and neither is it how discrepant assessment functions.

The report writing, the essay writing and the narratives counted not at all towards these student-teachers' end of the year 'results'. Except that all writing eventually feeds itself into something else. I produced individualised descriptions for the student-teacher writers, about their uses of genres, idiomatic English and academic conventions. At the start of the year (in September, this is the Northern hemisphere), they produced a page each, no more and no less, using a computer. This was quite strange for them, as were my pencilled ticks (for points well made) and circles (for grammar, word choices and spellings unable to be corrected by computers), my cryptic comments and my hand-written scrawl. Later they wrote 1,500 word essays about the novels, plays and short stories we had read, and I produced a one-page filled-out sheet for each, commenting on each personÝs consideration of topic, expression of ideas, use of English and structuring of writing. Again, I also did the ticking, circling and handwritten commenting, in pencil, on the essays themselves. There were 70 of them.

Quite often the Norwegian writers' skills in English did not match their literary or their analytic skills. Conversely, other students were highly skilled in English, but lacking in experience when it came to the work with cultural themes, or the related disciplines of literature, politics, geography or sociology. I was determined that content not become subordinate to expression. Everyone knows you usually get a good mark by writing what is easy, making sure you spell it right and having it look nice. I wanted to challenge the convention - and not 'mark' at all. Accordingly I commented on their structuring of their writing, their consideration of their topics, their uses of both what they had read and of their own experiences, their abilities to present and format lists, critiques, charts, drawings, stories, explanations, maps.

At this point my reflections of practice abruptly end, so that I can give you the promised ethnographic picture of the scene, and so that I can introduce some related theorisations of globalisation. These should then be kept in mind throughout the second and third sections of the paper, where I discuss evaluation more broadly, and where I introduce a contemporary ethics of teaching. What follows as the ending of this first section, about the students and their learning contexts, will occasionally blur the subjective and the objective, the literary and the factual, the intellectual and the everyday. Some of it is written in the present tense, as a form of research journal.

In November last year I went to London for a week. With 52 of the Norwegian student-teachers who are studying English with me, in the Faculty of Education in Oslo. Amongst other places we visited London schools, which provided introductions to: 1. English language in use; 2. English systems and practices of language and literacy learning; 3. English teachers' ways of being together with their pupils; 4. English staff-room conversations; 5. English parents encountered in corridors; 6. English playground play; 6. English Infant Assemblies.

None of our visiting and witnessing could have taken place without the (mature age) Norwegian student-teachers being highly skilled at speaking and understanding English. It is the conditions of globalisation that make such transportations of a language possible. Thus, in a global society (Giddens, 1994; 96-7) many integrations and inter-dependent organisings are taking place. This allows not only the transference of linguistic skills, but access to the cultures of the other. Accordingly English textbooks in Norway, usually written by Norwegians, include information about social, political and geographical conditions in Britain and USA. Novels, plays and poems for study are selected from both 'the literary canon' and today's internationalised writing (Fugard, 1996; Guterson, 1995; Morgan, 1987; Shapcott and Sweeney, 1996). Film, multi-media, everyday print genres and ordinary conversations are dealt with in lecture-workshops. The study trip to England was part of the course. In Norway, the pedagogy of other-language learning requires language in use, authentic texts and elevvurdering uten karakter og elevvurdering med karakter (student assessments with and without marks), (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1996).

I shall exemplify some of the Norwegian student-teachers' writing, to document (with their permission) their skills with their English. Included are their reactions and reflections regarding schoolings: those of both England and Norway. 'Does it matter', one of these students asked me at the start, 'if my accent is American? I went there as an exchange student when I was a teenager.' Others speak with an English accent much better than mine. In Norway, English is construed as grammar, phonetics, literature, social studies and so-called 'method'. I get to do what I would call Cultural Studies and Literatures of English-Speaking Places, packaged within a context of Pedagogies (which Norwegians speaking English call Didactics). A colleague does the Grammar and Phonetics and Method. I am highly conscious of the fact that not many foreigners get to teach their own language in the foreign country.

Featherstone (1995, p. 6-8) sees globalisation as 'the extension outwards of a particular culture to its limit, the globe'. Applied to the English language, it is speakers and writers who do the extending, in much the same colonial ways as did earlier generations of emigrants. Norway, however, is not about to be over-run by other sets of nations: English is just an adjunct, an extension for Norway itself into the worlds outside it. Norwegian-ness is maintained; despite the encounter with the other and the language of the other. Here is an example. The writer is a Norwegian woman in her forties. She has just visited an English school, as one of the student-teachers described above:

I had asked the student-teachers to write a 3,000 word report about schooling, as education was one of the chapter headings in their set textbook about Britain (McDowall, 1993). My task next was to comment on their reports. They need to know how they are going, as end of the year exams are coming up. This writerÝs grammar is OK, and theyÝre all using English spell-checks before they print out. I remind myself that I am not employed to teach Comparative Education, so I take the easy way out and do a generic description of what they have written. As a concession to my position I put little pencilled circles around any of the words and phrases that are Norwenglish. I see many differences between these student-teachers and the ones I worked with last year in Australia. I also see that, compared to the former's English, my Norwegian is absolutely terrible. Such evaluations are unavoidable.

