Reading Responses

Reading Response 5/4 - Rachel's Thoughts on Creative Writing/ Multimodal Composition Assessment

This week while I know it said to post four articles from The Journal of Assessment in Writing (which I did grab 2 from that journal) I searched outside of it for what I am very curious about which is how one assesses creative writing. As you know I earned my MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University in 2017, assessment there was strange. You did the work you got a good grade, but the comments you would get would make you think you did not deserve such a good grade. As I am qualified to teach creative writing, and got the opportunity this semester to teach a couple creative writing units in my literature and pop culture course, this has been a burning question the past few weeks. Is holistic the way to go? Should it be on an individual basis? How does one grade when every writer is unique and their work very different? How do you even assess one’s creativity? Can you assess effort shown? What matters in evaluating creative writing? And then I also had to think of how one assesses creative multimodal texts as I teach how to do that as well.

I want to be better than my creative writing/tv production professors. Give great feedback, but make a student feel as if effort is rewarded and a grade is not just a completion sticker for being a good student. I want my students of creativity to feel like I am taking their work seriously and I want it to be the best it can be. While grades are sometimes focused on too much, in creative writing it is focused on too little to the point of can it even be assessed? So I did my research and here is what I found.

I then assign point values to each section and grade thusly after watching the film a couple of times and providing lengthy feedback on how this could be edited to be ready for a more formal film festival.

 

I am very happy I spent this week researching this subject. I think taking my previous instruction in creative writing, and everything I learned from this course will help me develop a fair and valuable assessment philosophy for creative works. I think for creative writing having e-portfolios would be the best take. I think I would want either one class working on a longer work throughout the semester and submitting drafts to their eportfolio to see their progress and learn from their editorial history; or a course focused on shorter pieces to be placed in an eportfolio. I would have assignments catered to various learning outcomes such as time, location, dialogue, description, etc. I also would always include a reflective creating statement as it will help writers reflect upon their own developing style. I do really hope to teach creative writing sometime in the future. I think with my education here I would benefit a writing program very well by fostering community instead of stoking hyper competitivity, a problem faced a lot in the creative writing world which I hate. I want to help make writers who feel like they have people to lean on, people to help them edit, and one which has a foundation of trust. I want to make writers who aren’t afraid of taking risks with their writing and try new different things. Getting out of their comfort zones and creating great works. I felt it so much in this last class I taught in our creative units and my students even wrote to me how much they loved these units and feel like they have grown a lot. They told me to keep teaching creative writing it was a very touching last class session where I started to tear up. I was so nervous to teach these units. It felt really empowering to get that feedback and then to see the amazing publishable work my students created.  I really hope I will be able to find a job that will allow me to teach all of my areas of knowledge and skills. I’m not sure where it will be but I hope it is out there.

I do also think holistic grading is important with the creative writing but we need that rubric with the scores because if too holistically, it is too hard to assess the validity or reliability of the creative writing assessment which is why there is this huge of an issue doing it.

 

References

Anson, C. M., Dannels, D. P., Flash, P., & et al. (2012). Big rubrics and weird genres: The futility of using generic assessment tools across diverse instructional contexts. Journal of Writing Assessment, 5(1), pp. 1-15.

Blomer, Y. (2011). Assessment in creative writing. Wascana Review 43, pp. 61-73.

May, S. (2007). Doing Creative Writing. Routledge.

Newman, J. (2007). The evaluation of creative writing at M.A. level (UK), In S, Earnshaw (ed.), The Handbook of Creative Writing. Edinburg University Press, pp. 24-36.  

Sills, E. (2016). Multimodal assessment as disciplinary sensemaking: Beyond rubrics to frameworks. Journal of Writing Assessment, 9(2), pp. 1-9.

Freiman, M. (2 October 2002). Learning through dialogue: Teaching and assessing creative writing online. TEXT, 6(2).

Mozaffari, H. (December 2013). An analytical rubric for assessing creativity in creative writing. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3(12), pp.2214-2219.


Reading Response 1/26 On a Scale ch. 1-3- Rachel's Thoughts on Standardized Testing/ The History of Assessment Part One. 

