The University of East Anglia’s school of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing traditionally awards prizes for high marks and outstanding performance. Whilst this acknowledges academic achievement, it means work that rewrites tradition and challenges the marking rubric doesn’t always get rewarded.
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The Innovation in Assessment Prize aims to acknowledge and reward the experimental forms of expression students continue to hand in for assessment. From scrapbooks to interpretive dance, LDC is proud to inspire such creative work. The new prize hopes to encourage students to keep reinventing their learning process.
submissions
“Huzzah! I’m so pleased to see this new award for inventive assessment work. In LDC both staff and students are pioneering new ways of writing about (as well as writing) literature and drama, united by the belief that thoughtful and rigorous work doesn’t come in a single mould. It’s great that the best of such work is to be formally acknowledged through a prize.”
Dr Clare Connors
RUNNING THE PRIZE
The Innovation In Assessment Prize 2019 has been co-ordinated by two third-year students, Indigo and Lucy.
We were the ones replying to emails, inputting data and creating this site!
Here's what we have to say about our time running the prize...
Indigo Gray
LDC Intern | June 2019
The experience of reading through every single submission we received was decidedly overwhelming. As an LDC student myself, I'm a little too familiar with the pressure students can put on themselves. I've seen firsthand the days spent in the library, where everyone is trying to somehow capture their ideas onto paper (or in some cases, not paper at all). It’s been a privilege to all the finished products of so much hard work.
LDC students have a unique experience: they are encouraged to challenge their modules, the examiners, and their own creative expression. We’re incredibly lucky to have staff who are unfailingly enthusiastic about all kinds of whacky ideas. We wouldn’t be able to run this prize without their support for all this creativity!
It’s one thing, however, to be encouraged by a tutor - it’s a little different to be encouraged by peers. To me, the Innovation Prize is the perfect way to ensure students continue to inspire one another. I hope the archive ensures that the creative freedom available in LDC doesn’t go unnoticed, and that the work I’ve seen can continue to inspire many more future ideas.
When I was seeking inspiration for an assessment, I would have hugely appreciated a site like this. Future LDC students should enjoy looking through these submissions, and use all this incredible content to fuel their own ideas. Every single piece of work on this site deserves to be noticed, and demonstrates that students shouldn’t feel constrained by the fact they have to have their work assessed.
It can be difficult to stay excited by your ideas, especially if you’re executing them for assessment. The Innovation Prize should remind all students to enjoy what they write, film and make at university. There’s an unbelievable array of talent in these submissions, which you can draw upon to fuel yours. Don’t forget, you’re being encouraged to break the mould! Let your ideas flourish!
I hope you enjoy exploring the site. Maybe, somewhere in here, you’ll find your next idea.
Lucy May
LDC Intern | June 2019
This is such an important prize for LDC: judging from the influx of submissions to our inboxes, there is already a huge amount of creative-critical work being done within the school. I feel like I have been encouraged to interpret the module assignments creatively from the very beginning of my degree, with an emphasis placed on questioning and reinventing expectations constantly throughout academia.
It’s been an absolute pleasure to work on the prize, and especially to read the wide range of submissions. We knew about summatives here and there that sounded exciting, but this was nothing to prepare us for the broadness and inventiveness of the entries. Having been prepared for half a dozen submissions, we were overwhelmed to receive over 40, so many of which were contenders for the shortlist.
Submitting an assignment that deviates from a traditional essay feels like such a risk, but the guidance of academic staff combined with LDC’s enthusiasm for creative-critical work has allowed the students whose work is exhibited here to deviate boldly and effectively. The strongest entries are the ones whose inventiveness is relevant to the arguments or narratives they are working around, in which the form and the risk rise out of the content itself. This is a tricky balance to manoeuvre, so hopefully budding creative critics find signposts for their own processes within the entries to this prize. It was so important to us that everyone could see so many of the summative assessments that students have been coming up with, because given just one winning example would go against the guiding impulse of this prize, of range and deviation.
"There's so much original, risk taking, thoughtful and intellectually probing thinking happening in student assessments here in LDC; it's wonderful to see a prize which acknowledges and celebrates that!
Whether students consider themselves to be 'critical' or 'creative' or somewhere in between, a prize which celebrates innovation is a great way of acknowledging that the very best, most interesting and brilliant work always contains elements of both."
Dr Nonia Williams
We would like to give thanks to Dr. Rebecca Pinner and Kate Moorhead-Kuhn for judging the shortlist and selecting the award-winning assessment.