'My dream literature department is one that resembles an art school.'
Dr. Karen Schaller
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Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing and convenor of the Art of Emotion Module
The Innovation in Assessment Prize
has been coordinated by LDC lecturers Karen Schaller and Jacob Huntley. Having had this idea in the works for a couple of years, we asked them a few questions about the nature of the prize.
What is it you hope to see as a result of the Innovation Prize?
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There’s stuff that we didn’t know about and want to see. It’s about visibility for undergraduate students, helping them get their work and ideas seen. It’s also helping to inspire others’ response to modules, so that staff designing modules can draw on myriad different work to shape their module outlines, and say to students “I know a student who submitted something like...” in the hope it will encourage a spark. We want to see work that creatively responds to the challenge of the rubric. It’s there to inspire people.
Jacob Huntley
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We didn’t want to create a new genre of work. We have purposefully used all sorts of different words for what we’re asking you to find: work that is innovative, creative-critical, non-traditional, experimental… there’s no point in pinning down what these words entail because that immediately delimits and categorises. We don’t want to create something that hardens into any genre; this is about exploding categories, and using a more elastic vocabulary to open up interdisciplinary thought processes. We want work to be meaningful for students, and we have seen them create work that doesn’t fit the [marking] grid but works around the edges.
Karen Schaller
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Is LDC already good at encouraging innovation?
LDC is already good at critically-informed creativity: with this prize we’re encouraging something for which there is already lots of appetite and enthusiasm, which is being demonstrated in myriad ways. ​Existing prizes didn’t sufficiently account for the scope for creativity that’s out there. We were keen to see something that explicitly acknowledged the kinds of work we’ve seen students produce.
Jacob
There’s a new critical dialogue surrounding what constitutes creative-critical assessments, and the convers​ation about creative-critical work is still a new one in the UK. LDC can only get better by kindling this dialogue. While within the school itself it feels like the conversation has already begun, we need to hear the student response, and ​we’ve deliberately invited students into that dialogue. It’s important to us that students are able to recognise each-other’s work, and celebrate each-other’s creativity, and what we really want is to create an ongoing dialogue between students and staff that can continue developing along with the work.
​Karen
So it was important to you that the prize was run by students?
Students, we felt, were best placed to see how others were responding to the rubric, and understand their processes from the other side of the module. We wanted the decision-making to be done by students, so it would be much less module informed ​and students wouldn’t feel restricted in any way. It’s not about who you studied with. LDC has many teachers who are trying to rethink what “assessment” is, and that translates into interesting work, but hopefully this prize will create an opportunity to look at radically different and heterogenous things, and so their comparison absolutely must take the form of a conversation between students and staff. ​
Karen
You’re the ones creating the work that gets submitted to the marking criteria. So you should decide what needs to be recognised. The students running the prize can be responsive to the changes that happen in the institution and the conversation, and can constantly update what the criteria are and how the work is showcased. Disconnecting the prize from the staff who are already interested in creative-critical work means that it isn’t limited to particular modules that already encourage this kind of response: the decisions all lie with the students, so you can encourage one another rather than depending on staff intervention.
Jacob
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Do you have any words for students who might be thinking of submitting in the future?
Do it! We want students to look at the showcase and see what parameters are open to them. Once you’ve seen other students’ work, you can write or create in whatever form you feel is relevant. Putting this work out there tells students that you don’t have to wait to be invited to make work like this, it’s not constrained to a particular module or to a particular moment in your degree, it’s always a possibility. Separating the work from the mark it receives should also encourage students not to second-guess the quality of their work. If you were pleased with a piece of work you did or you took a certain creative risk and it didn’t receive a mark that reflects this, then it is still eligible for this prize and its creativity should be recognised.
Karen
Look at the showcase, and think about what that opens up for you. One of the guiding impulses of the academy is to share good practice, so it is important that everyone can see what has been produced in LDC, and see how students have inventively and critically responded to the guidance they’ve been given. We (professors and lecturers) have to be open about our work and where we found inspiration, so it would be great to hear in seminars that students have seen the showcase and want to create something parallel to it.
Jacob
'The guiding impulse of the academy is to share good practice.'
Dr. Jacob Huntley
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Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing and convenor of the English Literature and Creative Writing BA