Here is another extract, this time about the teaching of English in Oslo:

Mistakes? Who decides how to pronounce English? Isn't the English of a global culture different? What kind of flexibility might there be with pronunciation, and for that matter, with grammar and the choice of words? I begin to see that evaluating English elsewhere is quite complicated: that is, if I let myself think about todayÝs cultural shifts, and consider the ethics of what I am paid to do. As this student-teacher points out to me, maybe I should be correcting how she sounds. What is my responsibility here? They will have both a written exam and an oral (Ongstad, 1997). Moreover, what I think of their English will count for only half of the marks they will get. The other half is determined by an examiner who is external. I ask some questions and find out that this will be a Norwegian. I wonder what she will value about English. I open the dictionary again, to decode the Norwegian in my inherited policy documents (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1995). And go and have a talk with my colleagues in the English Department. We decide that I should phone the examiner and talk about it.

The student-teachers, meanwhile, become preoccupied with problems of cultural differences. Here is a part of another report about what was seen in England:

Aha, here is some grammar I could fix up. There are rules about plural and singular verbs etc. Another of the report writers tackles evaluation herself:

These writers, though the medium of English, struggle to come to terms with pedagogical differences, as do I in my new location in Norway. Normative integration between England and Norway, say these students in their everyday English, could in fact come about. Many of them argued that adopting (English) order, teacher rule and ability streaming would make Norwegian teachers' paid work easier. In their efforts to take up the language of the other, it was difficult for some of them to not also take up the apparent values regarding the foreign schooling. In writing this paper I am similarly located, as the very words of another language work to stop you from thinking in the ways you did in the language you learned first. The new language, with its inherent cultural values, regulates what you desire - because of what you can and cannot say (Rhedding-Jones, 1995; 1997a).

Becoming the same, however, by giving up the values (and the grammar) you had earlier, is not the only possibility for globalisation in postmodernity (Featherstone, 1995, p. 13). A unified culture is one possibility, but a field of discordant and clashing cultures is another. Thus the modernist idea of climbing up and following oneÝs betters may be supplanted by the postmodern idea of living with differences. When the Norwegian student-teachers are torn (as above regarding their reactions to English pedagogy) this appears to be because they attempt to resolve the problem of diversity by replacing it with homogeneity. In other words, they donÝt know what do with their locations in todayÝs global culture; they want to put themselves into a system where one value replaces another, where positives and negatives fight each other for supremacy. Producing a hybrid identity (Connell, 1997, p. 2) is thus for them not an option. These student-teachers felt they had to make either-or choices: either they liked the English ways of teaching or they didnÝt.

A feature of this case of my own teaching and of the new English-learning in postmodernity, is the fact that it cannot be evaluated in the old ways (Gipps, 1994; 175). A beginning here is the opening up the teaching of English, so that it goes beyond the structures of the language itself, to literary and cultural studies, to feminism and to a range of disciplines (Burgess, 1996, p. 60). Standard English however, as a symbol of a developed and literate culture, remains an aim. In this regard we teachers of English must deal with the 'formidable educational legacy' (Burgess, 1996, p. 62) left to us historically. Introducing change into the language itself because of the cultural and linguistic location of other-tongue English speakers, is thus not (for evaluation purposes) an option. In this sense English has a coloniserÝs power, and globalisation has modern, not postmodern, effects. Given this position in theory then, a natural practice that follows is the modernist examination of the knowledge of English by regurgitation of facts, names of authors, quantities of texts read, given literary analyses recalled, and accuracy of the produced English-ness.

But critical interests, regarding discourses, curriculum genres and social power, would appear to be the issues taken up by the student-teachers who wrote the above. Asking them to produce some report writing about their visits to the English schools was perhaps not so wise, given what they are supposed to be learning. In any case, describing a socio-cultural situation 'how it is' is always impossible, and this is a further dilemma for the English teacher, whose teaching must always be about something. Following this, will an evaluation value the something, or only the language? If both, then where will the emphasis be? (Rhedding-Jones, 1997b, p. 62).

It can be argued that the quality of a text must be allowed to vary given global conditions. These conditions include the grammar of the language spoken in the mother-tongue, the habits of addressing, the genres that are usual, the discourses that are absent or frequent. In other words, allowing for difference, by altering what is acceptable, can be seen as a practice of respect for the local. The implications of this, for the teaching and evaluating of English would be quite far-reaching (Gipps, 1994: p. 129). What, for example, should I do with a piece of writing presented, as a narrative, by a Turkish-Norwegian studying English? In my estimation he is highly skilled regarding his use of the language. In someone elseÝs estimation he fails. Here is his writing.

