Assessment for Inclusion and Belonging: Learning Journals in Comparative Literature

Instructor: Dr Sara Marzagora

Module: Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Somali literatures in Global Intellectual History, Level 6, BA Comparative Literature, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Arts and Humanities and Global Modernity and the Horn of Africa, Level 7, MA Comparative Literature, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Arts and Humanities.

Assessment activity: Students produce a learning journal based on 10 entries which cover the topics of the module.

Why did you introduce this form of assessment?

A more inclusive genre

Essays test a particular set of skills: being able to write in a specific style and build evidence-based arguments, as codified by the rules of the genre. Learning to write essays is an important transferrable skill of university education, but academic essays are only one of many ways of writing and thinking critically about a topic. For example, personal reflection is not encouraged in essay writing, and logical thinking is privileged over creative writing or visual/aural knowledge. Some students may find writing essays easier, some students harder, depending on whether they are native or non-native speakers, their education growing up, or just their intellectual predispositions. As intellectuals, our brains always work in different ways – and this is a source of richness, which allows us to learn different things from each other. A learning journal allows students to show how they have connected with the material without getting hung up on the mastery of a particular technique.

Learning and engagement throughout the module

Students are often strategic in assignments that require an in-depth knowledge of only one topic out of the ten covered in a typical semester. This may discourage attendance and prevents them from engaging deeply with the other nine topics. Student who do attend all classes and engage intellectually with all the ten topics may perceive an inequity, gradually impacting on their own engagement in turn.

I wanted students to feel they could focus on the process of learning as something that is accessible to everybody, regardless of mastering of a particular writing technique. Students who take a strategic approach to coursework and attendance will not do well in this assignment without engaging with its full range of contents.

Motivation and fun

The more they engage critically and creatively with the module content and the more evidence they include of this engagement, the higher their mark will be. So, the assessment encourages innovative approaches and out-of-the-box-thinking. This type of assessment is not as vulnerable to GenAI because the student takes ownership of their own work, but it also has the potential to allow students to use AI to generate some content, for example, to produce AI-generated portraits of some of the authors whose physical appearance is not documented in photos or portraits.

How does this fit with the programme structure?

The vast majority of modules in the two programmes (BA Comparative Literature and MA Comparative Literature) are assessed through essays. This module gives students an opportunity to acquire different skills and to demonstrate their knowledge in a different way. The idea is that once students have acquired the more traditional skills of essay writing, they can explore a different and more creative genre with confidence that they will not miss out on vital skills that are necessary for their dissertations.

The deadline is the same as the other semester 1 (or 2, depending when the module is taught) assignments, which gives students some time after the end of the semester to catch up with the weeks/readings with which they may have not been able to engage during the semester. However, students are expected to do the bulk of the work during the semester, and this is encouraged through weekly formative feedback. This means that, for the most part, students do not have to work on the assessment during the winter break and when they have 2-3 parallel deadlines for other assignments.

How did you organise the assessment?

Students produce 10 entries in one holistic diary. Each journal entry requires reflections on the compulsory selection of the weekly readings. These can be of any nature:

Critical and academic responses
Autobiographical connections;
Seminar notes and reflections on the seminar discussion;
Photos that document where and when they studied for the module;
Activities they may have done in connection with the module, e.g. coffee in an Eritrean café with friends, attending an art exhibition that included artists from the Horn of Africa, creating a Spotify or YouTube playlist on Somali, Eritrean and/or Ethiopian music, etc;
Knowledge production via other media, e.g drawing, poetry, photography, Tiktok videos, etc.

They work on the assessment bit by bit during the semester. Although I expect them to engage and encourage them not to leave things until the last moment, the deadlines are not set weekly. It is normal to skip some lectures or seminars, and it is normal that some weeks they have less time to do the readings, so the end of semester deadline allows everybody time to catch up. They have time after the end of teaching to re-read and polish the journal entries, but this is designed to be a work of light-touch revisions, so less brain-intensive and time-consuming comparing with starting a new essay from scratch.

