Issues in the assessment of creative musical theatre and digital DiY: UK lockdown versus Constructive Alignment

Abstract

This article considers the assessment of collaborative, creative theatre by students in Higher Education, made as what theatre scholar and educationalist Kathy Dacre refers to as “simulated professional practice”. During UK lockdown (2020-22) for the COVID-19 pandemic, difficulties arose with the assessment of students’ digital and hybrid theatre pieces that could not have been foreseen many years earlier at the point of module and programme design. Drawing on critiques from the field of Performing Arts and of Education, John Biggs’ widely adopted outcome-based approach “Constructive Alignment” is problematised here as a structure for teaching and assessing creative work. Constructive Alignment is outlined and contradictions elucidated between this framework and the freer ethos of “DiY theatre”, a model of creation by which much contemporary performance-making work at HEIs is undertaken. In conclusion, benefits of “DiY theatre” are considered in relation to Constructivism, without the rigidity of Constructive Alignment. Such considerations encompass freer creative and aesthetic output, the facility for real-time artistic development alongside technological advancement, and social inclusion. Recommendations for future practice include incorporating the above more formally into a model of “curriculum co-creation”, and more broadly, opening a space for a practical discourse on how we value and assess creativity in Higher Education.

Statement of ethics

This article draws, in part, on student work produced for a second-year module, “Creating Musical Theatre” on the Musical Theatre degree programme at Edge Hill University. Research for this article was conducted in full compliance with the University’s Ethics Procedure, under the scrutiny of an ethics panel. The information in this article is offered with permission from the University, and with the informed consent of students whose work was used for research. Students did not “participate” in the first instance, but gave permission for their work to be analysed in its recorded form after the event, and their processes to be reflected upon. My direct contact with the module was in the role of Internal Moderator, checking the appropriateness of assessment against “Intended Learning Outcomes” (to be discussed), clarity of mark allocation and mark scheme, and standard of marking and feedback. I concurrently acted as personal academic tutor for several students on this module. As the student work was recorded for assessment, in compliance with the social restrictions of Covid lockdown, I was able to consult the University’s Virtual Learning Environment to analyse the recorded work submitted. This research methodology was sanctioned for publication by a University ethics panel.

Aims

This article aims to elucidate the tensions between a now standard model of assessment in the UK university sector on one hand, and the nature of creative practice and need for flexibility in assessment of performing and theatrical arts on the other, using a case study from musical theatre. It is a provocation to universities, to consider the issues for creative subjects using a centrally standardised model of assessment, and to encourage open and informed debate and creative thinking around the structures of learning, teaching and specifically assessment in the arts.

Education frameworks and ideas will be discussed alongside artistic modes of production. Technical and descriptive labels for these concepts and processes will be unpacked as they appear, and a short glossary included as a postscript for clarity. The article touches on many theoretical ideas, discussed relatively briefly and applied to the core tension outlined between creative practice and assessment models. It is thus intended to function as stimulus for further research, deliberation and discourse on the problem, whereby those undertaking curriculum design and delivery and their managers might be emboldened to bring this debate to fruition and encouraged to research and engender creative solutions to the problem of assessing creativity.

Introduction and overview

In a 2019 chapter, “Assessing Simulated Professional Practice in the Performing Arts”, theatre scholar and educationalist Kathy Dacre reflects upon final-year undergraduate collaborative performance-making, or “simulated professional practice as assessment activity” (Dacre, 2019: 190). The term, as used by Dacre, refers to “company”-based theatre practice within Higher Education. The output of this practice might most simply be a play, or a season of performances, whether scripted or devised, where students are engaged in stage performance, but also the art and mechanics of the production in its entirety, from creative roles such as directing and choreography, to lighting and sound design, liaison with and participation in the technical team, marketing and social media. Models of assessment of performance and production within a “company” have long been typical of performance-making courses at conservatoires and universities in the UK and more widely. In her case study, Dacre highlights the challenges faced by tutors in assessing this kind of collaborative performance practice. These assessment challenges are most pertinent within the broader context of assessment frameworks derived from John Biggs’ “Constructive Alignment” model (Biggs and Tang, 2011), as are adopted sector-wide in the UK, and beyond.

