Podcasts and Pictures: Multimodal Assessment

Away with boring book reports! This website features a series of intriguing ideas beyond such traditional modes of assessment. Here are two key ideas from the site (article by Beth Holland) that I think have real potential to be adapted for the literature classroom as a means to assess students’ learning.

1) Create Literature Podcasts

To demonstrate their understanding of mood and tone, students can create podcasts in the style and format of radio programmes by drawing upon their mobile devices’ recording functions. Their narration of excerpts from novels, short stories, or plays can be accompanied by sound effects and background music (for example, staging dialogue between characters while recreating the sounds of a Bangkok market in Ho Min-fong’s Sing to the Dawn). Students can also create video podcasts of dramatized readings or poetry performances. (See, for instance, this reading of Arthur Yap’s ‘2 mothers in a h d b playground’). With parental permission, these videos can be uploaded and shared on YouTube. Through the creation of such podcasts, students learn by doing—while allowing the teacher to assess their awareness of theme, setting, tone, voice, and other elements. 

The downside of these podcasts is that they demand students’ familiarity with using recording devices (though this is probably less of a concern today given that students can simply use their smartphones), and also the entire process may be rather time-consuming. But the clear advantage is that they can be easily showcased and stored online for posterity to be part of students’ portfolios (which, in a way, also aids the process of continuous assessment).

2) Choose Your Own Adventure

When studying narratives, students’ understanding of plot and characterization can be assessed by having them recreate the narrative as a ‘choose your own adventure’ story. In this activity, students map out a new story based on the original one by pinpointing crucial moments and specific twists that the narrative can take. (For example, rewriting Silas Marner as a tragedy, with Silas never finding Eppie and dying all alone.) According to the site, students can generate e-books, incorporating not just text but also images, audio and video, as well as assorted hyperlinks. Students can further show their understanding of characters by generating new scenes and situating the characters in them—revealing the characters’ personalities in the process. The scene can then be depicted visually using digital tools. Given that the activity is predicated on students’ knowledge of the original plot, teachers can check on their awareness about the significance of particular scenes or chapters.

It can be initially challenging, though, for students to refashion the narrative by editing the plot (given the possible natural tendency of some readers to fall back on the text and adhere to the storyline). But by kindling their imagination, the activity fosters students’ creativity while encouraging them to consider authorial choices and motivations for selecting particular plot trajectories. A benefit of such activities is that they can be extended to cover other domains as well. Students can, as this article points out, turn their favourite poems into illustrations, incorporating various art forms like animation or photography. (Consider how Arthur Yap’s ‘2 mothers in a h d b playground’ can be illustrated with photographs of old playgrounds in 1970s HDB estates.) Students’ awareness of setting and other elements can then be effectively assessed.

If, as the site’s author argues, one’s learning objective is to instil enthusiasm and passion about the texts studied, teachers can provide students the opportunity to exhibit their understanding via multimodal approaches. Then, perhaps, we can leave boring book reports behind.