How did you design the criteria and weighting of the assessment?

The learning journal is 100% of the final mark for a 15 credit module

I do not provide a specific word count as I want them to be as creative as they can. But in the brief and in seminars, I explain how to edit the entries for coherence and pertinence.

There is no specific marking rubric, as it is difficult to provide a rubric that does not over-standardise what is expected at each grade band in such a creative assignment. However, I provide criteria for my expectations. This is benchmarked to expectations for achievement at level 6 or 7 according to College Criteria.

Meeting the two basic requirements: have you engaged with all 10 weeks? Do all 10 weeks include the compulsory section on the weekly readings? And are those 10 sections on the weekly readings thought-out? Have you made a persuasive case for the importance of the key quotes/passages you have selected?
Amount of engagement: How much have you engaged with the topics of the module? Has your engagement remained constant across the 10 weeks? Did you engage beyond what was taught or discussed in class?
Depth of engagement: are your critical, creative, and intellectual responses to the module contents impulsive and rushed, or are they polished and thought-out? Are they merely hunches or intuitions, or did you build on those hunches and intuitions so as to analyse the issues at hand more comprehensively? Is there evidence that you stayed with your thoughts, kept building on them, went back to them and expanded them and complicated them? Is there evidence that you took the time to think through a problem from different angles, maybe through independent research? Did you just copy paste your seminar notes into the learning journal (please do not do this) or did you polish them and rewrote them?
Usual requirements on style, spelling, presentation.
Anything creative gives you bonus points (but you will not be penalised for choosing a more traditional form of academic reflection, so please do not worry).

How did you support the students with this new form of assessment?

Students were supported in three main ways:

I gave them samples of students’ previous work as guideline.
I provide a comprehensive assessment brief (an extract of which can be seen above) written to the students in jargon-free, informal language to explain the rationale for the assessment, the benefits, and any other details they need to be aware of.
Rolling feedback: students are encouraged to show me drafts of their journal in seminars and in office hours during the course of the semester. The aim of this formative feedback is to encourage students to focus on the process of learning itself, and not (only) on the final “product”. I encourage them to reflect on their learning methods, how, when and where they prefer to work, as well as whether those methods are right for them – all as part of a journey of discovery through the metacognitive reflection that journalling allows.

How do you give feedback?

Summative: Students submit the assignment via Turnitin on the deadline set by the department for the end-semester assignments, and get written feedback from me.

Formative: Because students work on the learning journal incrementally during the semester, formative feedback opportunities are provided on a rolling basis. Students can discuss the learning journal in class with me every week and show me drafts. In the seminars, I also encourage them to give peer feedback. Both the level 6 module and the MA module are optional modules, so the student cohort is small and there is more of a sense of community; therefore, students feel more comfortable. In addition, the learning journal encourages them to include group activities e.g. organising to attend a Somali poetry event, or study together, or go to an Ethiopian restaurant for a group dinner. This helps them build a sense of cooperation rather than competition as with other assessments.

What benefits did you see?

A shift in focus from performance and mark to the process of learning and experience of being a university student. This was evident in the submissions themselves, in which many students reflected on how they learn, the connection between this module and other university or personal experiences, and the way the module shaped their thinking and their views. Knowing that a sustained engagement with the material over ten weeks was enough to pass the module encouraged them to take risks and experiment with crosswords, poems, memes, songs, and even the making of imaginary CVs for some of the writers in the course! Some students used Canva to produce richly illustrated journals. I was surprised by the wide variety of responses to the ten topics and as a teacher, I got to see how they had connected with material (or not) much more holistically.

Here is an example of a comment from a student reflecting on her learning:

2. Students recognise that learning does not just take place within the classroom but use London and other spaces as part of the learning environment. They are enabled to recognise the connection between their modules and themselves as people and as intellectuals, and I see that manifested in the work they produce.

