Beyond the Essay?
Assessment in English Literature and Creative Writing
SESSION ABSTRACTS
Time
Sessions
Page
Sessions 1 - 3
Sessions 4 - 5
1
4
Sessions 6 - 8
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Friday 5 December
12.00 – 13.00
15.00 – 16.00
Saturday 6 December
11.30 – 13.00
FRIDAY 5 DECEMBER
12.00 – 13.00
Session 1: Assessment and Pedagogy
Vice-Chancellor’s Meeting Room
Assessing Research-Informed Teaching: The Critical Glossary
Rachel Carroll (University of Teesside)
This paper aims to situate an innovation in assessment strategy within the context of current
debates about research-informed teaching (see Alan Jenkins, Mick Healey, Roger Zetter
“Linking teaching and research in disciplines and departments” HEA, 2007).
At first sight a critical glossary might seem a rather esoteric and ‘academic’ form of
assessment to employ in an undergraduate module. I wish to suggest its benefits by reflecting
on my own experience of introducing it into the assessment regime for a Level Three option
module (on feminist theory and contemporary fiction) and by evaluating the student
experience, with reference to process, achievement and feedback. In particular, I wish to
suggest the potential of this mode of assessment for enhancing reflective practice on the part
of students; I am especially interested in how the experience of devising a critical glossary
facilitated a changing relationship to knowledge and enhanced student awareness of the
provisional nature of its production.
In his much cited account of the research-teaching nexus, Mick Healey (2005) makes a
distinction between ‘research-based’ curriculum design, which emphasises ‘inquiry-based
learning’, and ‘research-oriented’ curriculum design, which focuses on ‘teaching processes of
knowledge construction’. While the glossary is not principally concerned with research
methods or with the production of new knowledge, it does provide valuable opportunities for
reflection on the constructed nature of existing knowledge; moreover, it enables students to
occupy the role of producer, rather than consumer, of learning resources. In this way, I hope
that the example of the critical glossary will act to illustrate the different forms which researchinformed teaching might take and the varieties of assessment strategy which could support it.
‘Now, what I want is, Facts’: Testing Students’ Knowledge of Literary History
Jan Jedrzejewski (University of Ulster)
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The traditional essay-based model of assessment in English is characterised by two
underlying principles: it is text-centred, in that it relies primarily on close textual analysis, and
it is student-led, in the sense that it is normally up to the student to choose not only what texts
they will write about and be assessed on, but also - within parameters set out by the question
they are answering - what approach they will adopt and what textual and contextual material
they will choose to deploy in their submissions. In consequence, while the essay assesses
students’ skills of critical analysis, argument, composition, and expression, it offers relatively
little scope for testing their knowledge of material they may well have been taught, but have
chosen not to write about. A student who has completed a module in Victorian literature, and
written excellent essays on the narrative structure of Wuthering Heights, on Browning’s
dramatic monologues, and on the treatment of issues of faith and doubt in works by Arnold,
Hopkins, and Hardy, may well receive first-class marks - and thus appear to be
knowledgeable about Victorian literature - without ever studying any Dickens, Tennyson, or
George Eliot, without having any understanding of the impact, on the writings of the Victorian
age, of the heritage of the Romantics, or of the changing position of women in Victorian
society, or of the complex circumstances of the Victorian literary market, or indeed without
having ever heard about the Pre-Raphaelites or about Mrs Gaskell’s social-problem novels. In
other words, the student may earn very good marks while having only rather limited and
fragmentary knowledge of the literature of the Victorian period, for the simple reason that
he/she has not been tested on his/her knowledge of literary history.
