The Global University

WR098Kim Spring 2015

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline [...]. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

--David Foster Wallace

Final portfolio

Purpose: This final assignment invites you to engage in the reflective process of organizing your work into a final portfolio. It asks you to document, assess, and reflect on your growth as a thinker, reader, and writer over the course of the semester. The process of creating the portfolio is itself a learning experience. In documenting and reflecting upon your work, you will come to a better understanding of what you have learned in the course, increasing the likelihood that you will be able to transfer it to other contexts.

Assignment: Create a Digication portfolio that documents your growth as a thinker, reader, and writer over the course of the semester. The specific contents and organization of your portfolio are largely up to you, but your portfolio must have at least the following elements:

1. Introductory Essay: In an essay of at least 700 words, assess and reflect on your growth as a thinker, reader, and writer over the course of the semester. Among the things it does, your essay should address your progress toward the course goals outlined in the syllabus and toward the personal goals you established for yourself at the beginning of the semester in your self-assessment. Like the other papers you have written for this class, your introductory essay should make an argument. The claims you make in your introduction should be supported with specific evidence drawn from your work over the course of the semester.

2. Exhibits: An exhibit, in this context, means anything you might include in your portfolio. At a minimum, your portfolio should include the following exhibits:

· Your self-assessment from the beginning of the semester

· The final version of paper 3

· At least three additional exhibits (drafts, exercises, notes, photographs, etc.) with captions explaining their significance

Your exhibits should be organized coherently into sections, pages, and modules. Each exhibit in your portfolio should be in its own Digication module and a clear, descriptive title (e.g., not “In-class Exercise 2” but “In-class Exercise 5: Ashoke’s death in The Namesake ”; not “Paper 2” but “Paper 2: Home as Anchor in Pico Iyer’s ‘The Burning House’ and Barbara Ehrenreich’s ‘Cultural Baggage’”) You can think of your exhibits as an archive of material that supports the argument you make in your introductory essay.

Grading: Your final portfolio is worth 10% of your final grade. In grading the portfolio, I will not reevaluate work that has already been graded. Rather, your grade will be based on the quality of your portfolio as a whole, with particular emphasis on the introductory essay.

Comments: Here are some observations and suggestions that will help you produce strong, meaningful portfolios.

Own your portfolio: A significant body of research in the psychology of learning indicates that when students reflect on their work, they learn it more deeply and are more able to transfer what they learn to other contexts. To get this benefit, you have to make your portfolio your own. Use this assignment as an opportunity to take stock of your progress over the course of the semester. Don’t settle for a perfunctory, cookie-cutter portfolio. Push yourself. Raise and address hard questions about your work, the course, yourself.

Be thoughtful in selecting and arranging your exhibits: To create your portfolio, you must collect your papers and other exhibits (you have been doing this all semester), select the ones you wish to include in your portfolio, and reflect in your introduction and captions on their significance. There are many sorts of exhibits you might include: homework exercises, in-class writing (which can be scanned), worksheets, comments from me or from your peers, comments you wrote in response to the writing of others, tutorial feedback forms, revision cover notes, email exchanges, source materials (video, pdf files, websites, cartoons), “before-and-after” samples demonstrating revision, etc. Note that not all of these exhibits are strictly textual. For instance, a photograph of an idea map could be a great exhibit to include. You should choose those that best support the argument you make in your introductory essay.

You must include at least three exhibits in addition to your self-assessment, your final paper, and your introductory essay, but it is fine to include more. What matters is the thoughtfulness of your selections and their arrangement.

Introductory essay: Although your introduction is about you and your writing, it should not read like a private journal entry. It should be an academic argument, like the other papers you have written for this class. The difference, of course, is that in your introduction you will develop an argument about your own writing. However, good portfolio introductions, like good papers, advance precise and compelling claims and support those claims with well-framed and well-presented evidence or exhibits. Think of the introduction as an essay that presents your portfolio publicly to your peers and to your teachers. This essay may contain discrete sections. Think of the rest of your portfolio as an archive of evidence that you will use in support of the arguments put forward in the introductory essay. Refer to the various pieces of evidence from the archival portion of the portfolio in the introductory essay. Guide the reader to them. You can also engage in acknowledgement and response. You can respond to comments I gave you over the course of the semester, to feedback from another student, even to your own self-assessment from the beginning of the semester.

Explore and reflect: I encourage you to take some risks in your portfolio: to explore, reflect, speculate, imagine. Often the best portfolio introductions, like the best essays, are those that show a writer working out an idea or working toward an insight as the introduction progresses.

Approaches: Here are some prompts to stimulate your thinking:

· How do you go about generating a topic and question? How do you come up with your ideas?

· How has your writing process changed or evolved? How do you plan your papers? How do you go about revising?

· In what ways has your awareness of your audience or reader evolved or changed?

· Have you experienced any epiphanies—“aha” moments—about your writing? If so, what were they?

· What is the relationship between your reading and your writing? Has your approach to reading changed over the course of the semester?

· What aspects of writing are most difficult for you? Have these changed since the beginning of the semester?

· If you could do one or more of your papers over again, what would you do differently? Why?

· Reflect on the goals you set for yourself in your self-study. Did you achieve them? Were they the right goals?

· What goals do you want to set for yourself in WR 100?

· How do you use advice and feedback from others?

· Are you using things you’ve learned in WR 098 in your other classes? What? How?

· What have you learned or learned how to do that surprises you?

In your introductory essay, you may respond to some of these, or you may develop an approach of your own!