Cultural Shifts, Multimodal Representations, and Assessment Practices: A Case Study

Abstract

Multimodal texts involve the presence, absence, and co-occurrence of alphabetic text with visual, audio, tactile, gestural, and spatial representations. This article explores how teachers' evaluation of students' multimodal work can be understood in terms of cognition and culture. When teachers apply a paradigm of assessment rooted in print-based culture to multimodal texts created with digital tools, they may fail to capture students' content learning and meaning-making processes that draw on diverse semiotic resources and involve multiple modes of representation. Cultural Shifts, Multimodal Representations and Assessment Practices233 culture, include the ability to produce written symbols and engage in paradigmatic thought. Donald (1991) states that theoretic culture is marked by the external storage of memory that 'introduced new cognitive skill clusters that are generally referred to as "literacy" skills' (p. 746). Thus, in a theoretic culture, literacy skills consist of the ability to read and write alphabetic print texts. Within the realm of education, Shaffer and Clinton (2006) explain that, 'theoretic schooling emphasizes the production and consumption of symbolic text as a primary literacy activity' (p. 295). For hundreds of years, these skills were sufficient. However, Shaffer and Kaput (1999) argue that digital tools now allow for external processing to occur. Where pen and paper facilitate the external storage of memory, technology now enables us to readily compute algorithms, run statistical analyses, and create multimodal compositions. Consequently, Shaffer and Kaput (1999) posit that we are now in a fifth stage, that of virtual culture.Culture, in this sense, is defined by the ways in which individuals privilege specific modes and use diverse communication tools in order to construct meaning, share ideas, and create a dialogic space with their audience. Within a virtual culture, digital tools take information in one form and return it in another. 'Whether the [digital tool] "understands" the information in any sense is irrelevant here. The point is that a person can use .

“I didn’t say, ‘Macbeth,’ it was my Google Doc!”: A secondary English case study of redefining learning in the 21st Century

“…Using Classroom in this way prescribed the format of content and delivery for students while constricting textual learning, propelling a uniformity of content that fell short of what her tech-savvy students were capable of, particularly with Docs. In her study on digitized assessment practices, Curwood (2012) argues that as teachers recognize that students interact with texts and communicate within a virtual culture, so too must they recognize that their “design and evaluation must change” (p. 242). The revisions sequence on Day Three marked a crucial evolution in Althea’s design.…”

A multimodal assessment framework for higher education

“…Whilst learning and literacy are still grounded in decoding, comprehension, and production, the modalities within which they occur extend far beyond written language (Curwood and Gibbons, 2009). As Curwood (2012) notes, a focus on the meanings of multimodal student texts has been a central emphasis of work in this area, but there is still a need for more nuanced understanding of the 'complex ways in which technical skills, composition elements, modes, and meaning interact' (242). Greater attention to materiality, including artefacts (Pahl and Rowsell, 2011), movement (Leander and Vasudevan, 2009), and place (Ruitenberg, 2005) enriches this understanding, and this attention is beginning to emerge in discussions of multimodality.…”

“…For educators whose experience with knowledge representation has been dominated by written and spoken words, the implementation of multimodal assessment challenges their approach to design and evaluation. In order to value the learning and knowing that occur within and through multiple, multimodal and multifaceted textual representations, they must ‘engage students in a critical discussion of the affordances and constraints of modes, mediums, and tools for given purposes’ and work with students to ‘jointly construct formative and summative assessments that can capture the design process, modal choices, and meaning making’ (Curwood, 2012: 242). In that sense, the scope for creativity, criticality and holism within multimodal assessment begins in the discussion, contestation and negotiation of how modes and semiotic resources can afford or constrain knowledge representation.…”

“…written words, visual images or moving digital images) serve as socially and culturally shaped resources for meaning making. However, assessment rubrics for multimodal assignments have not always kept pace: teachers may be consciously or unconsciously working with ‘a paradigm of assessment rooted in a print-based culture’ (Curwood, 2012: 232).…”

English Teachers’ Cultural Models About Technology

“…In previous analyses from this study, I examined teachers' interviews and written reflections, transcripts of learning community meetings, and observational notes to outline the key features of effective technology-focused professional development (Curwood, 2011(Curwood, , 2013 and I have analyzed instructional materials and student work to investigate how an individual teacher designs and implements technology into the secondary English curriculum (Curwood, 2012). In this article, I focus on the learning community at Avon High School to examine how teachers used language and created situated meanings.…”