What was my focus, that I failed to register the seriousness of this writerÝs errors? I am excited by the tempo of a text, the placement of a body in water, the imposition of the Aegean into the core of a Norwegian classroom. It is the literary me that takes over, clouds my judgment, makes me desperately want him to pass. I write on his page. 'You tell this really well. ItÝs like reading a short story.' Unethical of me? Yes, I should have told him that poetics and rhythms are never enough. Besides, I rationally know he carries a multi-language battery-operated translator in his pocket.

It can be seen from the above that my dilemmas as a teacher stem from my desire for a more formative assessment practice than the Norwegian system allows, especially at examination time. Facing the situatedness of students' and teachers' evaluations of their own performances and each other's, is, I would argue, the praxis of pedagogical work. The summative, which takes place at the end of a 'teaching time' is often for the information of outsiders to the course. In this paper its supposed infallibility as a measurement object, indeed as a desirable object, are brought into question. Following Gipps (1994; p.1-3) 'we need to develop a new way of thinking about assessment to deal with the issues that are emerging as assessment takes on this broader definition and purpose.' What Gipps proposes is a 'new educational assessment paradigm', which appears to go against 'the formal written exam'. As she points out, assessment should support learning. The politics of this, though, is that any practice can be justified as educationally sound: Norwegian students having written a six hour exam paper, or having 'done an oral' will say it was good for them, for example.

Presenting any alternative assessment is problematic when it claims singular applicability or relevance, such as in USA where new forms of assessment are considered as the (definite article) way of reforming the system (Gipps; p.15). In Australia and also in England the shift towards descriptive assessment, saying what students can and cannot do, is a move away from norm-referenced approaches and the pretence that assessment is an exact science. Here the discourses of modernity and postmodernity produce differing effects, as disinterest and detachment from teachers/examiners are differently construed (Gipps, p.167). What Gipps calls 'educational assessment' seems to me to quite close to what Norwegians call vurdering, The intent of a term, however, is not necessarily what happens as practice, as I have been attempting to exemplify. Here reconceptualising practices, and not only naming purposes and qualities, are what radical changes in evaluation are about (Gipps, p. 174). Like Gipps, I am convinced that the increased professionalisation of teachers is the key to more sophisticated and pedagogically useful evaluations.

As a way of working towards this professionalism, I next present information and histories regarding the formative and the summative, within Australian and Norwegian contexts of assessment documentations for schools. As has been said, Teacher Education relates closely to these, although the practical links may be forgotten in our efforts as academics efforts to upgrade our work, and claim intellectual status for our disciplines, rather than letting the students claim the advancement of their own knowledges and abilities. Ignoring the pedagogy of Higher Education learning, I would argue, is the temptation of getting a job as an academic. From this perspective, Education as a discipline offers much, and English or Language within it offers understandings of the functionings of texts, discourses, genres, communications and constructions.

Australian teachers have accepted the fact that 'assessment will primarily be for students and parents, while, at other times, it will be for the teacher herself or for a group of colleagues evaluating the program' (McGregor and Meiers, 1986; 7). At the end of 13 years of schooling, however, Australian teenagers are subjected to the major stress of the formal examination system. This system determines who goes where after schooling is done. For those working in Higher Education, the students are neatly graded on their arrival. They in turn then neatly grade the people they have 'taught': for future employers, or further study. Thus assessment is not only as McGregor and Meiers say; it functions for the purposes of outsider institutions and groups.

Basically there are two forms of assessment: formative and summative, although what Gipps calls 'ipsative ... in which the pupil evaluates his/her performance against his/her previous performance' (1994: vii) is also in evidence. 'Summative assessment should derive from the learnerÝs involvement in the program and her understanding of the goals to be attained, and should help all those concerned to know what the student can do, where she is headed and why, and how far she has gone' (McGregor and Meiers, 1986; 7). In practice this becomes what happens at the end of the teaching time, with varying degrees of 'accuracy' from who does the assessing. The ending of this statement carries more weight than the first part, about involvement. Some students can be highly involved in coursework, benefit enormously from the coursework and what they have done because of it, and still get 'bad marks'.

Formative assessments on the other hand, 'remain confidential to the teaching and learning situation, and ... they may be seen as inappropriate to the more distant audience of employers and selection panels for entry into later stages of education' (1986; 7). Here then lies the heart of the teacher, within the privacy of the learning situations, the inter-personal aspects of pedagogy, the crafting of knowledge with the learners. In practice though, teachers are often too busy, too stressed and sometimes even too out of control to do very much, given large their numbers of students and teaching hours. Furthermore, what counts in the long run is not this, but the other kind of assessment. Yet it is the relationship between the two that comprises the accountability of the teacher to the learners; and this is based on the particular ethics of the teaching profession and of the individuals within it.