The paper will propose a model of assessment which aims to remedy this problem by
introducing, to complement the traditional essay, a compulsory fact-based questionnaire
designed to test students’ knowledge of literature and literary history by focusing on aspects
of the material studied on the module which are unlikely to be assessed by means of
conventional student-led and text-centred methods. A practical example of this approach will
be a case study of an assessment scheme used, over a number of years, in an introductory
first-year module on Literature and Society in Ireland taught on the Coleraine campus of the
University of Ulster. The paper will deal with the relationship between this model of
assessment and the structure of teaching on the module, and with its impact on student
learning; it will consider practical advantages and disadvantages of the formula proposed,
both in terms of its applicability at various levels of study and in different types of modules and
courses, and in relation to practical considerations of the pedagogic reality of twenty-first
century higher education in Britain.
Session 2: Technology and Assessment 1
Room D112
How Can Technology Help with Assessment? Enhancing peer feedback through
blogging on creative writing
Jess Moriarty and Vy Rajapillai (University of Brighton )
This presentation aims to report on an exploratory case study on using blogs for peer
feedback on an undergraduate creative writing course. The study explores the feedback
mechanism, to argue that timely feedback and peer interaction can play an important part in
the development of students’ writings and their ability to critically evaluate each others work.
The study was designed to help students to improve their writing skills and also help them to
overcome any anxieties with reading their work aloud in the classroom.
This qualitative case study is comprised of student feedback on the blog and also their
responses to a questionnaire and seeks to suggest that blogs provided a ‘safe’ environment
for the students to give and received feedback which in turn contributed towards the
development of their writing ability.
Having presented the paper, we will then open up a discussion on how to use E-learning to
enhance the assessment and feedback processes.
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An Appraisal of Computer-Assisted Objective Assessment in English Studies
Michael Jardine and Matthew Sauvage (University of Winchester)
This session will be a presentation followed by discussion. The presentation will take the form
of an interim report on a Learning and Teaching Project currently under way in the
Department of English at the University of Winchester. This project involves the integration of
computer assisted formative assessment into two introductory Year 1 modules of BA English
using the university’s Learning Network (Moodle). The main objective of the project is to
assess the value of such assessment for a non-fact-based discipline such as English. The
two academics involved have developed a bank of items designed to prepare students for a
range of module assessments, from library tasks to conventional essays. The intention is to
enable tutors to more easily and effectively monitor students’ development and to encourage
them to read set texts and beyond and not to be overly fixated upon summative assessment.
The particular advantage of this project, and the presentation emerging from it, is that it will
evaluate continuous, module-specific formative and diagnostic testing in real teaching
situations on an established English degree course. Hopefully, it will encourage debate on a
key issue as English looks beyond the essay and considers advantages and possible
disadvantages of exploiting developments in computer technology in seeking to improve the
student learning experience.
Session 3: Student Perspectives on Assessment
Room D107
‘A Third Degree of Horror’: Student Perspectives on the Essay
Neill Thew (Education Consultant)
Hilaire Belloc, in typically mischievous mode, suggested that while writing itself is a 'bad
enough trade', there exists 'a third degree of horror':
Writing about what other people have written about writing: "Lives of the Critics"; "Good
English"; "Essays on Sainte Beuve" - things of that sort. Good Lord deliver us.
In 2008, the English Subject Centre commissioned a survey of undergraduates' experiences
of reading English. Small groups of students were interviewed in 7 HEIs in England and
Scotland. One of the topics discussed was that of assessment. A striking theme emerged
from these discussions: students are extremely skeptical about both the value and the
fairness of the "traditional" essay as a mode of assessment. This session will explore
students' reservations about the essay, and open the opportunity to discuss creative ways in
which we might be able to respond to students' (entirely legitimate) concerns.
Disability and Assessment: Student Perspectives
Jonathan Gibson (English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London)
Recent legislation has placed squarely on universities the onus of anticipating the likely needs
of disabled students. More work will, therefore, need to be done by departments to make sure
that their courses do not erect unnecessary barriers in the way of these students' learning.
With this in mind, last year the English Subject Centre commissioned from Kevin Brunton of
London Metropolitan University a survey of disabled students' experience of HE English. This
session will present some of the results of the survey, focussing in particular on the crucial
issue of assessment. There will be an opportunity to discuss both the results of the survey
and, more generally, the challenges of an 'inclusive' approach to assessment in English.
