Tomorrow and tomorrow: students, shakespeare, and DV in academic assessments

ABSTRACT

This article presents the work of two female students in a rural school who were assigned to respond to a Shakespearean text with a Digital Video (DV) project. The study shows how the teacher provided students appropriate time, mediation, and space in allowing them to bring their out-of-school literacies and interests within an academic context. The students composed a DV interpretation of the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from Macbeth. The research examines both the product and process of the students’ work. They recursively planned, drafted, and edited as they composed a multimodal response that purposefully attended to the orchestration of visuals, audio, and text. Implications from this study demonstrate the importance of valuing students’ identities in classroom settings, emphasizing multiple audiences for student work, highlighting the complexity of compositional decisions students made throughout the entire process of creating their video response, and providing multimodal assessments in academic contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital video
• composition
• adolescent literacy
• assessment
• digital literacies

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the Writing with Video professional learning community for their contributions to this work. In particular, we would like to thank Brendan Heaney for allowing us a glimpse into his classroom. Finally, the Cattaraugas-Allegany BOCES has been an invaluable partner in this project.

David L. Bruce is an Associate Professor in the Department of Learning and Instruction at the University at Buffalo. He is the Program Director for English Education and is Co-PI for Writing with Video, a project researching the professional learning communities around digital literacies in rural classrooms. His primary research and teaching interests explore students’ and teachers’ use of multimodal literacies—especially Digital Video—in classroom contexts.

Sunshine R. Sullivan is a Professor and Associate Dean of the Department of Education at Houghton College. She is a Co-PI for Writing with Video, a project researching the professional communities of practice centered on integrating digital literacies in rural classrooms. She teaches literacy and inclusive education courses across undergraduate and graduate teacher education programs at Houghton College. Her primary research explores multiple literacies across landscapes of communities of practice.

Olivia Tetta is currently a junior Psychology major at Houghton College. She is currently part of a research group in the Psychology Department at Houghton College regarding benevolence online.

Tess Schilke is currently a senior Applied Design Art major with an Art Business minor at Houghton College. She has her own business (Tess Schilke Photography) as a Wedding and Elopement Photographer and Entrepreneur.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Conference on English Education [Conference on English Education Research Initiative]; University at Buffalo [Civic Engagement Research Fellowship].