I spent the summer 2020 months, as many of you did, preparing and taking courses for updating skills on the latest pedagogical methods, standards and software available to support remote and online teaching modalities. In a post Covid-19 world, these strategies for taking traditional in-person courses online meant rethinking not only how to benefit from the technologically advanced ways to deliver content and engage in online discussions, but also more deeply to rethink, retool and reimagine how to assess students wisely, fairly, accurately all while promoting academic integrity.

Three words come to mind as the main takeaways of the online courses in pedagogy that I engaged with over the summer 2020 that were offered by York University’s Teaching Commons, academic scholarly organizations of which I am a member, and by other departments, higher learning publishers and groups. The three mainstays that are still resonating as I review back on the first semester’s work of applying the newest strategies are: 1. simplicity, 2. clarity, and 3. repetition. The other word that springs to mind, and that underscores the former three, is rhythmic scaffolding. Meaningfully arranging assignments to reflect each cumulative stage of learning in the courses that I teach is strategically key for reaching the objectives of the courses that I teach in Hispanic language, literature and culture. Especially with the former, the range of detailed and cumulative acquisition, practice and analysis of the materials must be layered and continually re-tested, to ensure success at the subsequent levels.  It is my intention here to offer some of the nuggets of awareness and experience garnered from these last few months; these are built on over twenty years of teaching at the postsecondary level, which have included the development of some abilities with Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), various online learning management systems and accompanying textbook software and audio-visual programs for disciplinary focus on second language acquisition, humanities and culture.

After my initial highlights of the best and brightest new software offerings subsided, and there were many of interest (Screencast-o-matic, Animoto, iMovie, Powtoon, Google Docs, Perusall, H5P options, among others), including the latest video recording capabilities for Power Point and Google Docs for brainstorming, I came to see that by far the most far exacting questions related to how to best fine-tune the assessment of student work, and to gear how effective the aforementioned strategies could be for teaching and learning the material, at hand. At the same time, this was aimed at achieving excellent levels of critical thinking and learning objectives and outcomes for the student’s learning process and to meet program and world standards for undergraduate university levels.

Assessing student work can be by far the most daunting of pedagogical tasks. To do so effectively, while maintaining a balance between expectations, motivation and high-quality standards takes careful planning. Being flexible to adjusting the various dynamics of specific class settings was more necessary. In this 2-part article I take you through the planning stages and some of ‘final’ results of the syllabus components of a course that I designed in 2020: AP/SP 2200 6.0 Introduction to Spain’s & Latin America’s Greatest Writers. In it we see how each aspect of the course is linked to show student progress successively, while they integrate motivational strategies for keeping the stakes at the right level for their investment of time, energy and creative thinking into the course. To reach the learning goals and to produce the aimed outcomes, the assessment framework must function as an overarching whole. Yet, while the best laid plans may seem good on our virtual ‘paper’, it is through real time testing of the parameters, activities, assignment structures and feedback from students, that we can best hone the ongoing process. For this reason it is of note that the course had previously been offered for many years, thus the pedagogical basis has gone through many former layers of edition. With the addition of the remote and online components that were used to adapt the course delivery and assessment for its current offering, these aspects were thrust into a new light of consideration, allowing me to redesign key components, observe these in action in the first half of the course this year, and to now present some initial findings. Each has some success and some tweaking reflected upon in the various aspects of course delivery, student engagement and assessment. The main failure in my initial plan was the overabundance of reliance on a network of many activities and a flurry of forums and assignments I had initially designed as part of the syllabus. By building backwards from the first layer then forward again towards the final stage (in a large summative assignment) the path became clearer.

As I mentioned, the initial design that included many smaller activities (with tangents into cultural materials that were of interest, I had believed), were too numerous in the current Covid-19 climate. I had to pare these down to the most essential, and provide a “draw-bridge”, so to speak, for leading the students across the canyon of previous knowledge acquired (in first year or other educational sector or experiences) to the second-year jump that requires more of them; this is important for preparing them for their next upper level courses. Once I pared down the syllabus, I still had on the materials (readings, activities) and assignments that were linked and interrelated to a grand plan to take them to a more advanced stage of learning by the end of the year.

Below are some of the highlights of the syllabus, with its component assessment and activity parts, to reflect the most recent changed implemented. These were integrated within the following evaluation scheme for the course:

Scaffolding

Assigned readings, questions and Zoom meetings built upon a chronologically arranged, thematic and genre-based textual analyses, teaching students relevant terminology and methods for studying texts in evolving socio-historical contexts representative of Hispanic writing since its inception. Testing in online formats posed challenges, benefits, unexpected advantages for high quality learning, such as having the capacity to build in various multimedia components (to the extent possible in the available platforms). Community engagement is also a part of this preparation, as it involves various sophisticated forms of address, interpersonal skills, networking and groundwork with academic and non-academic environments, for which assessment is still taking place. So the EE experiences (which I describe more in detail below) are only at a first glance in this sample second year course, as there is already an overwhelming range of new second-language acquisition, world literature (spanning many centuries) and cultural knowledge that students are acquiring. The final summative project of the course is a collaborative group video, with web and textual components, that funnel through the various aspects of literary analysis in context that is modelled throughout the course: from culturally contextualizing each representative text for understanding its distance from contemporary view points, while also considering its current relevance and interpretations, to close reading analysis, application of narrative, poetic, dramatic and essayistic genre terms illustrated by the texts, and achieving a fruitful discussion among peers and with the larger academic and public settings in which these web/video group projects will be shared.

Figure 1: Description of “Speaking Activity 1” displayed on the course Kritik page.

Figure 2: Description of “Creative Assignment 1” displayed on the course Kritik page

Part 2 of this article (to be posted next week) will further highlight some of the assessment strategies I used for this course, including: rubrics, experiential education components, peer-review, and a gamified strategy.

About the Author

Maria Figueredo is an Associate Professor with the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics (LA&PS) at York University, where she teaches courses in Spanish language, Hispanic cultures and literature. She received the President’s University-wide Teaching Award in 2016. She previously served as President of the Ontario Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), and as Delegate of Region 1 of the Modern Language Association (MLA). At York University she has served for many years as Coordinator of the Spanish and Portuguese Studies Section and was Director of Undergraduate Program Director–Languages and Literatures from 2011 to 2013. Her research on the relationship of literature and music in Latin America, contemporary innovations in Spanish American literature, digital and e-poetry, and teaching has been published in books, specialized journals and cultural magazines. She was a York-Massey Fellow from 2008-2009 and since then is Senior Fellow at Massey College of the University of Toronto. At York University, Maria established a trilingual journal titled Entre Voces, together with students, to publish student work from across the university and of the greater GTA community, in Spanish or Portuguese with English translation. She also created a Pan Am Games “Poet-Tree 2015” community Ignite project, which included the publication of an edited anthology The Poetry of Sports & the Sport of Poetry: POET-TREE 2015. She is also a member of the League of Canadian Poets.