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FRIDAY 5 DECEMBER
15.00 – 16.00
Session 4: Period Study and Assessment
Room D112
Teaching Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic Prose: Assessment on a Writing Intensive
Course
Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London)
This presentation details my experiences in developing and introducing a writing-intensive
course on Nineteenth-century Aesthetic Prose into the undergraduate curriculum of the
School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and considers the results
to date. The course, designed for second-year undergraduates, introduces them to a range of
late Victorian writers linked by their impressionistic, subject-centred styles. Course texts
include art and literary criticism, travel writing, biography, social satire, essays and fiction. The
course is assessed by a logbook and a portfolio of exercises. The logbook requires students
to comment on their reading, their experience of the class, and (if attempted) the weekly
homework exercise. Exercises linked to the set texts are distributed for the first nine weeks of
the course. The exercises have a strong creative element, asking students, for example, to
write a piece of impressionistic literary criticism or autobiography, or to write the opening of a
short story, using themes and stylistic devices taken from the set texts. Students hand in
completed exercises in the next class and receive informal written feedback the following
week.They can attempt as many exercises as they wish, but must submit four revised
exercises for formal assessment at the end of the course. My paper considers the use of both
logbook and exercises as forms of assessment and reflects on their contribution to students’
learning.
Creative Assessment: Why, How and is it Valid?
Lesley Coote (University of Hull)
These are the results of a project, completed in its immediate, finite sense but also ongoing,
examining the validity, reliability and effectiveness of 'innovative' methods of assessment for
English and Film Studies at the University of Hull. During the course of this project the team
also examined - and attempted to find workable solutions for - questions concerning how to
run modules in medieval literature with non-traditional forms of assessment, and what criteria
to adopt in marking them.
Session 5: Employability and Assessment
Room D107
Reflecting Practice: Alternative Assessment Methodologies in an Education /
Employability Interface
Anna Clare Richardson (University of Central Lancashire)
The Centre for Employability Through the Humanities (ceth) at the University of Central
Lancashire is dedicated to providing educational opportunities that enable students to
recognise and build upon the skills that they need to be successful once they leave Higher
Education and enter employment. Ceth offers a range of modules at Level 2 and Level 3,
from Food Writing and Television to Managing an Arts Event, which make use of the Centre’s
Realistic Work Environments to engage students with the processes and practicalities of their
intended career paths, whilst encouraging continuous reflection. None of the modules offered
by ceth are assessed using essays: instead, students may be required to complete a
reflective log, deliver a presentation, produce a project portfolio or even take part in a mock
job interview as part of their assessment. This paper will provide an overview of the
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implementation of alternative assessment methods within a number of ceth modules,
including how the assessment relates to the subject matter and learning outcomes of each
course. We will then consider some of the pros and cons of these methods, informed by the
experiences of the academic staff who deliver the ceth modules. Finally, I will pose the
discussion question: are these alternative assessment methods transferable to more subjectspecific study? I will propose some models for the assessment of English that are informed by
current assessment practices in A-Level English, in particular the hybrid Language and
Literature A-Level, before opening the matter for discussion and further suggestions.
Towards the Essay and Beyond: A Case Study in Teaching and Assessing Academic
and Professional Development
Michelle Denby, Alan Girvin and Monika Smialkowska (University Centre, Doncaster College)
This paper reflects on a project that we have undertaken on our BA (Hons.) English
programme at Doncaster University Centre. The project concerns the development of
coherent, credit-bearing modules targeting Academic and Professional Development at Level
4 and Level 5 (this paper will focus on discussing the Level 4 module). In our experience of
teaching on the programme for the last 6 years, we have felt that APD skills, especially those
of self-reflection and the capability to transfer subject-specific skills to wider contexts, have
been an increasingly important component of the programme and of Higher Education in the
UK as a whole. Yet, while embedded in the programme structure, those skills have proved
notoriously difficult to teach, largely because they have not been assessed in systematic and
targeted ways. For example, we have had student PDP files for a number of years, but the
engagement with these files has so far been sporadic – put simply, most students cannot see
the point in updating the files which, they feel, bear little relation to the academic content of
their programme of study, and do not contribute credits to their degree.