Further to Dacre’s critique, in this provocation I want to interrogate and interrupt the principles of Constructive Alignment as I have seen them work in a kind of forced tandem with contemporary theatre practices, often seeming to pull in opposing directions, with competing value systems. The current instrumentalist ideology underpinning general assessment principles is at odds with the creative process and ideology of contemporary performance practice. Here is the great contradiction of the arts as assessed in the modern university: how might we encourage artistic freedom, innovation, cross-fertilisation and pushing at boundaries, whilst remaining within the pedagogical remit framed by our Intended Learning Outcomes? To what extent should we continue to persevere within this framework, and at what cost?

This inherent tension was exacerbated and illuminated, from 2020 onward, by the social isolation of students and staff imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the digital assessment procedures put in place over the period of UK lockdown. To illustrate this I consider an example of collaborative, creative performance work made on the Musical Theatre degree programme at Edge Hill University, Lancashire, during UK lockdown. My main focus, however, is to contextualise this performance work within the broader picture of assessment frameworks which informally coexist and compete, and to analyse issues and outcomes arising from this inherent tension.

Key terms: Constructivism, Constructive Alignment and Intended Learning Outcomes

“Constructivism”, a concept going back at least to Piaget’s Psychology of Intelligence of 1950 (2001), emphasises that learners construct knowledge through their own activities, and that teaching should engage learners in that knowledge-building. Building on this principle, “Constructive Alignment”, developed by John Biggs and propounded by Biggs and Tang (2011), is a principle of transparent educational practice whereby, in an age of accountability and Quality Assurance, we ensure that that we set, then teach and assess the achievement of “Intended Learning Outcomes” (henceforth “ILOs” – the specificity of which will be unpacked later). ¹ So, working backwards, we design aligned programmes and modules thus:

• Intended Learning Outcome: what do we want students to know or to do?

• Assessment: how will we assess that ILO through the application of knowledge?

• Learning and Teaching: how will we teach toward that assessment in order to engage students in activity and learning that results in that knowledge, and that outcome?

Transparency is key. Where students construct their own knowledge individually as well as in communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), clear guidelines for assessment are important and essentially very helpful. The structure of Constructive Alignment works on the premise that if students have in mind the broad framework of ways in which their knowledge or skill will be assessed ultimately, they will work toward that assessment.

It is the nature of self-constructed knowledge that makes necessary the alignment of Learning Outcomes. How will a student document their own individual process of learning toward assessment, whilst feeling assured that they are offering something within the framework of what is expected or acceptable? To address this need, one could argue the logic that ILOs should be stated in a broad but essential, achievable way, aligned with the (often varied) work done toward the assessment. However, the model of Constructive Alignment currently practiced across the UK HE sector has increased the rigidity of the way in which ILOs are formulated, and has therefore arguably moved away from original constructivist thought, whereby students formulate their own bespoke learning paths. The present-day university, driven to standardise and rationalise such processes as the setting of ILOs, thus finds itself in conflict with creative educationalists. Imperial College London, for example (a STEM-focussed university), advocates a specific, stepwise process in the construction of ILOs on the webpages of its Educational Development Unit, mapping them onto part of the 2001 revision of Bloom’s taxonomy, ² “helping us to evaluate and describe the appropriate levels of learning we want to design for our students” (Imperial, 2024). A pointed example of this approach, the Imperial College webpage advice is highly articulated and prescriptive, advocating use of specific behavioural action verbs, and a SMART target approach (where ILOs might be, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-appropriate). Other universities, with undergraduate arts programmes, such as Bristol, Bath and Queen Mary University of London, also offer similarly defined online instruction on the construction of ILOs. However, when taken literally, the specificity of some of these requirements can become problematic in the context of an artistic response, product and learning outcome, where it may not be practical, or in fact desirable, to know the nature of the outcome before it appears through organic creative process. I will discuss this further in relation to a theatre-specific framework later, with reference to Robert Daniels’ concept of DiY theatre (Daniels, 2014). More broadly, constructivist educational philosopher Ronald Barnett describes a student’s educational being as “always in a state of becoming”, and describes a student ideally “coming-into-self” and into her own authenticity through learning that is self-driven, selected and constructed (Barnett, 2007). “What courage, what daring we require of our students in Higher Education” he reflects. “A willingness to venture forth into they know not what […] beset with course prospectuses, course descriptions and course ‘outcomes’”, which Barnett radically describes as “essentially fiction”, and an impotent attempt at “educational totalitarianism”. In direct contrast to the prescriptions of Educational Development Units such as that discussed earlier, the Higher Education model Barnett espouses is equipped to challenge students to “be willing to venture forth even into situations that their tutors cannot foretell” (71). A global pandemic might be viewed as one such drastic situation.

