Portfolio/Reflection Paper
Due: After the break, for sure. As late as possible
Your goal in this assignment is to show me how you’ve progressed over the course of the semester. The purpose here is not to give you a chance to stroke my ego with all the many things you’ve learned, but to provide a way for me to judge your work on your terms, as well as my own. Whatever you want to focus on is fine: Reading, writing, editing, speaking, observing, critical thinking or anything else you feel is appropriate. It is up to you to decide what counts as “progress”. It will benefit you to be informal with this assignment. It should sound more like a letter than an academic paper. You must include the major assignments as part of your portfolio.
You can also include the following, though they are optional:
1. Annotations/Notes from any of our units.
2. In-Class essays; if you want them, I have them.
3. Journal entries
4. Any scrap of paper that is demonstrative of your progress. Look to previous papers in previous classes, if needed.
It might be productive for you to think of the portfolio like a court case. You’ve already accumulated the evidence through your work thus far in the course. The paper will serve the role of lawyer, convincing me that you have done the work and deserve the points for this assignment. You can also think of this assignment as a kind of guided tour of your work, with the reflection letter drawing my attention to noteworthy aspects that I might not have noticed otherwise. In any case, you must link every claim you make back to things that are observable (though not necessarily obvious) in your portfolio. The standard way to do this is to make a claim, pull out examples from your work that support that claim and explain how the excerpt proves the claim you’ve made about your progress. Before and after shots (from your earlier and later drafts, respectively) will be crucial to your success. Give the flabby version, give me the chiseled version, and then show me how the “better” version is an improvement and what this means for you as a person/writer/thinker. (This is definitely the tried-and-true way to succeed at this assignment, but plenty of papers in the past have shown that they are so steeped in the discourse and conversations of the class (by using the terminology, referencing things that they couldn’t possibly have said unless they had been engaged throughout, etc.) that this method seemed rather redundant).
There are many excellent and creative ways that you can approach this assignment, but you’ll probably want to include the following information in some capacity:
1. How has your attitude/feelings toward writing/literature/rhetoric or anything else we’ve studied this semester changed/complicated.
2. What have you learned about your process (i.e. how you work) as a writer/thinker?
3. How has the class changed the way you think about writing, rhetoric, poetry, narrative, film or any of the other numerous things we’ve discussed this semester? Have you come away with some new perspective(s) that you didn’t have before? This is not the same question as number 1; I am asking you to think intellectually here rather than emotionally.
4. If you were able to go back in time and take the class again, what would you have done differently? Why?
5. How will what you’ve learned help you achieve your goals (academic or otherwise)?
But I definitely do not want to see the following:
1. You dwelling pointlessly on how your writing was good enough to begin with. Many of you were excellent from the beginning, but that doesn’t mean that you did not grow in some important way. Your job is to prove to me that you are somehow better/more aware than you were before. As with any paper, do not overstate!
2. Conversely, talking about how terrible you still are. Don’t waste too much time focusing on your shortcomings. Even if you made just a little progress in some minor area(s), call attention to and celebrate that.
3. Not including draft work. Draft work is there to help display all the work that went into the final product.
4. Just telling me that you learned and not how your learning manifests in your work. I am not going to take your word for it!
5. Being overly preoccupied with the content of the course. At this point, I don’t care what you think about any of the readings and assignments you were given. Talk about them, sure, but only if you can connect them back to your own learning.
6. Blaming the fact that you didn’t learn anything on me. Save that for the course evaluations. What I have failed to teach you is probably very real but ultimately irrelevant and unproductive for you as a learner. If you are tempted to go this route, it might be helpful to ask yourself this: What have you taught yourself? How have you used your time wisely? Don’t try and stroke my ego, either. No matter what your attitude is, this assignment is not about me.
7. Making claims about your progress that completely ignores large chunks of the course. You need to be able to show that you have been engaged in all aspects of the course from the beginning.
Rubric
You will receive the first 50 points just for having each of the required assignments in the portfolio. Lacking multiple drafts where I have specified will result in half credit. It cannot hurt to have it all clearly labeled. The other 50 points will come from the reflection paper. Here is a breakdown of the points for the portfolio:
Reflection on Rhetorical Analysis: 10 points
Poetry Project and draft work: 10 points
Drama Project (draft work can’t hurt): 10 points
Narrative Project and draft work: 10 points
Graduation Project, multiple drafts: 10 points
A convincing reflection paper: 50 points
Again, completely leaving out any of these things could mean failure. This is a rough breakdown; I reserve the right to let stellar elements color my interpretation of less stellar elements and vise versa. You don’t want to depend upon my lenience; the smartest and safest thing for you to do is just to use this sheet as a guide and not leave anything out. Leave me no other choice but to give you the full points.
Here is a breakdown for how I will grade the reflection paper. Anything less than 5-6 pages will probably not be developed enough:
50 points: You put in the requisite amount of effort and clearly took a lot from nearly every aspect of the course. Your final products are by no means polished and pretty (except in rare cases), and there is a lot to improve upon, but you’ve definitely stayed focused and taught yourself a lot. How do I know this? Because you’ve backed up your claims with textual evidence.
40 points: An uneven and inconsistent paper. You clearly learned something, maybe even learned a lot, but weren’t as engaged in the work of the class as much as you should have/could have been. Either that, or you were especially engaged in one or two aspects to the detriment of the others. You seem genuine, but many of your claims lack sufficient textual evidence. Not exactly blowing it out of the water, but a respectable grade.
30 points: Crucial aspects of the course were not engaged with or missing altogether. You might have learned something but that “something” is either not evident in your work or couldn’t have emerged from the questions/topics we’ve explored or the conversations that we’ve had. You appeared to just “go through the motions” and your grade reflects that choice.
20 points: All the things that are present in a “C” just to a more embarrassing extent. It appears as if you’ve learned nothing or engaged with only a few tiny aspects of the course work. Either that, or what you did “learn” is so surface level and/or poorly argued that it is likely you knew it to begin with, and this course didn’t exactly help you discover it.
10 points and down: Significant parts were either missing or you didn’t turn in a paper at all.
Alternate route:
I recommend this for people who need to re-write the Graduation paper. However, even those that received high grades on the Graduation paper can opt for this route if they so choose:
Write a reflection letter that focuses only on what you’ve learned from the graduation paper. Be open minded, and you might be surprised by what you discover. You will need to answer the following questions as part of this assignment:
1. What have you learned about writing/research/critical thinking from writing this paper? Give textual examples.
2. How have you applied other concepts/ideas we’ve explored over the course of the semester to this paper? Give textual examples.
3. In what ways is this final paper a “better paper” than what you turned into me the first time? Give textual examples.
Shoot for a good 3-pages here. This is shorter than the other assignment but I’m also limiting what you can say in this version of the reflection paper. Helpful hint: Writing something to the effect of “I’ve learned not to procrastinate” is not going to work.