Following McGregor and Meiers, the State documentation (Department of School Education, 1991), translated the two forms of assessment into the formal and the informal. Thus 'Much assessment is not deliberately set up but goes on incidentally in the classroom. This form of assessment is born of practice and experience.' And: 'Assessment of a more formal and systematic kind is necessary to ensure that students are making progress in all aspects of the subject' (Department of School Education, 1991; p.7). Here what is implied is that if we donÝt have formal/summative assessment, students will not be seen to 'make progress'. In other words the professionalism of the teachers is in question, and their 'practice and experience' becomes demoted to second place. Another reading is that the students will not bother to learn unless they get a formal assessment.

The history of assessment practices and its rhetoric in the Australian State of Victoria is that the new Liberal Government (the Conservative Right) then introduced more stringent measures (Board of Studies, Learning Assessment Project, 1996). Although these were unpopular with teachers they were nonetheless put into practice. At this time many of the more radical teachers left the educational profession, taking their early retirement packages with them. In a section labelled 'Who is assessed?' the answer is given bluntly: 'All students in Year 3 and Year 5'. (aged approximately 8 and 10) (Board of Studies, 1996; 16). Known as the LAP test, this form of summative assessment produces statistics useful to State bureaucrats with agendas of an economic rationalism; and the promotion of a non-ethnic, non-indigenous middle class. Further, the LAP test serves to divide schools of 'excellence' from schools without it, and with todayÝs school-based administration rather than a central administration, the financial and social benefits of scoring highly from such assessments are huge.

In practice, Victorian primary school teachers are busy working out the meaning of the new terminology and striving to do what is required. Teacher work, for example, becomes 'preparing for the centrally assessed tasks', 'administering the centrally assessed tasks', finding the 'equipment and materials required for the teacher-assessed tasks', understanding 'assessment criteria for the teacher-assessed tasks', filling out an 'Assessment Tally Sheet' and an 'Assessment Log Sheet' (Board of Studies, 1996). Until 1996 such matters were the prerogative of only upper secondary school teachers, with students in their late teens. Now it is a major concern for those teaching a much younger age level.

In contrast, Norway appears like a breath of fresh air. Here the given curriculum documentation regarding assessment reads as follows (translations are mine):

How can we get the students to be active in evaluating their own work? What links can be made between formal and informal assessment? How can school assessment become a part of the schoolÝs pedagogical competence? Does a centralised and national administration mean standardised assessment/evaluation? (Norsk Lærerlag, 1994; 19)

Here many of the political and theoretical problems of the Victorian situation are avoided. Binary divisions between formal and informal, between teachers and students, and between school and State are erased, at least in intent. Further, the documentation operates, at this point within the text, by the asking of questions rather than by the making of statements. In practice Norway avoids, so far, the summative and formal assessment of its pre-teenage students. These get 'individual assessment without marks'; the 'individual assessment with marks' being reserved for those at the end of their schooling (Kyrkje-, utdannings-og forskningsdepartementet 1996; 3). Further, the State documentation says, 'It is important that the students and the parents or care-givers understand the reasons for the assessments.' Such consideration is missing from the Victorian rhetoric, itself a reflection of political difference from Norway. Regarding process/formative assessment, for the 10 years of schooling with students aged 6 - 16, NorwayÝs received pronouncement is that 'the assessment must be more about process than result.' (1996; p. 9), that 'there must be more stress on teaching and less on ranking' and that 'students must take part in the judgments made.' Further, 'assessment must be made from contexts appropriate to the studentsÝ lives'; 'alternative forms of marking will be valued'; and 'test forms must be varied. Open book exams are an example' (1996, p.9, my translations). Here it can be seen that this particular rhetoric is at odds with some of the evaluation practices in Norwegian Teacher Education. Indeed, putting it into practice, at the tertiary level, proved impossible, certainly for me.

The above rhetoric however is not for the summative/national assessment, with older students only. Here 'quantitative and more qualitative examination' (Kyrkje-, utdannings-og forskningsdepartementet 1996; p. 19) is used for 'measuring knowledge and competence' (p. 20). So whilst it seemed that radical steps regarding assessment have been taken, the final crunch of schooling presumably carries the same referents and discourses as the Australian practices, the difference being the targeted age group. A consideration of the changes taking place over time, between the curriculum documentation in Norway of some ten years ago (known as M86) and of what is commonly known as L97 (1996, p. 79-84), shows that there may be political agendas here with faint echoes of the changed positionings in the ten years of documentation regarding assessment for Victoria, Australia. A chat with those personally engaged in implementing the curriculum changes further indicates that this is a distinct possibility.