Issues with Constructive Alignment, and divergent assessment

Even before lockdown practice consolidated the problem, academics working in the performing arts had begun to question the use of modern-day Constructive Alignment in the assessment of live, collaborative, creative theatre. Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, such critiques seem to have foreshadowed the problems (and solutions) that we would come to face during the pandemic. In the closed structure of Constructive Alignment, tied to prescriptive outcomes that must be known before they are created, contemporary theatre practices have had to be shoehorned into a space that barely contains them. This tension has been keenly felt by students and staff. Astutely, Dacre criticises the focus on “skills and replication rather than learning and innovation” in what she terms “constrictive alignment” (2019: 194). She also draws on the previous theorising of Jeff Noonan and Paul Kleiman to consolidate her stance. Noonan bemoans a “drift […] towards skill-programming and away from the cultivation of cognitive freedom” in which ILOs are implicated (2016). Kleiman (2017) identifies four explicit concerns with ILOs, that:

• “they militate against intellectual experimentation and discovery”,

• “creativity cannot be predetermined”,

• “outcomes promise certainty when learning might be unpredictable”,

• “they foster a climate that inhibits the capacity to deal with uncertainty” (in Dacre, 2019:194).

Indeed, Kleiman’s final two concerns could not have foreshadowed the events of lockdown theatre assessments more keenly had he had a crystal ball, as I will go on to discuss.

Recent Director of Higher Education at the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts (LIPA) Phil Christopher has also been vocal in his criticism of ILOs, proposing alternative work-based assessment models within the sector (2019, 2022). Christopher asserts that Constructive Alignment prompts “artificiality in the predetermination” as staff “align” the learning environment.

“The learner whilst active is not forging meaning from events but expected to react to preordained events to learn preordained outcomes. […] Significantly [Constructive Alignment] benignly controls learning and is resistant to the unexpected” (2022).

We might go back further and look more widely to ascertain warnings against this kind of predetermination from education scholars. Aptly, Dacre cites Phil Race’s general point that assessment criteria for practical skills can be difficult to pin down. “There may be several ways of performing a task well, requiring a range of alternative assessment criteria” (Race, 1996: 4). Harry Torrance, writing about post-secondary education and training in 2007, bemoaned the narrow interpretation of formative assessment with what he called an “overwhelming focus on criteria compliance and award achievement” (Torrance, 2007: 282). Torrance expressed concern that too much transparency in assessment criteria actively encourages instrumentalism. To mitigate against excessive criteria compliance, Torrance suggests what he termed a “divergent” style of (formative) assessment.

The root of this idea is the concept of “divergent thinking”, often linked to imagination and creativity, and since defined as the capacity to think in different directions (Paek et al., 2021). The term is taken from psychologist J. P. Guilford, who in 1956 identified what he termed “convergent” and “divergent” thinking factors.

“In convergent thinking, there is usually one conclusion or answer that is regarded as unique, and thinking is channeled or controlled in the direction of that answer. […] In divergent thinking […] there is much searching or going off in various directions. This is most clearly seen when there is no unique conclusion” (Guilford, 1956: 274).

The arts seldom offer a “unique conclusion”, as expressed here. In terms of audience there are perhaps many “unique” conclusions, so we might better say that there is no unified conclusion.

Torrance (2007) explains divergent assessment as “oriented towards identifying what students can do in an open-ended and exploratory fashion” (291). Thus Marshall and Drummond (2006) offer the description of serving the “spirit” rather than the “letter” of formative assessment. In the practical arts where summative assessment of a final piece for a module, for example, is also often formative in terms of the student’s future work, it seems appropriate to apply the notion here as well, to “summative” assessment in the arts.

