Issues in the Assessment of Creative Musical Theatre and Digital DiY: UK Lockdown vs. Constructive Alignment

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” (Dacre, 2019). 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, the widely adopted outcome-based approach “Constructive Alignment” (Biggs and Tang, 2011) 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 (Daniels, 2014). 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, even touching on the “decolonisation” agenda.