I wish I was a lion a puppy: a multimodal view of writing process assessment

ABSTRACT

At the same time that creativity, play, and inquiry are receiving special focus in academic, professional, and educational settings, mandated assessments have never been more prominent, despite public debates that question the value of such testing. In the context of these apparently contradictory developments in literacy education, as a “telling case”, we explore writing as a strand within the multimodal compositional processes of one boy in one classroom during a three-day mandated writing assessment that was also a performance-based and process-oriented assessment. There are two primary areas of interest here: (1) what is made visible when one examines processes more closely, in an ethnographic and observational fashion, and (2) what a multimodal understanding of compositional processes offers, especially in terms of the learning that happens across modes of expression.

KEYWORDS:

• Multimodality
• composition
• writing
• ethnography
• process

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This matrix consisted of a piece of paper with a table drawn with five columns, each of which was labelled with different aspect of the researched animal: Appearance, food, habitat, geographical location, and predators. As students researched each animal, they added notes to the appropriate column.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diane R. Collier

Diane Collier conducts research in the areas of multimodalities and literacies with a special interest in connections across home and school. Using critical qualitative and ethnographic case study methodologies her work focuses on the processes of text-making her research interests also include ethical considerations of children’s participation in research, teaching for social justice, and the use of children’s literature in classrooms.

Maureen Kendrick

Maureen Kendrick is a Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on literacy and multimodality as social practice, family and community literacy, literacy and international development, and digital literacies. She has written widely on literacy and multimodality in local and global contexts.