It is evident that primary, secondary and even Further Education may have the tendency and structural need to comply with external measurements using hyper-monitoring of pupils and students via convergent assessment methods, “with teachers focusing on identifying […] whether or not students achieve extant curriculum-derived objectives” (Torrance, 2007: 291). However, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), which create and validate their own criteria and assessments (albeit working within the frameworks provided by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education Subject Benchmark Statements ³ ), are better positioned to engage in divergent assessment and thus assess creative and exploratory practice. Quite obviously, the creative arts also naturally align themselves here. Processes unhampered by the need for convergence, or for one unified outcome, might best align assessment with students’ own metacognition – as ideally, they are learning how to learn. As Guilford would have it, they are “searching or going off in various directions”, expanding rather than narrowing the field. Higher Education should not be adverse to what Professor Mark Schofield described to me in person (March 14 2023) as “the left-field”, “emerging, free aesthetic entities”, or to valuable but unpredictable outcomes.

Theatre, musical theatre and divergent ‘DiY’

I will now return to the theatre, and briefly the specifics of the area in which I work, musical theatre. This genre presents its own problems in terms of pedagogy. It is often treated as a skill-based multi-discipline. Students of musical theatre performance will be required to sing, dance and act in order to achieve the desirable “triple threat” skill set. In addition to this they are required to write essays, reflect on practice, devise theatre, choreography, costume, set design, and even compose songs. This is not a degree programme based on one fundamental skill to be honed, but rather a varied and disparate skill set to be selected from widely, polished, and flexibly employed. The theatre, then, is a place for skill with fluidity; for direction but also imagination. Theatre is not theatre until it has been created, traditionally live and in-person, with the ephemeral quality and inevitable “mistakes” and expected problem-solving recovery that this involves.

Theatre in certain contexts, including courses of Higher Education, embodies a home-made or “have-a-go” quality that has been described as DiY, or do-it-yourself (Daniels, 2014). In contrast, musical theatre in a professionally performed, commercial context relies more heavily on regimented skill and, in some quarters, a paint-by numbers kind of directed performance where each performance is a carbon copy of the one before. But theatre performers are, in their essence, creative. Certainly a university (more so than conservatoire degree programme), in asking students to develop as thinking, creative, reflective practitioners, requires of them some creative output which might be developed in a small group or “company”, akin to the DiY theatre model adhered to more obviously on Drama or Performance Studies courses. This is the DiY principle utilised within defined “communities of practice”, a term coined by Etienne Wenger to refer to groups of people engaging in regular collective or collaborative learning within a shared domain of interest (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2015). Considering, then, the diversity of arts backgrounds of those studying and working in musical theatre (including specialisms in drama, music, and/or dance), and consequently the many and varied ways in which work might be produced and problems might be solved, the potential for the DiY theatre approach takes on heightened importance.

Performance scholar and theatre-maker Robert Daniels has curated two collections of writing on DiY theatre and performance (2014, 2015), exemplifying the term. However, its usage is varied and disputed by practitioners (often because a fundamental of the do-it-yourself ethos is that it is essentially collaborative, and done with others). Daniels describes one camp of DiY performers as politically and philosophically invested in “dilettantism, auto-didacticism and working with anything they have in frugal ways” (2014: 8). “This kind of practice”, he tells us, “is now a commonplace feature of many practice-driven performance making university degree courses”. And while there are implicit tensions here with the polished aesthetic of commercial musical theatre, the Musical Theatre degree course at Edge Hill University is no stranger to the DiY theatre ethos either. Fundamentally and democratically, here is the idea that “skill is acquirable and accessible to all”. When working in a company, the show must go on, and if expertise in a particular skill (be it makeup, lighting, whatever) is in short supply, one must simply initially work it out by doing, for the good of the collective and the performance. There may be time to polish later - there may not. This is the collective ethos and the aesthetic of this kind of contemporary theatre from which our students often draw their creative process. Daniels thus mentions the need for performers to “thicken” their practice, and describes theatre as a “creative industry in the truest sense”, referring to “magpie” practice and the greater likelihood of “bricoleurs than dilettantes” with the bits and pieces of magpie expertise, stolen from here and borrowed from there, but shined to perfection. Daniels describes practitioners “not averse to notions of skill, or virtuosity, or whatever” (2014: 9). The first contributors to Daniels’ initial DiY volume, Daisy and Pablo, describe the practice of “making your parachute on the way down” (16), handmade but never slapdash. Further into the volume artist Mamoru Iriguchi states with clarity that “interdisciplinary practice means that every now and then you have to work in new disciplines. When this happens the first thing you do is to investigate and understand” (67).

