Teachers’ Approaches to Digital Stories - Tensions Between New Genres and Established Assessment Criteria

Abstract

Abstract New practices in technology-rich schools call for teachers who can be responsive to change. This article explores a group of Norwegian upper-secondary school teachers’ approach to students’ digital stories – a multimodal genre recently introduced to many classrooms. The concept of inscription (Latour, 1992) is used in an abductive analysis to show teachers’ struggle with identifying the premises of digital stories and, consequently, how to assess such texts. The analysis demonstrates that established assessment conventions tend to guide teachers’ assessment of digital stories, thereby resulting in tensions between traditional and emerging practices.

Keywords

• Teachers
• professional learning
• assessment
• digital stories
• genre
• sociocultural