‘You Left No Crumbs’: Student Voices Informing an English Teacher's Podcasting Assessment

Abstract

Although writing essays remains hegemonic in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms, podcasting as a form of digital multimodal composing (DMC) is an empowering alternative for diverse learners to represent learning. However, their privilege to draw on their full communicative repertoires may be constrained by assessment practices that overlook student voices. Situated in Western Canada, this ethnographic case study explored how diverse learners in Grade 8 might have informed an ELA teacher's assessment of podcast episodes they co‐created to analyse poetry. Data included student‐generated rubric criteria, self‐assessment sheets, interviews, teacher feedback and the podcast episodes. Adopting a telling case approach and drawing on sociocultural, critical and multimodal perspectives on literacy assessment, we used thematic analysis to examine one trio's episode. We followed an inductive‐deductive approach to examine student input and used constant comparison to juxtapose student input with teacher feedback. Three themes emerged: emphasizing relatability in literary analyses, explaining design choices to engage the audience and foregrounding collaborative troubleshooting. The findings demonstrate how prioritizing student voices legitimizes the intellectual, collaborative and multimodal work potentially overlooked in product‐centred assessment. The study invites ELA teachers to position students as dialogic partners in DMC assessment and recognize their reflections as legitimate evidence of learning.