Here are some examples of the learning journals:

Learning journal sample 1-compressed

Learning journal sample 2-compressed

Attendance and engagement have improved: I cannot quantify this exactly but the atmosphere in class is livelier than classes I have taught before, and there are fewer noticeable problems with attendance.

Workload and marking: Admittedly the assignment is longer than a traditional essay and students are sometimes submitting up to 7000 words! But they are more fun and engaging to mark and I don’t have to intervene to correct writing style and argumentative gaps as carefully as I would for an essay. For me as a teacher, marking the learning journal is a voyage of discovery about the students, and this enables me to offer more open and personalised feedback.

What challenges did you encounter and how did you address them?

Supporting the students: It can be a challenge to help the students get out of the essay writing mode! While that is fine within the criteria, I try to encourage them to document their learning more creatively so they can make the most of the opportunity. Some of the students do stay within the essay form regardless of this though. Students are sometimes nervous about what is expected of them because this assignment is less structured than an essay and new for many of them. To reassure them, we discuss the assignment in class every week and and I share anonymised samples (see above). The challenge is to keep the guidance loose enough to facilitate creativity while scaffolding them to meet the learning outcomes of the module. This can also depend on the dynamics of the group – creative people immediately get into it more and inspire their classmates to do the same, while other groups need more encouraging to gain confidence.
Engagement: The assignment requires engagement week by week and some students are not able to attend every week due to commitments, illness etc. I normalise the fact that we are not always able to engage with the material fully every week, and I mitigate this unevenness by not setting the deadlines for the ten entries to be weekly (although I do encourage them to come with their weekly pieces for formative feedback as above). If some students cannot come to class, I reassure them that they can still engage with the materials in their own time, and suggest ways for them to engage with the material even if they could not attend the lecture and/or the seminar: for example, by taking their pick of the optional readings, or by emailing the authors of some of the set texts. I encourage students to meet with me if they are having particular difficulties.
Technology: The current requirement in my department for a Turnitin submission restricts audiovisual submission and can dissuade them from taking creative risks. For example, a Canva file can be too big to submit in Turnitin, so students often have to find ways around that. Students can add hyperlinks to videos and web content within the submitted file, but it would be nice to have these embedded.
Scalability: the way I have set up this assignment works better for small classes, as its success depends on weekly formative feedback and community building. In a small classroom where students know each other, they feel safer to share their work and ideas every week. The assessment could be introduced in larger classes with a GTA in small groups, however, but would have to be carefully thought out.

What are your next steps?

Ideally, it would be great to explore alternative submission platforms to Turnitin. Turnitin does not allow the submission of audio and video files, or the opening of hyperlinks, and this technical limitation can restrict student creativity. The use of Turnitin is currently a departmental convention, but the TEL teams in the faculty might be able to offer alternatives.

This assessment was introduced in the 2023-2024 academic year and it will run for a second time in the 2024-2025 academic year.

What advice would you give to colleagues wanting to implement this type of assessment?

Be aware of the programme: a programme approach is important to make sure that students have had enough training in essay writing to confidently tackle their dissertation module. The learning journal is meant to complement, and not replace, the essay-based assessments students take in the same semester. A programme-wide approach to the distribution of student workload over the course of the year is also necessary. Part of the rationale for this assessment was to create a staggered timeline for assessment deadlines, so students would not be working on this assessment at the same time as the assignments for other modules, thus spreading out their workload across the semester.
Samples help if you have them: Sample submissions from previous academic years can restrict originality in the case of essay-based assessments, with students “playing it safe” by simply copying the structure and format of the sample. With more creative assessments, however, samples of previous students’ work are more likely to give inspiration and show possibilities!
Be clear about how you are going to mark as this will be a new type of assignment for most students, and it has its own configuration of marking criteria. Make your marking criteria clear to yourself first, and reiterate to students what you are looking for throughout the module and in the final feedback.