It is not hard to see the tensions that might be felt between this type of DiY creative theatre practice, prevalent in performing arts programmes, and the closed model of “Outcome-Based Education” (Spady, 1994), or Biggs’ “Constructive Alignment” of Intended Learning Outcomes to be decided upon in advance of the module, known at its beginning, and attained by its end. How might that account for the swift acquisition of a skill, unforeseen but required by the group, and its ultimate implementation; for “making your parachute on the way down”? Yet it was this skill that served students during the pandemic when Constructive Alignment was stretched to its limit, and beyond.

Incorporating divergent digital theatre

At the heart of the traditional experience of theatre, the passage of time in its liveness serves to forgive some of the specifics of the moment. The overall experience of a performance ensures the ephemerality of mistakes or of micro-events that diverge from a plan. ILOs in this context most often incorporate implicitly the importance of liveness and an overview of a performance experience over time.

Enter lockdown and with it, problems for creating and assessing the live and collaborative arts, but also a surge in the professional practice of “digital theatre”. Later, in 2022, in theatre magazine The Stage, Fergus Morgan reviewed the functions of digital theatre, post-pandemic, including “meaningfully hybrid” or “blended” theatre that incorporated digital elements “on a fundamental level”. Producer Adam Lenson described musical theatre that had been “made to be experienced via a screen”, using platforms such as Skype to represent the interactions of characters. “It was theatre”, he said, “but it used a totally different dramaturgy to working on stage” (Morgan, 2022). Essentially, in lockdown, the artefact of theatre had become changed, and with it the roles of those creating the artefact.

Morgan describes theatre-makers

“forced by circumstance to develop the ability to make work digitally. They have learned how to do everything from handling cameras to renegotiating […] contracts, from using live-streaming software to developing digital dramaturgy – and those skills are now being shared.”

How like Robert Daniels’ DiY ethos this sounds, adapted for a lockdown, and now post-lockdown world.

And so to our students. It is perhaps contextually important to note that all students on the Edge Hill Musical Theatre programme at the time around UK Covid lockdown were of the traditionally “expected” generation, ranging in age between 18 and early 20s, having grown up around pervasive internet culture. ⁴ Morgan (2022) asserts that in this year “courses at educational institutions across the country have started to incorporate digital theatre skills into their curricula”. While this may be the case now, it is perhaps more interesting to look at that liminal point in time when our bricoleurs began the process of integrating the digital before we asked them to, at times seeming to work against the practicalities of the assignment briefs and the ILOs which we had so carefully aligned for them before the world was thrown into a chaos from which new practice would emerge.

In spring 2020, when lockdown hit suddenly and unexpectedly, Programme Leaders in the performing arts had to draft modified alternative assessments, with the aim of best meeting the existing validated Learning Outcomes. The approval of External Examiners was secured, and thus the first wave of lockdown assessments was formed. Shortly after, in summer 2020, at Edge Hill University, a more formalised process was started whereby temporary revalidations occurred for the following academic year (2020-21) including new ILOs, to facilitate video submissions where the old ILOs may have referred in any explicit context to the “liveness” of assessment pieces. These temporary validations were designed to supersede the formal validated ILOs and assessment only for a year. However, where these temporary changes to modules served to clarify or add value, they were made permanent. As an example, I would like to evaluate some of the work produced in summer 2021 for a module on which I acted as Internal Moderator.

Module ILOs: “Creating Musical Theatre”

Creating Musical Theatre was a second-year module on the Edge Hill Musical Theatre degree programme, for which students collaborated in small groups (or “companies”, as we might describe them within the framework of simulated professional practice) in order to create a short piece of musical theatre. Students were then assessed on that creative piece of work and their individual role in it, both as performer and creator (or what we might term a performance role and a production role), and also on a “reflective journal” including academic content which they write about the piece and their creative journey.