Apart from these particular politics, the difficulties of assessing the learning of English, especially in another country, are huge. According to Norwegian Course Outlines (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1995; 51) all evaluations, even of separate assignments, should follow official statements. But words themselves are always slippery, and meanings can never be fixed to texts. For example: 'English is an aesthetic discipline, a knowledge discipline, a proficiency and a communication' (my translation for 'Engelsk er et estetisk fag, et kunnskapsfag, et ferdighetsfag og et kommunikasjonsfag.') Communication easily becomes reduced to communication between candidate and examiner/teacher. Aesthetics becomes a variable subjective judgment of literary qualities. Knowledge gets reduced to what got published as exposition in the set textbook. Proficiency which can be measured, becomes the focus, with rightness and wrongness able to be seen (read from an exam paper) and heard (listened to, in an oral exam). Another reading of this documentation, in its entirety, is that it is remarkably close to that of the Languages Other Than English documentation in Victoria (Board of Studies, 1995) and to what has been happening with English curriculum statements and profiles for Australian schools (Meiers, 1994).

A difference, though, is in the place of grammar. Perhaps an emphasis on proficiency explains the long hold that grammar has had on (foreign) language pedagogy (O'Rourke & O'Rourke, 1996; p. 42). Indeed 'the role of grammar in the extension of literacy needs to be re-examined and reformulated'. Obviously it is time that grammarÝs place in other-language learning is critically examined, because teaching a system of discrete rules, which is the traditional pedagogy of grammar, is very much alive and well. English has an awful lot of rules, although an art of using any language well, and of keeping pace with cultural shifts, is to sometimes break them. What is needed is 'a process of grammatical consciousness-raising about communicative values and communicative strategies' (O'Rourke & O'Rourke, 1996; p. 42). Working with this kind of process (developing listening and reading), rather than testing products (of writing and speech), would appear to be appropriate. As processes, in institutionalised pedagogies, we have contact time in classrooms, lecture-workshops and what happens when people get together. But these are not what usually gets evaluated: texts do.

Reflecting a valuing of doing something, rather than having something produced, thus seems reasonable, especially for teachers, who must act and make decisions about what to do, and who are constantly engaged in the here and now. It is after all a process writing stance. Further, doing is in line with second-language conditions for learning (Wales, 1989; p. 30), where 'a needs-based, functional approach to curriculum and syllabus design and a communicative approach' is 'encompassed overall by a learner-centred approach to pedagogy'. Read like this, a functional approach is not about some fixed state of concrete products, such as the perfection or otherwise of final-draft texts. Further, 'in a learner centred approach, curriculum topics will be selected on a basis of relevance to students themselves', which makes me feel better about my request for a report about schooling. However, in a negotiated curriculum, the students decide together with the teacher what they will do - and how, by building in evaluation components at each end-point (Wales, 1989; p. 32). The idea here is that evaluation is an integral feature of what happens, as learning and teaching; and it means that the teacher must constantly evaluate what she/he is doing also. Thus, self-centredness, or writing and talking about oneÝs own teaching, is a necessary component of this kind of professionalism. However, even the fact that I am now writing for a journal outside Norway, with an audience of people-like-me, is a manipulation of my locations, and hence another claim for (English) power.

Apart from the language they are in, the Victorian Australian Curriculum and Standards Framework documents (Board of Studies, 1995) are quite similar to the ones in Norway (Kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartement, 1996), known locally as L97. If one reads the Australian LOTE (Languages Other Than English) advice and basis for curriculum (Board of Studies, 1995), and compares it to the Norwegian English-teaching documentation, a number of similarities can be seen: strategically, text types or genres are introduced in meaningful situations, with the spoken and written (other not mother) language used for personal, social and informational purposes. Exam situations, however, are another matter altogether, and tactfully left off the list of suggestions advising teachers of what to do. Similarly, radical texts regarding pedagogy (hooks, 1994; Stone, 1994) leave evaluations, assessments, the markings of assignments and the judgments of others off their agendas. This is despite the acknowledgment that learnings and knowledges themselves are culturally constructed, and that it is cultural diversity that marks todayÝs postmodern climate.

Institutionalised assessments and evaluations, nonetheless, are firmly in place to 'discover' studentsÝ knowledge, skills and understandings. Surely it is time now to do more than ignore the existence of the systems and the people that/who do the evaluating and assessing? We must look at what is being tested by exams, and at what is currently valued as students' assigned writing. Wales (1989, p. 33) wants to 'ensure that the purpose of the test is not being sabotaged by linguistic or cultural factors'. I submit that this is impossible given today's locations in globalisation. Moreover, it may not even be desirable. In postmodernity, isnÝt it cultural and linguistic difference, actually in English, that we should be celebrating and developing? And isnÝt it testing we should be sabotaging?

Besides, spoken and written language is much more than can be tested. Language is always a means to something else. Taking away the something else makes a mockery of the functions of language, produces a delusion that words can be grasped, that transience can stand still. When the language used is not our first, the same functionalism applies: we are using the other language to continue our own learning. All we have done is switch the linguistic code, by moving into the grammar and the lexicon and the idiosyncracies of the other.

