the pirate caribbean hunt location of tortuga

The students on the module submitted an impressive range in their portfolios. I also asked students to think about issues like audience and format: what key ideas did they want to communicate about the history of piracy, and how could they use the format to do that for their chosen audience? They could make anything they liked, so long as it related to the history of piracy and used suitable evidence to develop the design.

Students could either produce a series of smaller pieces, or a single design with an accompanying discussion of the research that went into it. I had already tried out alternative assessments in other modules, to offer students a chance to practice skills besides those more traditionally associated with undergraduate essays, and this module seemed the perfect place to introduce a creative assessment portfolio. We have been sharing some piratical material on this blog recently, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film in 2003, much of it related in some way or another to an undergraduate module that I teach here at Reading, also called ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ (I would claim this is a truly astonishing coincidence but, well, it isn’t).Īs I wrote in a previous post, as well as learning about the history of piracy in this module, we also think about why this one particular period in history has come to dominate popular imagination on this subject.

The pirate caribbean hunt location of tortuga