In the following analysis I refer to a module curriculum that was not designed by myself, either pre-Covid or during lockdown. With the current expeditious restructuring of workforces in the performing arts, it is not possible to contact those whose personal input was given to the design of this module curriculum. My own input was as Internal Moderator, and thus a critical friend during the implementation of assessment of this module.

Originally (pre-Covid), students were asked to achieve a number of Learning Outcomes, including, for example:

“Develop practitioner artistry, craft and technique appropriate to the creation and presentation of an original piece of musical theatre.”

Students in summer 2020 (after lockdown began in the March) had still to meet this objective, but with recorded created pieces, and so our understanding as staff and students was that, in response to the situation in which we found ourselves, “theatre” may now be interpreted as digitally recorded theatre. The artefact of theatre and the roles of creators were now intrinsically altered. Meanwhile the role of theatre as artefact and its modes of engagement were also unexpectedly changed, as theatre was now working at a temporal (as well as physical) distance from audience, with the fundamental necessity of liveness reduced, if not removed. The following summer (2021) ILOs throughout the programme were revised to remove explicit reference to theatrical practice as such, and to live audience engagement, but retained reference to the end result of a piece of musical theatre.

For example, in Creating Musical Theatre, from summer 2021, ILOs 1 and 2 read as follows:

“(1) Embody in practice a range of techniques appropriate to the creation and presentation of an original piece of musical theatre

(2) Manipulate the functional elements of musical theatre through the creation of an original musical theatre performance”. ⁵

These were also far clearer and, as such, were retained post-Covid and more permanently validated. So, in 2021, students were still asked for essentially theatrical work, filmed in a rudimentary “live capture” kind of way. This was only fair, because the programme, as validated, was designed for students to develop and understand the art of live theatre; media skills could not be made mandatory by inclusion in an ILO. A rudimentary recording of an outstanding live performance should therefore be sufficient in order to score as highly as possible. However, our students adapted and developed their own versions of digital theatre as they felt was required to solve the problem posed by lockdown and the need to keep creating theatre at a distance.

One assessment piece on the same module, entitled Into the Out, was developed from an idea borrowed from the 2015 Disney feature animation Inside Out. The company of students set up for the assessment described it as a “sequel” to that film, with explicit reference to lockdown, and without explicit reference to the theatrical. This is, in the sense in which our theatre students defined it, a movie; but it is a theatrical movie, developed within a theatre context. It is, at once, in their terms a “movie”, and in our framework, digital theatre.

The directorial role taken on by one student merged with the function of media editor. Footage of individuals was filmed with the express intention of reformatting into “gallery” shots, as one might experience on a Zoom call or similar. In the case of this film, the characters in gallery represented feelings (Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, etc.) in the life of the main protagonist, an adolescent girl, Riley, navigating lockdown. This was an ideal way of using the Zoom format, and in fact in the original children’s animated film the same characters had occupied a “control room” space, set in Riley’s mind. Other students on the programme also utilised the Zoom format to represent elements of mental health; so apt was the “confined” nature of lockdown recordings and non-performance interactions in all our lives, and so immediate was the concern of isolation and the modes of introversion it induced. Here these realities were imitated by technology in our students’ creative work.

Songs within the performance pieces were often visualised like commercial music videos. In Into the Out we saw a variety of effects, for example fish-eye lens photography enhancing the idea of confinement, where the character Anger leans into the centre of the lens, distorted and visually amplified as in a goldfish bowl. All around her shrinks away, as our worlds shrank in lockdown and we were left alone within our own often distorted and amplified emotional states. At other points static camera work framed the “stage” of performance, with characters walking off camera, as they would off stage. This was indeed “meaningfully hybrid” performance where use of technology reflected the very feeling being presented in theatrical performance, as scenography might on stage. How then should this piece be marked against assessment criteria designed for live theatre?

Looking back at the new revised ILOs, students were required to “embody in practice” techniques appropriate to musical theatre, and to manipulate the “functional elements” of musical theatre. Ultimately, we received hybrid theatre which still embodied practice (but at a distance from audience) and where the “functional elements” were expanded to include home-made digital recording and editing techniques.