The new modules which we are introducing attempt to bridge the gap between
subject-specific and transferable skills. They do this through a structured building of skills,
which are assessed incrementally throughout the modules. Although we advocate and
employ a variety of new assessment tools beyond the essay (outlined below), a large
proportion of the Level 4 module is structured around essay-writing skills, as we believe that
the essay remains the most appropriate method of assessing students on English
programmes. However, the essay is not presented as the be-all-and-end-all of assessment.
Instead, the process of essay-writing is broken into its components, emphasising such
transferable skills as planning, research, critical reflection, evaluation, and continuous
improvement of one’s work. Those components are gradually introduced and assessed
throughout the module, in a mixture of formative and summative assessment tasks (for
example, explaining the essay question, planning the stages of argument, producing
annotated bibliographies, writing introductions and conclusions, and writing different types of
paragraphs: descriptive, polemical, analytic, etc). The selected assessment tools for the
module are varied, including self- and peer-assessment, reflective study journals, participation
in discussions and projects on VLE, as well as the more traditional written assessment
marked by the tutor. This assessment strategy reflects our support of the traditional essay as
well as new forms of assessment able to equip students with further transferable academic
and professional skills. Our aim is to involve students in an integrated learning experience
which, while pertinent to their chosen programme of study, will help them develop skills
relevant to wider contexts, both personal and employment-orientated. The employability angle
is further developed in the Level 5 module, which places increased emphasis on nonacademic types of discourses and contexts.
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SATURDAY 6 DECEMBER
11.30 – 13.00
Session 6: Reflective Assessments
Room D112
Empowering Students Through Reading Diaries
Anne Schwan and Sarah Patricia-Wasson (Napier University)
This presentation showcases an experiment on a level 3 undergraduate theory module,
where reading diaries were introduced as a formal assessment method to help students deal
more confidently with cultural and literary theory. In response to a high drop-out rate and
instances of plagiarism on the module, we designed this new assessment method, based on
research evidence that reading diaries achieve two things, namely that they empower
students by enabling them to actively reflect on what it actually means to study theory, and
nurture students’ confidence in their ability to engage with intimidating prose. Making the
process and the difficulties of reading theory explicit facilitates a more self-assured encounter
with and deeper understanding of the material.
A poster will provide an overview of the specific instructions students receive at the beginning
of the module, together with sample reading diary entries and assessment criteria. Our
presentation will also discuss examples from the first cohort that had to complete this
assessment, and explain how it is designed to feed into other (more traditional) assessment
components on this and a subsequent theory module, as well as preparing students for their
final-year dissertation.
Narrative Scholarship but Not as We Know It
Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University)
Last year I experimented with a new form of assessment on my ‘Practical Criticism and Close
Reading’ module. I asked students to write a ‘narrative of reading’, telling the story of how
reading a literary text had had a powerful effect on them at a particular point in their lives.
Details were to be included of when and where they read it, and of what else was happening
significantly in their lives at the time, or what in their long term experience and taste could
account for the powerful effect of this text. They were to combine this with a close account of
what it was in the text that they found powerful, including something about its literary form.
In the USA this sort of thing would be called ‘narrative scholarship’ and would tend to be
associated with identity politics and ‘situatedness’. I was influenced to some extent by that
model, but more powerfully by my scholarship in ecocriticism and Heideggerean ecophenomenology, where the idea of encountering other entities in an open way, minimising
pre-emptive definitions and requirements as far as possible, is very important, as is the notion
of embodied experience (I asked students also to include narrative of their physical and
emotional reactions, and to attempt to locate moments in the text that had elicited a strong
emotional or physical response). This research crystallised, for me, the misgivings I’d been
feeling about learning outcomes, assessment criteria, game-playing tactics by students and
the idea of extractable transferable skills (an example of Heideggerean ‘enframing’ if ever
there was one), as aspects of the contemporary attempt to enlist or press-gang English
Studies into the service of industrial priorities. Many teachers of English have these
misgivings, I think. In my experiment with narrative scholarship I was hoping to find some
respite from those forms of commodification, though I did not suppose I had found a form that
could not be commodified in its turn. The commercial success of lifewriting and ‘sick-lit’ shows
how personal narratives can be commodified very readily. Nevertheless, I wanted to see how
students fared writing in a mode currently at odds with the dominant academic model: a mode
engaging with reading as embodied experience, rather than as converted into historicist or
theoretical argument of a generalised kind few students are able to handle authentically.
