It should not be hard to understand the meaning of inclusion in assessment development, as so many of us have been classroom educators.
For classroom educators, inclusion means including special education students in regular classrooms, lessons and activities—rather than in the building, but it in self-contained classrooms. It is about including those students where the main action is, rather than marginalizing them over there in some other part of the building.
This same logic applies in the workplace. It is not enough to merely include diversity in the organization if it is marginalized over there. It’s not enough that it is listed on paper as being part of the team, but not in the room where issues are discussed. It is not enough if it is not at the table where decisions are made.
Inclusion is about actually taking advantage of the potential of diversity on our teams to help our projects and our products.
Obviously, this matters quite a bit when to comes to writing assessments for the diverse range of test takers who take our products. If our diverse voices cannot be heard appropriately, then the promise of enlisting them in the first place was met. I would suggest that disciplinary lens is another dimension of diversity that should be acknowledge and considered in the context of inclusion. Discussions of issues and decisions need to be open to those diverse voices, or else their knowledge and potential contributions will be wasted, and our products will suffer.
I suppose that this is an aspect of balancing confidence and humility, of knowing when to listen—which requires ensuring that those other voices are present for discussion and decisions. If we did not have a history of marginalizing some voices and excluding some perspectives from the room and table, this would not be notable. But we do have those histories, so we need to be careful to break those old patterns and establish new norms for how we ensure that our product (and decisions) are able to leverage the potential of the diversity within our teams.
Because of longstanding norms of power and who is centered, this requires intentional effort and attention to ensure that those voices are truly included. Because this is about cultural norms and power—yes, it really is about power—efforts to truly include those voices and perspectives take more work and more difficult work than those who have always been included realize. It takes more than merely literally including people in the room and having them at the table. It takes the work of giving them the confidence to speak up and the work of giving the others the humility to listen.
But it is all worth doing because it products better products that have a better chance of being put to some valid use and/or purpose.