Jonathan Ferreira will be presenting his PhD proposal on Wednesday, November 29, 2023 from 1:00PM to 2:30PM in the Multipurpose Room (PCN 2012).
Supervisor: Dr. Maureen Kendrick
Committee Members: Drs. Margaret Early and Kathryn Accurso
Dissertation Title: Assessing Digital Multimodal Composition: A Justice-Oriented Approach with Secondary School Youth
Abstract:
Digital multimodal composition (DMC) is a textual practice through which youth can orchestrate multiple modes to communicate with intended audiences across physical and digital spaces (Smith, 2014). Recent scholarship foregrounds DMC’s impactful contributions toward social justice, with this practice offering all students, but particularly racialized youth subjected to increasing racial discrimination (Cotter, 2022), authentic opportunities to employ their full communicative repertoires to reclaim their identities, disrupt monoglossic ideologies, and transform disciplinary classrooms into sites for social justice and civic activism (see e.g., Kendrick et al., 2022; De Los Ríos, 2018). However, DMC assessment remains under-explored, and how it is conducted may perpetuate unjust evaluative practices in Canadian schools. Hence, this ethnographic case study will take a justice-oriented approach to assessment (Randall et al., 2021) to understand how a secondary English teacher and a teacher librarian in Metro Vancouver assess digital multimodal texts and how they, alongside secondary school youth, identify and negotiate criteria to assess how learners orchestrate their full communicative repertoires to demonstrate disciplinary knowledge and perform their identities in the composition process. Sociocultural perspectives on literacies and assessment, and theories on communicative repertoires and digital literacies will inform my qualitative analysis of field notes generated throughout one semester (approximately five months), assessment rubrics, semi-structured interviews, student artifacts and final digital multimodal texts. The intended contribution of this research is to a) connect classroom assessment to students’ full communicative repertoires and identities, b) expand the ways youth can communicate in physical and digital spaces, and c) disrupt unbalanced power relations ingrained in evaluative practices.