Another influence was ‘presentism’ in Shakespeare studies.
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Session 7: Creative Technologies
Room D107
Embedding Creative Assessment
Liesl King and Keith McDonald (University of York St. John)
This short paper, in conjunction with two of our students, describes a project we began in
2005 and have recently gained some Enquiry Based Learning funding to extend. In the
original project, around 40% of the students on the first year of their Literature programme
took up a new option, which was to submit their responses to the short stories and poems we
studied in the first semester in the form of a Creative Project, along with a reflective essay.
Students were encouraged to respond to the literary works in a form of their own choosing,
and they responded with music, short stories, poetry, collage, oil paintings, short films, papier
mâché and a dance piece. In the spring of 2006 we put on a 'Cross-Arts Exhibition',
displaying some of the work the students had created, and we presented a paper about this
creative option and our experience with it at the English Subject Centre ‘Renewals’
conference in Surrey in 2006.
With the current funding of £1,000, we are working with ten second and third year students to
render the creative work they created as first year students meta-textual in digital form; that is
to say, we are asking them to create a visual icon of their work using a software programme
entitled 'Pebble Pad', and to then select the critical, cultural, historical, intertextual, and
personal texts that influenced the creation of the original piece of artwork they developed
(extending these where possible) and to create links to these using the software. Finally,
when they have a visual and virtual representation of their creative pieces, embedded in
several critical and cultural layers, they will then use this material to create another response,
ideally in another art form, ideally in collaboration with another York St. John student from
another programme in the Faculty of Arts. Although we will be facilitating this process, it is
entirely up to the students which texts they will select for the meta-textual representation, and
in addition, it is entirely up to the students to choose how to fill this collaborative 'Third Space'.
Between September and November the students will be rendering their work 'meta-textual',
mirroring the good practice (along with good referencing skills!) that we hope they and other
students will repeat on every assignment they submit, and it is this we will discuss and display
today.
Our aim is to create a 'Virtual Gallery' which offers three tiers: in the first, we will display the
creative responses along with the reflective pieces; in the second, we will show the pieces
which have been rendered 'meta-textual', and in the third, we will display the collaborative
material mentioned above. We have found that the students have really enjoyed working in
alternative modes to the traditional academic essay; in many cases, they have said that the
opportunity to respond to literature using another art form has encouraged them to look more
deeply into the original text than they might have done using the more traditional format.
Again and again, students have said they formed a much closer emotional attachment to the
text through their creative work. Our aim is to ensure that students layer their emotional
responses with critical, cultural, and historical responses, adding depth and breadth to the
creative process. We have come up against some constructive criticism from other colleagues
during this project, and so part of the presentation will be to outline the problems that have
arisen, to recognise limitations and complications, and to discuss potential ways forward.
Assessment and Second Life
Chris Wigginton (Northumbria University)
This paper will consider the potential of ‘Metaverses’ as locations for the teaching and
assessment of collaborative inter- and multi-disciplinary work across writing, literature,
performance and media. It will argue that whilst much of the work produced in virtual worlds
or online communities might be thought of, to use Raymond Williams term, as ‘residual’ in
content, these worlds open up possibilities for new forms to emerge through collaboration.
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Rather than mimicking or recreating historic and textual mediations of ‘real life’ (as is currently
the predominant mode ‘in world’), these forms, the paper will argue, will respond to and
emerge from the unique the conditions within and of these environments.
