Towards the Global Postgraduate: Dynamic Teaching-Learning Environments for Optimum Transfer of Knowledge

Traditional methods of assessment at the postgraduate level have often concentrated on the expanded essay as well as oral presentations of critical discussion of course material. Within the context of literary studies, the central focus of such assessments is on the ability to critically analyse a set of reading material, often in form of novels, poetry and drama. However, the horizon of literary studies has moved beyond such traditional means, and many literary programmes are now incorporating multimodal cultural texts. The Postgraduate programme in Postcolonial Literatures in English conducted by the School of Language Studies and Linguistics reflects such multimodal incorporation in course content. This paper will report on the preliminary stages of a research that focuses on the ways in which the incorporation of both multimodal texts as well as multimodal assessments is able to transform the traditional classroom into a dynamic teaching-learning environment. The primary aim of the research is to determine whether such strategies of teaching and learning are able generate optimum transfer of knowledge for the inculcation of higher order thinking skills in the postgraduate classroom, through various combinations of analysis, application, synthesis and evaluation. It uses as its sample the syllabi of a postgraduate course on the application of Literature in the real world.