ABSTRACT
Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices provide opportunities for teachers and students to learn with and from each other. Less well established are the roles that the material and affective configurations of classroom spaces play in AfL interactions between teachers and students, students with peers and students with ideas. Feedback, dialogue, questioning and using exemplars all depend on interactions where students are expected to manage their bodies, emotions and physical materials. Students not only infer meaning through talk but infer meaning from where their teachers stand to survey their work and how they circulate. Data from twenty years of AfL observational studies in New Zealand and Australia highlight some of the often overlooked spatial and material dynamics that impact the enactment and effectiveness of AfL. A growing understanding of the importance of embodied perspectives of assessment is essential to promote sustainable, healthy, and manageable classroom assessment experiences.