Accordingly, rather than rehearsing traditional models for the development of collaborative
work, the potential of these spaces as locations for new pedagogic developments will be
considered within the paper. To do so, it will look at examples of work produced (as well as
the process of production and assessment) by students, artists and writers in the UK as part
of a development initiative funded, in part, by the English Subject Centre. These will be
considered through the lens of the making of texts, selves and worlds into and through virtual
poiesis, autopoiesis and allopoiesis.
POETiK: Teaching and Assessing Poetry Using On-line Software
Greg Garrard (Bath Spa University)
This presentation will describe a poetry software project currently being developed in
conjunection with the English Subject Centre, provisionally called POETiK. The software
would simultaneously teach and assess students' understanding of poetic technique by
guiding them through 'layers' of analysis.
The Poetik Project
Teaching aspects of form has always been a part of the pedagogy of poetry, and is a crucial
element of the growing interest in creative writing in schools and universities. Most students
coming to university able to identify alliteration and onomatopoeia, but they often seem
unable to say what they are for aside from the imitation of the poem’s subject (‘the rattle of
machine guns is represented in the repeated ‘k’ sound’ etc). Moreover, practical criticism
exercises encourage what one student called a ‘combine harvester’ approach to poetry, in
which a series of poetic techniques is ticked off a predetermined list one by one. The insight
that different aspects of poetry are at once distinct and interacting is typically reserved for the
brightest students. Finally, metre and rhythm - arguably the most fundamentally important
features of poetry - seem to present pedagogical challenges too great for most teachers and
lecturers, so that many students complete an English degree without understanding much
more than iambic pentameter. Even once a simple method for teaching rhythm - such as
those put forward by Phil Roberts or Derek Attridge - is adopted, students’ scansions are
often marred by basic and unnecessary errors. The Poetik project aims to develop a webbased application that would enable students to submit a poem and then analyse it on various
levels, using a model of layers derived from InDesign and Photoshop. It would undertake the
basic work of syllable division, phoneme identification and fixed stress distribution
automatically, and then guide and respond to the students’ own choices. It would also allow
for extensive annotation and hyperlinking, enabling the student to construct a ‘rich text’
version of the poem for discussion or assessment. Poetik would also be customizable by
individual teachers who might want to alter its architecture or adopt their own annotation /
scansion system. The objective is ultimately to develop a unique and powerful application to
enhance poetry analysis - and indeed writing workshops - fit for a Web 2.0 generation.
Session 8: Before, After and During the Essay
Boardroom 1
Before the Essay? Seminars as Assessment Preparation or Ends in Themselves
Julie Scanlon (University of Northumbria)
ASSESSMENT – noun
5. a. fig. in gen. sense: Estimation, evaluation.
b. Educ. The process or means of evaluating academic work; an examination or test.
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The OED interestingly places the educational meaning of the word ‘assessment’ (1956) as a
strand along with the earlier ‘figurative’ general sense of estimation and evaluation (1626).
The earlier figurative sense was at a remove from the word’s initial contexts concerning taxes
and properties. It is worth considering this collocation of the figurative with that of assessment
in education in English Literature. The figurative conceptually and variously suggests
something at a remove from the ‘real’ or literal; something that may add to our interpretation
of the real or literal; something that may stand alone with its own (possibly literal) selfcontained meaning. These concepts concerning representation offer a way to think about the
role of learning and assessment. If assessment is figurative, does this make learning the
literal or real and assessment divorced from learning? What is the ground that connects the
literal and the figurative? Is assessment representational? How do we ‘read’ assessment,
figuratively or literally? In this paper, I focus particularly on the relationships between seminar
practices and assessment practices to offer some reflections on these questions.
The Ends of the Essay or, the Essay at the Threshold
Aled Williams (University of Derby) and David Ellis (University of Wolverhampton)
In this paper we defend the essay as an indispensable mode of assessment for English
students. Further, we claim that the ability to write good essays is the culmination or capstone
of undergraduate training in the discipline. However, for the essay to fulfil this function, the
discipline has to reconsider the purposes of essay writing and its relationship to other forms of
written assessment.
