Assignment: First Year Writing Digital Portfolio
Platform: Digication
Audience: Classmates, Michael, Writing Program and University Administrators
Due Date: Tuesday, November 22nd
The Student Writing Portfolio –
A cornerstone of our pedagogy, the student writing portfolio provides the opportunity for students to demonstrate the degree to which you have achieved the program’s learning outcomes. Writing portfolios are required of every student in every FYW course and necessitate that students keep track of their work (collection), take responsibility for selecting pieces of their writing that represent their achievements (selection), and reflect on their own work in the course (reflection).
Portfolios play many roles in academic and professional life: artists use them to document and to showcase their work over time; architects use them to present drawings, media, and projects to clients; writers use them to make connections between the kinds of work that they do individually and collaboratively for any number of creative, academic, and professional goals and readers.
In each case, purpose and audience help to guide your rhetorical selection of materials, your reflections on those materials, and their presentation. In the First-Year Writing Program at DePaul, we use digital portfolios as a way for you to showcase your work and to show how you’ve met the learning outcomes of the course in which you are enrolled.
First-Year Writing Digital Portfolio Requirements
- A Reflective Essay that introduces your work to your peers, your instructor, and writing-program administrators: 750-1250 words
- Samples of your work that support as evidence your learning outcomes:
- rhetorical knowledge
- critical thinking, reading, and writing
- processes
- knowledge of convention
The design and composition of your digital portfolio draw on the very same strategies and outcomes that you’ve been practicing in your WRD first-year writing course: readers will attribute credibility and authority to you when your design and arrangement are done with care; thoughtfully integrated examples of your work will support your reflective essay’s main points; and you will get practice in articulating and presenting your academic and professional identities.
Portfolio checklist
an extended reflection on the NYT: critical thinking and critical reading
examples of — and reflection on — rhetorical précis and textual analysis (750-1250 words)
examples of — and your reflection on — your revising process: three drafts with changes, making sure, in the case of your argument/advocacy paper, to bold your best sentence in first draft, so that we can follow it in your second draft and final draft (1250-1500 words)
remix assignment; reflect on the claims (2), definitions (2), and your role(s)
audio essay as an example of multimodality
class participation
critical thinking and perplexity
Reflection
Reflection refers to the iterative process that we engage in when we want to look back at some activity or decision we’ve made, to think about what we’ve learned from it, and how we might use it in the future. Reflection is a powerful tool in teaching and learning — think of it as a dot-connecting mechanism — and outside of academics, reflecting is a common tool among professionals and organizations as a way to establish values, goals, and future actions:
- What did I do?
- What was important about what I did?
- Did I meet my goals?
- When have I done this kind of work before? Where could I use this again?
- Do I see any patterns or relationships in what I did?
- How well did I do? What worked? What do I need to improve?
- What should I do next? What’s my plan?
Those are professional-strength reflection prompts. When it comes to academic writing and your experience in WRD:
- How do you define revision? What steps have you taken this quarter to revise for different audiences and contexts? Provide clearly labeled specific examples.
- To what degree does the target audience, purpose, or context impact the work in your portfolio? Provide clearly labeled specific examples.
- How do you analyze texts (including the work of other students)? How do you define critical reading? Provide clearly labeled specific examples.
- What role(s) has peer review played in your development as a reader, writer and thinker? Provide clearly labeled specific examples.
- What do you consider to be the most important components to your writing process? Why? Has that changed over the course of the quarter?
- How do you edit? How do you manage to ensure correct surface features: syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling? What considerations figure into your editing?
- Beyond the learning outcomes, what individual goals did you have for your reading and writing this term? What have you accomplished that you feel proud of? What would you like to continue to work on?
Types of First Year Writing Portfolios:
- Organized by Learning Outcomes
- Organized by curatorial method
- Organized by your visual and logistical plan