“Vad tror du om det här?”

Abstract

This study asks how relationships affect how students deal with assessment. How the different roles of teacher, student who is a friend or not a friend and someone who knows the subject more or less than the student affect how the assessee receive assessment. The study takes place in Swedish upper secondary art education and answers how students reason about how different kinds of relationships affect receiving constructive criticism and to what degree it is part of the spontaneous interactions in the arts classroom. It does so through six focus group interviews in different schools and observations with two classes. The theoretical framework for the study is the sociocultural and social constructivist terms the zone of proximal development, more knowledgeable other and scaffolding through Vygotskij and Bruner as well as Aspelin and Persson’s (2011) Relational Pedagogy. The findings show that relationships do affect the students' experience with critique, they prefer when the assessor is their teacher, a friend or someone they believe is more knowledgeable than themselves, but not exclusively. Most of the constructive criticism is offered from the teacher but the students themselves do offer spontaneous peer assessment as well, however mostly when asked.