Good Practices for Oral Assignments

To put it in academic terms, the project to develop good practices for oral assignments came about through a conversation about incorporating critical storytelling practices into university assignments.^[1] Jeremy Leipert, a colleague in Digital Humanities at Brock University, and I talked about how developing the right criteria and modes of evaluation could support student engagement with critical thinking. We were both interested in worldbuilding as a practice and a concept in our classrooms, which we were thinking of in creative industry terms (e.g., creative fiction, game design, film and TV, etc.). Cultural Studies frames worldbuilding as a discourse that raises opportunities to think critically about the current shape of real-world social and political issues (e.g. Boni, 2017; Hergenrader, 2019; Ryan & Thon, 2024; Tremblay, 2023). But this wasn’t how we started talking about oral assignments. To be completely honest, my colleague and I were trying to think about how to engage students in role-playing games during class and how to evaluate that activity.

I have done this before. I taught an in-person class on Critical Worldbuilding at Trent during Fall 2019 and a remote version in Fall 2020. I recall fondly when my students Shannon Avery, Dunc Urquhart, and Jason Saunders submitted a recording of a play session using Blades in the Dark to explore their world of New Jericho, which was transformed under what they called The Grateful Dead Act; this was a world where reanimated citizens formed the labour force, and one could make some money during their life by selling their undead capacity to work. For those who need some support understanding how this kind of activity suits a university classroom, I’ll explain: students had to learn about content licensing, especially creative commons; they had to write an 8000-word metanarrative, which involved all the soft skills necessary for the contemporary workplace; finally, they learned to work through conflict to build a truly collaborative vision. So, the question Leipert and I were asking was, how could we do this again and bring the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to bear?

As I developed the application for a Wickerson Foundation Fund grant, the scope of my inquiry widened. Jeremy had to step away from the project, and I was discovering through conversations with colleagues such as Joel Baetz, Chair of the English Department, and Dana Capell, Senior Education Developer at the Trent Teaching Commons, that what I was aiming for had applications far beyond a worldbuilding context. Oral assignments present a unique opportunity for students from a variety of demographics, including first-generation students, mature students, international students, and equity-deserving groups, including Indigenous students, racialized students, and neurodivergent students. The point here is to say that students who prefer to communicate orally will benefit from having the option to submit some assignments in an audio format rather than a written one.

The other piece of the puzzle for me was an experience I had in allowing students to record take-home exam answers rather than submit a written response.^[2] Students produced the same amount of material (the average conversion is about 2-minutes per double-spaced page of Times New Roman, 12pt font. For example, a 5-page essay can be read in about 10 minutes). The results were encouraging, especially for me as the instructor. Full disclosure, I have dyslexia and general anxiety disorder: listening to students rather than reading yet another exam booklet means hearing them in their own voice. I was learning that I find it easier to engage as a listener than as a reader. Moreover, I can write commentary as I listen. I’m more focused and not anxiously looping about the stack of exams ahead of me. With these experiences and this information, a Wickerson UDL research project on oral assignments was an awesome next step.