Notes Toward the Role of Materiality in Composing, Reviewing, and Assessing Multimodal Texts

Abstract

• Validity in writing assessment calls for ethical “IDAs”: interpretations, decisions, and actions. • Scrapbooks and student ePortfolios focus attention on materiality and multimodality. • Such attention influences how scholars and teachers encounter these genres. • Careful consideration of these encounters points to an ethical and informed assessment practice. • This approach is useful for teachers and scholars designing a language and an assessment process for multimodal texts. In a discussion of validity in writing assessment, Pamela Moss and colleagues call for attention to ethical “IDAs” that constitute assessment: interpretations, decisions, and actions. Our purpose in this article is to engage such a hermeneutical conversation—that is, an exploration, analysis, and interpretation—focused not on how we assess material and multimodal texts, but instead on the preliminary question of how we encounter and interpret them. Here we focus on two genres—the scrapbook and the student ePortfolio—the first emphasizing materiality and the second multiple approaches to multimodality and multimedia. In this article, our goal is to understand more and better the practices teachers and scholars engage in as they encounter these two kinds of texts, believing that situating this inquiry through materiality and multimodality will help us understand each and assist us in moving toward an ethical and informed assessment practice of them. Ultimately, our argument is that such an approach may be very useful in helping teachers and scholars design both a language and an assessment process for multimodal texts.