English 120 Portfolio Assignment

Fall 08

Deadline: no later than Dec. 11, 5 pm
Put under my SE 318F office door or in my mailbox

Extra Credit Points possible: 4

The portfolio requirement for this class is mandatory but ungraded, though you may earn up to 4 extra credit points for the cover letter and overall portfolio presentation. I will be turning your completed portfolio over to the English Dept. for a special ongoing assessment project the department has been conducting. The goal being assessed this semester is "Outcome 6: learn to integrate knowledge and ideas in a coherent and meaningful manner."

You must complete the portfolio satisfactorily and in full to pass this course. It's also a good opportunity to think about this class and reflect on what you've been learning.

No portfolios will be accepted after the 11th, except with documented evidence of serious hardship or illness.

For help in compiling your portfolio, consult chapter 4 in Call to Write for some general advice on writing letters, and consult Chapter 23 for a general discussion of portfolios.

Instructions

CHECKLIST: What to Include in the Portfolio (in this order) :

_____Table of Contents with project titles, genre types, and page numbers

_____Reflective letter (2-4 pages; at least 3 would be best)

_____3 of the genres (final drafts) you wrote for this class

_____Section dividers to make it easy to turn back and forth from one document to another

_____At least 15 pages of writing (since some of your work may be electonic--as in Power Point--you may need to use your own judgement about

what "15 pages" means).

_____An unsealed manila envelope enclosing all items

_____The following on the front of the envelope:

_____Your name LIGHTLY penciled; this will later be removed

_____Your ID# in pen

_____English 120, Fall 08 Assessment, Sec. #53 in pen

_____Do not include your name or your instructor's name on any of your individual projects. Do include the course name on each project.

Note: if Project #2 was electronic, copy it to a CD—do not use a flash drive. (Consult the Technology Learning Center at ITS if you need help with this.) If your project was a webpage, you can simply type the title and web address on a sheet of paper with the project title and the project #.

The Reflective Letter

Include in the envelope a 2-4 page typed and double-spaced reflective letter to the English department. Most of the portfolio extra credit points will come from this letter, depending on how thorough, thoughtful, well-developed, and well-edited/proofread it is.

• Address this letter to "Portfolio Readers.” E.g., "Dear Portfolio Readers."
  
• Use conventional letter format, appropriate for a formal letter. (Consult chapter 4 in Call to Write for some general advice on writing letters.) Do NOT include your name and address, but DO include the addressee's name and address where it would normally go, like so:

Portfolio Readers
Dept. of English
NDSU
Fargo, ND 58105

• Write clearly and effectively to your anonymous English dept. readers who have been teaching a course with the same goals as this course. They will not be writing on your work, nor even looking at each paper in great detail, but they will be trying to assess how well you have met General Education goal #6: "learn to integrate knowledge and ideas in a coherent and meaningful manner." They will also be looking to see how well you can reflect on your own writing—the reflective cover letter is a test of your ability to write effectively in a specific genre, for a very specific audience and situation. Please reflect on the following three points.

1. Explain to what extent your portfolio demonstrates your ability to "learn to integrate knowledge and ideas in a coherent and meaningful manner." Please make specific reference to the work included in this portfolio, explaining to what extent you understood how the generic conventions influenced your writing, how you adapted your style or content for a particular type of reader, or how you responded to a particular situation or context in your writing. You might also identify how feedback from your instructor indicated that you were working effectively in particular genres, addressing specific audiences, or effectively responding to a situation or context.
   
2. Identify two strengths you see in your writing. Try to illustrate those strengths by referring to specific writing samples in your portfolio, and/or by describing your process for composing one or two of the pieces in your portfolio.
   
3. Identify two aspects of your writing you need to keep working on. Explain what you have done to try and improve on these points during the course of this semester, and explain what you think you will need to keep doing in future writing courses. Although you may perceive surface-level improvements as the key to improving your writing, please identify no more than one surface-level improvement you would like to make, and identify at least one rhetorical skill (understanding a genre, a style, how to address an audience, how to do research, etc.).

 Your cover letter is just as important a document as the other three items in your portfolio. Being able to represent your work effectively is an important skill—the portfolio cover letter is excellent practice for job application cover letters, graduate school application letters, or annual performance reports. In a nutshell, the keys are:

• support your claims with specific and concrete examples.
• use the language of the course to make your points.
• draft, revise, edit, and proofread your letter carefully.

What Does GE Outcome #6 Actually Mean?

General Education Outcome #6 is "learn to integrate knowledge and ideas in a coherent and meaningful manner." In some ways, that is what we've been doing all semester in this class.

When you discussed a documentary for Project #1, you were integrating examples and other information from the film into your essay as you analyzed it. You had to integrate such ideas as "rhetorical situation," "issues of substantiation, evaluation, and policy," and of course "ethos," "logos," and "pathos" intor your analysis.

When you put together your visual document for Project #2, you integrated research sources through quotations and paraphrases with in-text citations and a Work Cited page. You had to make that source material fit into your writing smoothly, coherently, and meaningfully, and in a way which supported the claims you were making. You were integrating knowledge for the purposes of persuasion.

For your final project, you are integrating information, quotations, and ideas from Rule of the Bone into your work. The review option, the literary analysis option, and the political letter option all require that you smoothly, logically, and usefully incorporate material from or ideas about the book into your argument.

Even the worksheets you completed throughout the term, as well as the in-class discussions we had, both in large groups and small, all required you to integrate knowledge from what you reading, or even from your own life.

Purpose of the Portfolio

To help your instructor assess how well our course goals are being met, and to assist the English department in its ongoing assessment of our composition program.

An additional, very important purpose: the portfolio is an excellent resource for your personal future use. It is something you can show to your next writing instructor, capstone instructor, or advisor. It provides a tangible record of your work, prompts the kind of reflection which can lead to deep learning, acts as a guide for improving, and becomes a possible resource when applying for jobs or graduate school. And you can use it, finally, to track your own development as a writer—you'll be surprised by how much you change over the years!

Audience for the Portfolio

Any and all instructors and administrators of College Composition II in the NDSU English department.

Evaluation Criteria for the Portfolio (extra credit)

• The portfolio should include the items listed above.
• The portfolio should be neat and well-organized, as described above.
• The reflective letter should be properly formatted, well-edited for clarity and concision, and proofed for surface errors. It should show deep reflection on the points detailed above, with good attention to the needs and expectations of its audience.

If you have trouble developing your letter fully, consider the following:

1. Which is your strongest piece of writing? Why?
2. Which is the weakest piece of writing that made it into the portfolio? If you were to revise that piece to make it stronger, how would you revise it?
3. How has one piece of your writing in this class improved since the first draft stage? Be specific.
4. Considering two pieces written in very different genres, how did you adjust any of the following—organization, style, content, page design, tone, or conventions—to fit the genres?
5. Considering 2 pieces written for different audiences, how did you adjust genre, style, content, tone, and/or conventions to fit those audiences?
6. Talk about how you used sources (field or textual) to write one of these pieces. Explain how you chose which sources to use or how you decided to integrate those sources, how they supported the points you were trying to make.
7. Returning to the goals you set for yourself in the first week of class: how does the portfolio represent your work toward those goals?

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