Students scored highly for creation and performance of this piece, and of course video editing was taken into account as an extra creative or “functional element” - how could it not be? But crucially this is not to say that other companies of students which created theatrical work that was filmed in a more rudimentary way were “marked down” as such. Positive marking (looking for what was evident rather than what was not) and generalised language in the construction of ILOs regarding “a range of techniques” and “fundamental elements” meant that we were able to credit new skills without penalising the digitally disinclined. This was a functional and logical way of working: essentially students were able to choose which techniques and elements to employ. In the brave, new, digital world into which they were thrust, they could even define, to an extent, their own “fundamental elements” - whether taught or self-taught; whether learnt from us, from a YouTube tutorial, or from one another.

Here we see Guilford's divergent thinking, “searching or going off in various directions”, and Biggs’ Constructivism working within Wenger’s “communities of practice”. Here also is Robert Daniels’ DiY theatre: students “working with anything they have in frugal ways”, and in response to need, “making your own parachute on the way down”. Developing their own digital dramaturgy, our students have become digital bricoleurs. In a sense this was inevitable, as a result of their own Drama education, most likely at post-16 as well as at university level, that has been based on the principles of DiY theatre (Daniels, 2014). ⁶

In order to assess individuals in group performance (theatre practitioners in “simulated professional practice”) via ILOs, we must deconstruct, clearly and explicitly, the elements of the theatrical “bricolage”. One might well argue that where students achieve the appearance of synergy in collaborative performance (where elements of performance work collaboratively to greater effect than the sum of their parts - a highly desirable result), to deconstruct down to the minutiae of the performance is counter to the ethos of collaborative, creative theatre art. We must then generalise the language of ILOs to “functional elements” and “appropriate technique” without specifying a singular meaning, or as Guilford would have it a “unique conclusion”– thus facilitating a constructivist approach, where selections from the vast array of the conceptually possible might be made by students. Assessment of such performance and creativity also takes place within the context of a community of practice – the functionality of what any individual chooses to do within a company depends on what others do in conjunction and in complement.

However, in a way that is quite contrary to the prescriptive advice of Educational Development at Imperial College London discussed earlier in this article, ILOs thus become couched in metaphor and generalisation. In the example given above students are required to “manipulate” (metaphor) “the fundamental elements of musical theatre” (no specification). One could argue that an Intended Learning Outcome that is metaphorical is no intention at all. And yet to solidify expectation of the ephemeral form, live theatre (where valuable, unpredictable outcomes are so often very welcome), is counter to its very nature.

While we tried to loosen the language of outcomes, in “aligning the environment” as Phil Christopher describes it (2022), we fell short during the pandemic when the unexpected was thrust upon us. The enormous amount of reworking and workplace (in the metaphorical, non-physical sense) stress that that entailed was extreme. Colleagues in the USA, where Constructive Alignment is not commonly adopted and assessment criteria are more freely set, reported that attitudes amongst staff there were geared “just to make lockdown work”. ⁷ UK staff and students working in the performing arts were thrown into anxiety resulting from work and assessment frameworks now not aligning with what was possible, or with the ways in which students might be inclined to solve the arising problems for performance themselves, by representing their art in a different medium.

While we congratulate ourselves on cleverly reworking the framework of Constructive Alignment, as was necessary to make it fit out new purposes in social isolation, we should not forget the difficulty we encountered, ultimately of our own making, and Kleiman’s warning that ILOs “foster a climate that inhibits the capacity to deal with uncertainty” (in Dacre, 2019): “resistance” as Christopher asserts “to the unexpected” (2022).

Broader perspectives and inclusion

I have dealt here with the intricacies of creative, collaborative performance in “simulated professional practice as assessment activity”, and the ways in which the DiY theatre model, commonly in operation in practical theatre education, rubs up against the wholesale adoption of Constructive Alignment and prescriptive and formulaic ILOs in assessment. This tension was illuminated in UK lockdown, but elements of both frameworks were manipulated in order to enforce a necessary fit.

Dacre’s chapter abstract for the Taylor and Francis website asserts that some of her analysis of “simulated professional practice as assessment activity” might apply to other settings (such as health and education training). ⁸ In relevance to the wider reach of a university programme in the arts and humanities, I would assert that the issues described in this article regarding: a) freedom in creativity; b) a shift of agency toward students; and c) value placed on unforeseen or unintended outcomes, might also apply more broadly here, outside of performance.