There is another reason why the examining of English may be even more unethical than that of other curriculum areas. This is because the study of literature has introduced and validated the personal to the reader/student. Confronting students with the possibilities of the personal, of even inscribing themselves in written language (Prain, 1996), is thus out of line with the assessment procedures that may follow the classroom activities in the English class. This is reflected also in current dilemmas regarding excellence of academic writing, when subjectivity is allowed to rear its ugly head (Rhedding-Jones, 1997c). The practice of autobiographical writing in schools, however, ensures that the students' words keep flowing, that the (m)other language is used meaningfully, that the 'social, historical and discursive influences on subjectivity' (Prain, 1996; p. 17) result in productions of required texts. To then betray oneÝs students by rubber-stamping writing as 1, 2 or 3, A, B or C, becomes a very nasty task, and one best accomplished after the usual classroom interactions of laughing, talking and sharing are well and truly over.

I conclude this broad discussion of evaluation and assessment with some references to Scandinavian research. Kvale (1995, p. 2-4) asks whether examinations are 'tests of students' or 'tests of knowledgeÝ. He uses the terms 'evaluation' and 'examination' interchangeably, as if each is the same as the other. Whilst this may be because he writes English as a Norwegian living in Denmark, the word shift allows him to query exams as constructions of knowledge, and to say that, in education, evaluation pertains to the evaluation of the studentsÝ knowledge. He argues that 'the form of evaluation itself promotes certain values', and goes on to say that 'with evaluation as the de facto goal of learning, the forms of evaluation come to influence and transform the studentsÝ learning'. From this, and following Foucault, Kvale considers 'the contributions of examinations to the social construction of the knowledge of a discipline'. Teaching and learning may thus become negated, or at the least depreciated, by evaluation/assessment anticipations. In practice then, students work towards the knowledge that counts. And counting is, theoretically, a quantitative act. English, of course, isn't.

Kvale outlines six implications for the knowledge being evaluated. Here a modernist question regarding the learning of English is: do we want knowledge or do we want skills? I have argued that what matters is what gets done. This I would see as being between being skilled and having knowledge. Partly this being between is a poststructural position; partly it is a philosophical position; and partly it makes the work-load easier, because doing, in (English) language, involves the processing of texts and talk. So I would want to read KvaleÝs six implications as six 'doings' of knowledge, although judging 'doings' will always be problematic. Kvale outlines 'knowledge as discourse, knowledge as differentiation and fragmentation, knowledge as privilege and commodity, and finally the castration of knowledge' (1995, p. 8). Evaluating each of these, by looking at what people do, is I think relevant to the teaching of English. Questions following this can then become: what discourses has this student accessed via the language? How has this teacher presented this knowledge as only ever fragmented and differentiated? Whose English is this that some English writers and speakers are privileged over others? And what has been cut off by an unnecessary emphasis on an evaluation act itself? Kvale says 'Evaluation of knowledge may extract the force and potency of the knowledge. A strong focus on grading, with high stakes for the students in the outcome of the grading, may further an evaluative erosion of knowledge' (1995, p. 11). In my terms, where knowledge is doing-related, the erosion occurs as people decide not to do what is valuable; but decide instead to do what will give them, or their students, more marks. It is at this point that the matter of ethics appears.

3. Ethics

For the ethics that I consider as always local and always personal, an awareness of people, bodies and subjectivities is crucial. Further, getting away from essentialism is a sign of what is happening with postmodern pedagogical shifts; and this is why we cannot evaluate peopleÝs learnings, and our own teaching, in the ways that we did. This is because the relational, the conjunctives and the dynamics of ethics and evaluations become, in postmodernity, unfixed. In short, essentialism has gone, and with it are the essentials of 'good' English, 'good' learning and 'good' assessment.

At this point I depart from the work of Gipps (1994; p.17) who also writes of ethics, but who takes it in the directions of ethical assessment practices, which could be construed, by what I have written as the end of the last paragraph, as discourses of goodness. The ethical issues she considers are the influences assessment has on the lives of the assessed, and the need for 'assessment criteria to be made available to pupils and teachers' (1994; p. 166). Whilst I agree strongly that this should happen and that lives matter very much, I want to now take ethics into more philosophical domains. In other words, I am changing the use of the term 'ethics' from the ways I have used it earlier in this paper, when perhaps the word 'moral' may have been better. It seems to me that ethics in its more philosophical domains has the possibility of clearing a space for other forms of pedagogical practices. In fact, what I am about to say is a beginning attempt to theorise today's professionalism of teachers and the work that we now do. Or try to do.

The reason why this article has taken so long to get to this stage of its development is that I have had to spell out not only today's complex shifts regarding the assessments and evaluations of learning, but also a teacher's personal location in regard to her students and her praxis. At this point the teaching of English in Norway can be read as simply a means to write about a philosophical ethics. Thus the final section of this paper considers how a pedagogical situation, of today's shift from summative to formative assessment, as a reflection of today's world, might be theorised. It does so by presenting some contemporary work regarding ethics, and by reconsidering what has been presented already.

