Assessment and creativity through a translingual lens: transdisciplinary insights

Abstract Outcomes-oriented assessment in translingual language education carries with it the necessary definition of the object of learning and the concomitant verifiability or construct validity of the means of assessment. At the same time, pedagogies for multilingual creativity should ideally seek to identify dimensions that effectively reflect their intended outcome. While reflection and critical thinking increasingly form part of criteria for assessment in language education at all levels, the assessment of these dimensions in relation to creativity has proved more intractable, due in part perhaps to the potentially stifling effect of assessing an elusive quality that is valued for fostering affective engagement with individuals’ unique identity and lived experience and enabling creativity to achieve transformative learning. Recognizing that translingual language play can be sanctioned in the arts as a way of legitimating and giving voice to minoritized and oppressed populations, can lessons be drawn from different disciplines to rejuvenate assessment in language education, for example by placing some of the onus on learners monitoring their own learning? This paper presents a holistic and inclusive, arts-informed pluridimensional lens on creativity in language education whereby new forms of assessment aim to foster tolerance, diversity and translingual practices in the classroom, while resisting the drive to institutionalize the neo-liberal mandates of the creative economy.