A/Prof Madeleine Dobson
“There is a great diversity of ideas, and the students do wonderful work at imagining this in creative ways.”
Faculty of Humanities
Overview
Inquiry-based visual artefacts have students collect, synthesise, and transform qualitative data into a defendable visual representation that responds to participant ideas and feedback, interrogates unit theories, and demonstrates their personal disciplinary philosophy.
Key features
- Lane 2: Non-secure assessment
- Provides hands-on research experience through interviews with real people, allowing students to practise approaching individuals and engaging in dialogue with them to share and seek expertise
- The visual artefact’s creative and flexible approach makes learning engaging and caters to individual student strengths through visual, hands-on, and written components
- Increases student motivation through creative freedom and personal choice
- Prevents academic integrity issues through unique, personalised creative outputs
- Adaptable for face-to-face, online, and hybrid teaching modes
- Functions well for both individual work and collaborative team projects with shared visual representations
- Linking with Curtin’s Makerspace and Adobe Express provides university-supported design materials, guidance and software
How it works
Curtin snapshot
Madeleine’s example assessment
About my unit: Faculty of Humanities | 50-100 students | Hybrid | Individual work
I use the inquiry-based visual artefact assessment to give students a lot of creative flexibility to respond to data and represent who they are as teachers and how they envision play in their future teaching.
The task is for students to have a reasonably brief, informal conversation with children aged 5-8 and use their ideas to design a play environment to support the learning, development, and wellbeing of all children. Students will create a detailed map of their play-based learning environment using the ideas and images collected from their interviews and unit readings. They are encouraged to integrate a range of visual elements – for example, photos or illustrations of particular resources, or features of the play environment they wish to illuminate in greater depth and detail.
A strong rationale defending the value of the environment should accompany the representation, explaining how the environment supports different thinking skills, considers the ideas of the children interviewed, and addresses how the play-space meets six key elements:
- Welcomes and creates a sense of belonging
- Flexible and open-ended
- Engages the children’s senses
- Provokes wonder, curiosity, and intellectual challenge
- Engages children in symbolic representations, literacy and the visual arts
- Considers barriers and quality standards
My advice
It’s important to emphasise conceptual understanding over artistic ability; the marking focus should be on theoretical application and communication effectiveness rather than aesthetic perfection. I also encourage students to consider including this in their Digital Professional Portfolio, as it’s a beautiful way to demonstrate their expertise about play in education settings, and their readiness to engage with and respond to children’s perspectives.
Suggested marking criteria
Note: Marking criteria and weighting are suggested guidelines. Specific descriptions should be adapted to relevant content and learning objectives.