Tomorrow and tomorrow: students, shakespeare, and DV in academic assessments

This article presents the work of two female students in a rural school who were assigned to respond to a Shakespearean text with a Digital Video (DV) project. The study shows how the teacher provided students appropriate time, mediation, and space in allowing them to bring their out-of-school literacies and interests within an academic context. The students composed a DV interpretation of the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from Macbeth. The research examines both the product and process of the students’ work. They recursively planned, drafted, and edited as they composed a multimodal response that purposefully attended to the orchestration of visuals, audio, and text. Implications from this study demonstrate the importance of valuing students’ identities in classroom settings, emphasizing multiple audiences for student work, highlighting the complexity of compositional decisions students made throughout the entire process of creating their video response, and providing multimodal assessments in academic contexts.