Preserving the essay is crucial because it uniquely tests what we would argue (drawing on
the work of recent educational theorists) are a number of ‘threshold concepts’ (Jan Meyer and
Ray Land) in English: the ‘core’ core learning outcomes, ones that are potentially
transformational of the students’ understanding of the discipline and of themselves, but ones
that are also unusually difficult or ‘troublesome’ (Perkins) for students to grasp. Among the
most important of these threshold outcomes are the following: the ability to make creative and
original interpretive judgments; the practice of close analytic reading; the application and
synthesis of theory and criticism; the ability to make appropriate text selection and to place
texts in relevant contexts; the ability to reflect on and review their own work; and the
willingness to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty in the weighing of evidence and the stating of
conclusions.
As this list of aptitudes suggests, the undergraduate essay is a difficult form to master, and
we argue that we may be asking too much of students when we expect them to produce
essays on demand during their first year. By the use of other (shorter and less wide ranging)
assessment tasks, each of which would measure one or at the most two of these threshold
outcomes, we can begin to prepare students for undertaking what the essay alone is able to
assess: the ability to combine all these skills and attributes in the creation of an appropriate
and original writing structure for an exploratory argument.
Finally, we will consider what makes a good topic for a student essay: what makes a good
essay prompt or question? The purpose of the essay is not to test subject knowledge or an
understanding of course content, since these things are assessed much more effectively by
‘objective’ testing (of which we can provide some examples). The purpose of the essay is to
allow the student to employ all the threshold abilities we have listed above, and in our
presentation we will offer and defend several examples of assessment questions which do
this.
In justifying our approach in this paper, we will explain how we have derived these threshold
concepts for English and our aim in proposing them here is to present them for discussion
and criticism by the conference participants. While very little work has been done thus far on
the relevance of this new framework to humanities subjects, we will argue for the need for a
wide debate regarding the usefulness of threshold outcomes to benchmark English curricula.
While we believe that the emerging theoretical frame of threshold concepts has a much to
recommend it for educators interested in returning the decision making about programme and
course design to the disciplines themselves, we will describe how our experience of student
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essay writing in English suggests at least one way in which the threshold concepts model of
student learning has to be revised or qualified in its application to English.
Meyer, Jan H. F., and Ray Land (eds). (2006) Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding:
Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge.
Meyer, Jan H. F., and Ray Land. (2003) “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge –
Linkages to Ways of Thinking in the Disciplines” in C. Rust (ed), Improving Student Learning
in Theory and Practice – Ten Years On. Oxford: OCSLD, pp 412-24.
Perkins, David. (1999) “The Many Faces of Constructivism” Educational Leadership 57 (3)
November.
In Defence of the Essay: Towards a Common Culture for Assessment in the
Humanities
Kevin Morris (Middlesex University) and Gary Day (De Montfort University)
Our roundtable discussion will seek to explore some of the contemporary debates regarding
assessment, learning outcomes and the whole discourse of pedagogic practice.
We maintain that the essay and its longer form the dissertation are central to the whole
purpose of studying the Humanities in Higher Education and what it means to be an
undergraduate. Central to our beliefs is the idea that education should not only be
emancipatory but should be a ‘site of struggle’: a journey that takes students from the familiar
to the unfamiliar and therefore becomes transformative.
New modes of assessment- from modularity to portfolios, journals, reading logs and self
reflection panda to an orthodoxy that denies access to a cultural elite and to the dominant and
powerful positions in society. Regardless of our context- New University or Russell Group,
genuine Higher Education must defend the essay and more importantly the written word.
Students deserve the ‘ best that has been thought of’ and our job in the twenty first century is,
in what ever small way we can, to equalise the social inequalities that continue to perpetuate
a stratified class system.
Long Live the Essay
Drop Dead the Learning Outcome!
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