Not all students find academic writing the best way to express their understanding of complex ideas, and a restrictive range of assessments can seriously limit student learning opportunities (Rust, 2002). Furthermore, as the Bologna process reaches its deadline for a European Higher Education Area in 2010, the importance of national language in the area of assessment is more important than ever in terms of fairness for student international mobility. This paper analyses an attempt to design and implement an assessment that uses a wordless means of assessing students’ achievements in one undergraduate module on bullying in schools. The module’s standard 2000-word essay was replaced with a comic strip format (appendix not possible). Students were presented with a number of images and symbolic components that they manipulated to demonstrate their understanding of two taught paradigms of research on bullying (McCail, 2008). In one paradigm, individual children (bullies and victims) are seen as the problem for having abnormal behaviours, and are dealt with by intervention, remediation and segregation. In the other paradigm, schools are seen as generating a bullying ethos through their hierarchical and unjust systems of compulsion, control and enforced conformity. Students taking this assignment in the past have struggled with the essay format, especially in the literal conveyance of concepts such as hierarchy, power imbalance, and authoritarianism, but have responded very well to pictorial teaching materials. This has especially been the case for overseas student, such as our Netherlands cohort on our International Degree in English and Education. The graphic illustrations have captured their imagination as well as providing a non-verbal non-literal (NVNL) mode of expressing subtleties that were limited in their language. The project has developed these materials (in conjunction with the original artist) into an alternative visual symbolic language that can answer the assignment’s learning outcomes. This paper will concentrate on the pedagogic and institutional quality assurance issues in changing from a traditional written essay to a NVNL assignment.

This paper will use a critical case-study methodology on issues relating to rethinking learning outcomes and criteria, marking and moderation (Orr and Blythman, 2005), and consider the relationship between teacher and learner, and institutional management of pedagogic processes in terms of the trust afforded to academics’ and students’ assessment of their work (Elton, 2004). Data will include field notes, meeting minutes, email and other correspondence that record and illuminate the processes navigated through the institution's quality assurance systems. The critical case-study approach will provide a narrative on barriers and facilitations in providing evidence to the institution of this project’s academic rigour and intellectual credibility.

We anticipate a uncovering a number of barriers to our attempted innovation, mainly focusing upon the institutional reliance on literal modes of communication and assumptions of their 'gold-standard' status in terms of rigour and accountability. It is noted, for example, that even the ECER conference online submissions afford no way of us presenting an example of the comic strip format for your consideration. Whilst acclaiming diversity, students’ preferences and innovation, we expect strict limitations in how far our University supports the non-verbal and non-literal evidence of student achievement. We also expect that the institutional strategy for controlling the innovation will be through dilution and compromise rather than outright refusal. We hope to be proved wrong.