As “interdisciplinary” approaches to arts and humanities have been championed in recent years, there is certainly a case in traditional academic and research work for the academic bricoleur. Of course, this description might seem more acceptable in the theatre than the classroom, and HEIs might be more inclined toward the pedagogical language of “Constructivism” than the more playful “bricolage”. In the case of either description, a timely example is found in the urgent agenda of creating inclusive curricula. Often now this is articulated as encased within the broader but often unspecific ideal of “decolonising the curriculum”. However, this is an area far more politically complex and nuanced to go into here. ⁹ To conceive of inclusion more widely, and touching upon Barnett’s philosophy of students who “venture forth” into their own learning worlds, the framework of a co-created curriculum, designed between staff and students, offers a practical way of implementing student agency in their learning journey. HE scholar Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka describes the process of co-creating curriculum with students as “values-based […], ongoing, creative, and mutually-beneficial”, where staff and students collaborate “to share and negotiate decision-making about aspects of curricula” (Lubicz-Nawrocka and Bovill, 2021). While we see this happen, perhaps in an ad hoc or informalised way, a more formally described or documented approach to “co-creation” might alleviate some of the tensions between creative constructivist educational practice and the formalised Constructive Alignment that we have seen arise in this article, and so should be considered in future plans. Catherine Bovill has outlined steps that might be taken toward co-creating elements of assessment and feedback in particular (2022) and particular attention might also be given to Advance HE’s Student Partnership in Assessment project (2021).

If assignments are built to allow space for students to construct their own paths of knowledge within a given framework, we receive individual perspectives from students arising, in part, from diverse lived experiences; experiences, crucially, that are different from our own. Of course, this is not only the case in creative, practical work. In response to open questions regarding modes of artistry or representation, for example, students are free to analyse examples that speak to them. We might foster a constructivist curriculum environment where equal value is placed on the art and activism (hard or soft) of performers and creators from groups that have experienced oppression and/or colonisation. Connections made and approaches taken by undergraduate students in written and practical work in these areas have undoubtedly educated me as I assessed their work, as, of course, they should when offering a perspective outside of my own embedded familiarity. For example, students of colour have responded thoughtfully and creatively to the critical study and deconstruction of blackface minstrelsy in many guises with nuances that I (a white British academic) would not have the lived or tacit understanding to anticipate in its nuance and its fullness. Painful homophobia has also been examined in both practical theatre and written investigations in ways that were absolutely and critically nuanced by the lived experiences of the student creators and scholars. This kind of work, incorporating, in whatever way, the perspectives and identities of the student creators, is to be credited for taking the academic establishment somewhere outside of its traditions and its metaphorical “comfort zone”. We might credit this as “original contribution”, in the terms that we use in mark schemes, but we are really crediting students who expand the content and context of the area of study to include perspectives from which we have not heard enough. Here are valuable outcomes that are unpredictable, and certainly unintended, if only from the perspectives of those who created the frameworks and structures from which these outcomes strain to break free.

Conclusion

The explicit focus on Constructivism serves us in the arts. Here are two examples of ways in which inclusive work is done by retaining this focus:

(1) It facilitates our students to incorporate the digital, thus keeping apace with developments in creative technology within theatre and enabling innovation;

(2) In prioritising constructed knowledge of a diverse student body, HEIs facilitate their own potential to include and listen, and in listening, contribute toward the work of equity.

Additionally, these two factors necessarily form a relationship since the use of modern digital technology has, in many contexts including the theatre, the power to include, communicate and share knowledge and culture globally. This is a point that warrants further interrogation in future research, including within the broad framework of the “decolonisation” agenda.

However, in lockdown, Constructive Alignment, specifically, as an assessment procedure has proven, in its rigidity, resistant: to change, to “excessive” creativity, to “thinking outside of the box” (even when problem-solving or necessary), and certainly to the unpredictable. While we will doubtless continue to align the content and skills that we teach with assessment tasks, we might also seek to collaborate with students: to co-create assessment; to include and incorporate other creative content and increasingly diverse perspectives within that same alignment; to explicitly encourage possibility wider than that which we have ourselves imagined; and to value creativity in the form of the unexpected.