Requirements
While the required elements will give a basic shape to your ePortfolio, the specific details of its organization are yours to construct. Think of your portfolio as a growing archive that will become full of interesting pieces of evidence collected over the course of the summer term. Use artifacts—things like drafts, instructor or peer comments, organizational notes, before and after versions of sentences and paragraphs, final versions of your compositions, for example—to document the work you have done, demonstrate your role in your learning, and articulate your intellectual strategies as they pertain to college level rhetoric, composition, and communication.
Be creative and attentive when making choices about organizing the sections and pages in your portfolio. For example, are the compositions going to serve as major organizational elements by following the reflective introduction in sequential order? Or, are you going to place the compositions and other examples of your best writing together in one “Showcase Writing Section” and organize the other elements of your portfolio in a different manner, along thematic lines, (“Revision Strategies,” “Productive Mistakes”), or in terms of notable developments in your writing (“My Breakthroughs”)?
The Final ePortfolio must include the following assignments:
- Reflective Introduction (700-1000 words, multimodal)
- What is Resilience? Discussion Post
- Resilience Journal Entries
- Comparative Essay (final draft)
- Resilience Story Essay(final draft)
- Resilience Story Presentation
The Reflective Introduction
This document introduces you as a college–level writer, thinker, and communicator to a community of your peers. Its fundamental purpose is to illustrate the role you have played in your learning over the course of the quarter in 139W. You take responsibility for the quality of your work in this document (and in your ePortfolio) by assessing your performance. The reflective introduction is an analytically incisive, multi–modal composition that delivers balanced arguments about your learning and supports them with carefully selected pieces of evidence.
Guiding Suggestions for Writing the Reflective Introduction
- The reflective introduction should be an analytically rigorous multimodal composition that documents the rich textures of your learning this quarter.
- Think of the rest of your ePortfolio as an archive of evidence that you will use in support of the arguments put forward in the introduction.
- Refer to the various pieces of evidence from the archival portion of the portfolio in the introduction. Guide the reader to them and clearly explain your artifacts.
The following topics must be addressed in the 700-1000-word Reflective Introduction:
- Transference
- Research & Composition Process
- Revision Process
- Multimodality & Rhetoric
- Resilience
- COVID-19
Of course, as you write about these topics in your Reflective Introduction, you will need to provide plenty of evidence from your writing to support your claims about transference, process, revision, multimodality & rhetoric, resilience, and COVID-19. These topics are broad, so it’s your job to be as specific as possible when talking about them in connection with your writing; the best way to do this is by providing examples from your own writing and video posts to illustrate the points you are making. Review your discussion posts, essay drafts, and all other materials related to the class.
Transference
The first topic, transference, asks you to think about what skills or knowledge you were able apply to your writing in 139W–whether that’s earlier composition courses or classes in other fields, or even things you’ve picked up outside of the classroom. Transference can also mean what you will be able to carry with you from this class to future endeavors (academic, professional, and beyond). Research and writing skills, your understanding of resilience, and presentation strategies are things you can consider when you think about transference.
Research and Composition Process
Considering your process is pretty straightforward. How do you compose a research paper, and how do you do it well? What composition strategies did you develop over the course of your 139W experience? How did you pick a topic and how did you research it? Which databases did you use? How did you start writing the paper? Outline first? Body paragraphs before introductions? Find your sources and write around them or did you find ways to insert your sources into your writing? How much time do you spend researching and writing on your topic(s)? Did you do all of your research first and then devote the rest of your time to writing? Or did you find yourself doing the research while you were writing the essay? These are all process-related questions that you can consider.
Revision
Revision asks you to reflect on your writing after your first draft. How much time and effort do you devote to revision from your first draft to your final draft? What typically needs revising–grammar, content, formatting, sources? How did you benefit (or not) from peer and instructor feedback? How did reading and commenting on the work of your classmates inform the revisions you made? Was there a benefit from writing multiple drafts? Why or why not?
Rhetoric & Multimodality
What did you learn about multimodality and how do you feel about using multimodal elements effects your writing? Did it enhance your writing and make your arguments more credible, captivating, and compelling, or were the multimodal elements confusing and burdensome? What types of multimodal elements did you incorporate in your resilience story essay and presentation, and to what effect? Describe the process of completing this multimodal assignment and your assessment of the finished product.
You can also think about the different rhetorics of resilience that you encountered in the readings and the different rhetorics that you. deployed in the writing assignments
Resilience
In addition to reflecting on your growth as a writer, your should also consider our course theme: resilience. How has your understanding of this term changed over the course of the quarter? Which readings and discussions were the most engaging, informative, and impactful for you? How would you describe your knowledge of and thoughts about resilience now compared to Week 1? Do you see yourself continuing to be engaged in discussions around the topics covered in class?
COVID-19
How did the pandemic impact your ability to learn in this class (and others) this summer? None of you signed up for remote learning last quarter; how has that experience effected your approach to this class? What was lost in distance learning? What was gained? Here are some ways that you can engage with this topic:
- Learning about the pandemic. What was is like to read the news, observe the impact on groups and individuals, and to feel the impact on your own life? How has the pandemic influence your thoughts and feelings about, well, anything and everything?
- Learning with the pandemic. What has it been like to have a pandemic on your mind while trying to complete your coursework throughout the quarter?
- 139W and the pandemic. What has is been like to engage with the discourse of resilience in a time where resilience is desperately needed? Did any of the research and critical thinking skills developed in this course influence how you engaged with information about COVID-19 and navigate the pandemic?
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