Weber (1951, in Featherstone, 1995, p. 38) writes this of ethics and religion in China: 'The puritan viewed the world as material to be fashioned ethically whereas Confucianism asked for adjustment to the world.' An ethics of adjustment to worlds is, as I have presented it, what is desirable for the evaluation of English. This notion of adjustment may be seen, following Weber, as an Asian contrast to Christian morality, which attempted to convert the world to its own moral values. Dictionary definitions also stress colonial or conversion attributes for ethics (Flew, 1979, p. 112): 'a set of standards by which a particular group or community decides to regulate its behaviours - to distinguish what is legitimate or acceptable in pursuit of their aims from what is not'. This, Flew hastens to add, is the layman's ethics. Philosophical ethics, says Flew, are 'systems that are intended to guide the lives of men' (p. 113). In modernity then, a slippage between ethics and morals was acceptable, as were the sexist values now apparent.

Instead of defining, de Lauretis (1990, p. 266) describes 'an ethical drive that works towards community, accountability, entrustments'. Here is a postcolonial ethics of going towards a set of values, of not superimposing the one over the other. For teachers, a sense of community could be the classroom and its equally valued participants; accountability could be towards the people doing the learning rather than to external institutions; entrustments could be towards privacy at appropriate times, sensitivities towards particular circumstances. All of these aspects of ethics go in the direction of an ethics of eros (Chanter, 1995), following Levinas (Chanter, 1995, p. 201). Here it is presence that challenges (p. 207): 'In ethics ... the presence of the other in the eyes of the one that challenges me ... is the condition of morality. The face to face founds justice.' I would argue that it is the presence of the other, as a body in the classroom, and in the text as the personal writer, that produces an ethics. Most assessing and examining, however, requires the removal of the examiner or assessor from the student. In other words, non-ethical evaluating requires non-presence.

Evaluating students differently, by not comparing one against another, and by not assuming that all examiners have the same set of values, would be a radical change. Such a change could be seen as ethics coming before all else, in that the teaching/learning situation is judged by it, and constructed by it. Thus Levinas (1979) places ethics before being. 'Levinas argues for the priority of ethics, a term which he employs in a different sense from traditional ethics insofar as the latter tends to assume the universal applicability of moral principles, and an essential similarity between individuals' (Chanter, 1995, p. 182). Here Levinas' concept of ethics starts not from an analogy between the self and the other (the teacher and the student? the Norwegian and the Turkish-Norwegian?) but because of the differences. Dealing ethically with these differences, and not desiring similarity, not measuring the one against the other, is another position in theory. In practice, such an ethics cannot produce 'motivated and anticipated' descriptions, discussions, answers and responses.

For Levinas (1979, in Chanter, 1995, p. 182-3):

Furthermore, the face-to-face is the beginning and the continuing of spoken and written language. To then deny the faces, by excluding the bodies, the lives, the difficulties, the diversities, is from this position in theory, unethical.

A second theorist of ethics is Deleuze (1997), who critiques classical frames of representation. Here the metaphor for knowledge is of rhizomatic root systems underground, rather than single-trunked trees above ground (Lather, 1995. p.55). In other words, knowledges and their doings are not always visible, cannot be represented in neatly matched categories, and may appear to hibernate. Further, a philosophy where people/subjects are seen as constantly in the processes of becoming, rather than as having arrived at discernible points and hence able to be categorised, raises the question of how ethical it is to assess/evaluate at all. For Deleuze, ethics dwells within the person (Deleuze, 1997). What counts is the life you lead, and what you do with it. DeleuzeÝs translators produce some almost impossibly difficult English, which no doubt is the counter-part of his original French. It seems to me that over-simplification, such as I have just demonstrated, must be risked if his ideas can be applied to everyday situations, such as the ethics of the busy-ness of teaching and learning. At this risk, then, I say the following: with a Deleuzean ethics the focus is on what goes between a subject and an object. Here, the subject could be English, the object the student who learns it. Or: the person could be the subject(ive) learner, and the English (language) the object of the learning. It makes no difference for the moment which labels you decide on. The point is that it is the in-between that is the new idea, for ethics. Saying that you cannot determine how much somebody knows (about English or anything else) is thus philosophically justifiable.

The word that is associated with DeleuzeÝs ethics is 'immanence'. For Deleuze, ethics belongs to the person. As an example (Deleuze, 1997, p. 4), he describes the function of the definite article, in relation to 'a' person. Once the 'a' person becomes a 'the' person the situated ethics alters. This is also the experience of teachers, who know their students differently, according to how closely they position themselves. This transcendence of the indefinite 'a' student to the definite 'the' student happens not just with classroom interactions. It also happens through texts, with the links between reader and writer able to be those of teacher-writer and student-reader, or student-writer and teacher-reader. Unfortunately, the latter pairing is the more usual, with the power position of the teacher allowing her/him to reduce 'the' student to an 'a' student. It is at this point that an ethics of immanence (an indwelling ethics, which resides within the life of the one doing the teaching) is different from other ethics.

