Checklist assessment does not merely evaluate texts; it reorganises authority. Once judgement is embedded in criteria rather than exercised in interpretation, the question of who decides is quietly answered in advance.
This post traces how genre-based pedagogy redistributes authority away from teachers and toward systems — and how this shift reshapes the pedagogical relation itself.
1. Authority before the checklist
In a Hallidayan frame, pedagogical authority is grounded in interpretive expertise.
Teachers are authorised to:
construe meanings in context,
judge their effectiveness,
and articulate why a text works as it does.
Authority here is not arbitrary. It is accountable to theory, evidence, and shared disciplinary norms — but it remains situated and dialogic.
2. What checklists displace
Once assessment is formalised as a checklist, interpretive authority becomes redundant.
If criteria are explicit and enumerable, then:
judgement no longer resides in the teacher,
explanation is no longer required,
and disagreement appears as error rather than difference.
Authority migrates upward into the rubric.
3. The teacher as procedural agent
This migration transforms the teacher’s role.
Instead of acting as a theorist-in-practice, the teacher becomes:
an applier of criteria,
a calibrator of consistency,
and a guarantor of procedural fairness.
The teacher does not decide what counts; they ensure that what counts is applied correctly.
4. Why this feels like accountability
The reassignment of authority is often justified in the language of equity and transparency.
Because criteria are shared and visible:
power appears decentralised,
bias appears minimised,
and authority appears restrained.
But what has been restrained is not power — it is judgement.
5. Authority without responsibility
When judgement is embedded in systems, responsibility becomes diffuse.
No single agent is answerable for:
why these criteria matter,
why these stages are required,
or why alternative construals are excluded.
Authority persists, but without a clear site of accountability.
6. The student’s new addressee
As authority shifts, so does the object of student orientation.
Students are no longer writing to a reader. They are writing to a rubric.
Feedback is interpreted not as dialogue, but as diagnostic information about alignment or misalignment with the system.
7. The narrowing of pedagogical dialogue
When authority is proceduralised, pedagogical dialogue contracts.
Questions like:
Why does this work?
What else might be possible?
are displaced by:
Which criterion did I miss?
How do I fix this section?
Meaning-making recedes behind optimisation.
8. Looking ahead
Once authority is reassigned to systems, students must learn to manage their own compliance.
The next post traces how student agency is reshaped under these conditions — and how concepts like “voice” survive only as controlled variation within pre-approved bounds.
That is where we turn next.
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