This reading helped me realize further that gatekeepers have been ruining education since its beginning and have been narrow-minded and oblivious to the fact that their decisions would effect people generations later. This also led me to connect to another book on writing composition I had read Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students 1865-1911  which shows how these type of decisions affected these marginalized communities. As someone whos ancestors directly were affected (Blackfoot Nation/Potawatomi Nation) and still sees in my family a negative view of education, a belief that they are less than in school, and trauma from trying to take people’s identities away and make them conform to a standard and to be like the gatekeepers (assimilation) in order to be successful in this country, these chapters just infuriated me and reminded me of the need to reform the educational system.

References

Elliot, N. (2008). On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America. Peter Lang, 

Enoch, J. (2008). Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911. Southern Illinois University Press.

The Education Trust. (2018). “The State of Funding Equity Data Tool.” State of Education Funding.Org, Retrieved from: https://stateofeducationfunding.org/. Accessed On: 26 January 2023.


Reading Response 2/2 On a Scale ch. 4-6- Rachel's Thoughts on Standardized Testing/ The History of Assessment Part Two


COLLAPSE

This weeks reading showed the further evolution of English education, testing, and scoring. It showed that in order to get where we are a lot of people doing a lot of different things, serving in committees, bringing different views, seeing that it is something to constantly be updating and changing with the changing world; and helped show me how important that is. Sometimes…(while yes I have served on committees and currently am on the FYCC committee, and have worked on that, the text book program one, and the MCLMM one) as a graduate student I feel its just another professionalization hurdle to get done in order to land that tenure faculty position, busy work. I thought it was ok but not direly important. These chapters changed my mind. It is very important! It helps bring change that can really improve things for future students and it led to my favorite assessment practice, holistic grading. We need to be participating in these committees so we can create the change we want to see. Even if we only change a few things they create ripples that create waves that then become the evolution of English Education and Writing Assessment.

References

Elliot, N.(2005). On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America. Peter Lang.


Reading Response 3/9 On Reframing Assessment. Rachel's Thoughts on Impact of Assessment.

This week’s reading really made me appreciate how NIU does writing assessment via eportfolios. I love that we have scores and broad, yet important, categories those scores go into, and at the end have a holistic numbered grade. I like that we do this as a whole department every semester and I appreciate all the writing instructors and their classes have to participate. It keeps us accountable and all knowledgeable about what we are teaching in our classrooms and why. I do think we need to add media literacy and multimodality somewhere in it though as that is a pressing concern with “fake news”, social media, and democracy as a whole. Overall this reading really helped me to appreciate how we assess writing at NIU. I do see a need to reach out to other departments and collaborate with them so that we are teaching applicable things to each discipline and staying true to the university’s mission. Writing/Rhetoric may be the basis of education, but we need that base so that other branches can grow and thrive off from it.

   For my individual philosophy I think this reading strengthens it and had me remember Bean as a person to add to my philosophy of assessment. E-portfolios are the strongest and most equitable way of assessing writing, with holistic scoring, and a score-based calibration system with different categories to be scored, and each category weighted equally (though I believe mechanics and grammar should be weighted less, I recognize other people in departments have differing philosophies than me).  Revisions should be allowed and championed in putting forth of portfolios so students can see their improvement, we can see improvement, and writing as a process is championed.  I also think that it should be the effort of all writing classes with consideration for other departments needs, and require all writing instructors to go through some sort of training/collaboration so that they recognize what we as a university are teaching and valuing in writing.

 

References

Adler-Kassner, L. & O’Neil, P. (2010). Reframing Writing Assessment, Utah State University Press. 

Bean, J. C. (2011).  Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd Edition, Josey-Bass.


Reading Response 3/23- E-Portfolio Learning  Rachel's Thoughts on E-portfolios and Assessing Them. 

 

This reading seems to be what we have been working towards in this class. We have learned the problematic approaches of the past and now see that eportfolios are the current best, most equitable, fair, and tech integrative assessment measure. The question then becomes how I want to individually implement them in my future career post NIU. I already think I want to add a way so my students can edit their drafts for it to show them the importance of revision rather than just adding one of the previous things on at the end of the semester. I want to find a process that won’t seem like busy work or just a box to tick off at the end of the semester, as that was what I felt about assessment before this course. I didn’t fully understand its importance other than keeping us all teaching the right things. So how do we keep it important, interesting, and show our burnt out colleagues it’s a really good thing we do it here?

 

References

Penny Light, T., Chen, H.L., & Ittleson, J.C. (2012). Documenting Learning with ePortfolios. John Wiley & Sons.