Thus philosophies of doing, rather than philosophies of being, are what todayÝs shift of philosophy itself into ethics is about (Deleuze; Levinas). Making your teaching itself ethical, which means it is accountable to your own integrity, is in this way a doing of what you know. For Deleuze, philosophy repositions itself as beyond the dichotomies of emotion and reason, which is what I think an experienced teacher attempts to do too. Not valuing just the emotional or just the rational is an ethical dimension of pedagogy, and it actually requires life-skills in both the rational and the emotional spheres. This is why a new pedagogical ethics, following Deleuze, must come back again and again to the life of the one who is called the teacher, and to the lives of those who are called the students.

Following a Deleuzean ethics further, a teacher works between obligation and impulse (Goodchild, 1997; 39). Here the ethics is of the unconscious, which demands the break-out from duty: the duty to produce expected lectures, workshops, group interactions, assignments from students and task designs that are like someone elseÝs, or like last year's. Yes we have a responsibility to be rigorous in the preparation of our classes, our reasoning as to why we select the tasks and the activities we do, the feed-back we give students about their writing. We are obliged to conform to the stipulations of course requirements, the various policy documents and the organisation that funds our teaching. We are also ethically accountable to the needs and imagined desires of the others we are answerable to: primarily our students, but also our colleagues, and our own selves. Teaching the impulsive, in addition to the obligatory, is a melding of the conscious to the unconscious, and this is new for pedagogy to acknowledge, especially for those of us in Higher Education.

A traditional ethics, based on a traditional (modern not postmodern) philosophy is that 'only a disembodied mind or a pure idea of justice can be an impartial judge.....Such an idea judges life from the perspective of one who does not liveÝ (Goodchild, 1997, p. 40). This description sits uncomfortably close to the position of the un-named examiner, of so-called objectivity. Regarding evaluation, Deleuze (1984, p. 1) says: 'Evaluations, in essence, are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge.' Linked to his theory of ethics as coming before being, evaluation thus fits into another order, an order that is not doing. This of course is traditionally how schooling has worked: first you teach and then you test. Further though, 'We are never judged except by ourselves and according to our states' (Deleuze, 1984, p. 40). These states, says Deleuze, (1997, p.3) are only ever temporary. Even if we insist on evaluating students, assignments, exam papers, coursework and even classroom doings, the very transience of their states makes nonsense of our judgments and descriptions by the time we have written them down.

One more point: in stressing 'the passage from one to the other as becoming' (1997, p. 3), Deleuze theorises 'futurity and temporality' as relational (Goodchild, 1997, p. 48). In so doing, he leaves the past behind, together with interactions, texts and discourses that are not part of a process of becoming. This, for Deleuze, is to focus on a 'transcendental field' (Deleuze, 1997, p. 3), to seek the doings that go beyond, the events that allow for surpassing what has already been. Too esoteric for teaching? 'Transcendence is always a product of immanence', says Deleuze (1997, p. 5). And what is immanence? It is a life (Deleuze, 1997).

In conclusion then (Goodchild, 1997p. 41), Deleuze's ethics are:

Not having representations, but having 'real' writing and 'real' speaking is problematic for education, which itself is based on removal from primary interests and instead produces substitutes. Creating authenticity, with texts and events, is, following Deleuze at this point, an ethical responsibility of the (English) teacher. If we follow him further, it is the only ethical action, as evaluation in education is always a matter of representations of skills and knowledge, rather than the actual skills and knowledges themselves.

NOTES

1. A paper by the same name was presented as an Invitational Seminar at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, 23 April, 1998.

2. An earlier version was presented at Nordisk Förening För Forskning (Nordic Association for Research in Education) Lahti, Finland, 12-15 March, 1998.

3. A related paper entitled 'Assessment in Teacher Education: practices, ethics and accountabilities' was presented as an Invitational Plenary to Allmennlærerutdannings profesjonsdidaktikk (National Seminar for Teacher Education), Saltstraumen, Norway, 6 August, 1998.

4. This paper has been rewritten following the advice of the referees of an international journal and is now submitted to its editor.

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JEANETTE RHEDDING-JONES is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Oslo College, Norway. She has backgrounds in literature, linguistics, writing, drama, language and literacy learning. Before migrating to Norway she worked for twenty years in Teacher Education in Australia. Her recent publications are in The British Journal of Sociology of Education, The Journal of Curriculum Studies, Nora Journal of Nordic WomenÝs Studies, Nordisk Pedagogikk etc, and (in press) Qualitative Studies in Education. After a one year contract as Associate Professor of English in Norway (August 1997-8), Rhedding-Jones has taken up a tenured position with postgraduate and undergraduate students in Pre-School Education. She now teaches Research Methodology and Pedagogy, using a mixture of English and Norwegian. Her two sons are teaching English in Japan.

Førsteamanuensis Jeanette Rhedding-Jones

Avdeling for lærerutdanning

Førskolelærerutdanning

Høgskolen i Oslo

Pilestredet 52

N-0167 Oslo NORWAY