Milena Marinkova, Joy Robbins, Leeds University, Leeds, United Kingdom
The unessay is a type of assessment approach that allows students a degree of freedom not seen in most assessment types. Students choose their own topic and their own way of presenting it, with the stipulation that it be ‘compelling and effective’ (O’Donnel 2012). When given an unessay, students have produced work that has usually exceeded the learning and engagement allowed by previous assessment constructs. For example, students have learned histology of organ cells better than through exams (Wood and Stringham, 2022), creatively shown understanding of computer programming far more interestingly than original programming assignments (Aycock et al., 2019), and practically applied cognitive psychology concepts in insightful ways (Goodman, 2022), to say nothing of the many success stories blogged about across humanities disciplines, and the growing movement on Twitter (#unessay). In our own classroom, the unessay approach has literally brought tears to our eyes (in a good way).
This presentation will outline the necessity of the unessay in the face of AI-generated work, student stress, teacher burnout, and the need for more inclusive and synoptic assessment. Drawing on examples of student unessays completed for an elective module at our university and reflections on the assessment process, we will extend existing discussions of the unessay as a necessary presence in the contemporary assessment landscape. While practitioners have repeatedly acknowledged that its multimodal, creative and situated nature can shift reductive views of knowledge communication (Sullivan, 2015), we will also share observations on how the unessay can develop interdisciplinary understandings. Moreover, with the unessay opening up an important relational space for students, where they could explore what “fuels their passion” (Jakopak, Monteith and Merkle, 2019), we also argue that this approach to assessment can offer a meaningful space for learners’ engagement with learning, bypassing the vapidness of AI generated assignments.
Key References
Aycock, J. et al. (2019) ‘Adapting the “unessay” for use in computer science’, in Proceedings of the 24th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education, WCCCE 2019. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. doi: 10.1145/3314994.3325073.
Goodman, S. G. (2022) ‘Just as Long as It’s Not an Essay: The Unessay as a Tool for Engagement in a Cognitive Psychology Course’, Teaching of Psychology. SAGE Publications Inc., 2022(0), pp. 1–5. doi: 10.1177/00986283221110542/FORMAT/EPUB.
Jakopak, R. P., Monteith, K. L. and Merkle, B. G. (2019) ‘Writing Science: Improving Understanding and Communication Skills with the “Unessay”’, The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. Wiley, 100(4). doi: 10.1002/bes2.1610.
O’Donnel, D. P. (2012) ‘The unessay’. 4 September. Daniel Paul O’Donnell. http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Teaching/the-unessay
Sullivan, P. (2015) ‘The UnEssay: Making Room for Creativity in the Composition Classroom’, 67(1), pp. 6–34.
Wood, J. L. and Stringham, N. (2022) ‘The UnEssay project as an enriching alternative to practical exams in pre-professional and graduate education’, Journal of Biological Education. Informa UK Limited, pp. 1–8. doi: 10.1080/00219266.2022.2047098.
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