In 1992, Catherine Lucas, a writing faculty at San Francisco State, suggested that portfolios switch the interests of students and teachers from “the assessment of outcomes” to “the enhancement of performance” and “growth.” Teachers in the 1970s began to ask student writers to collect their work in a portfolio rather than to submit papers for grades so that those students would have a chance to do “reflective evaluation” on their own rather than simply to receive grades or only get feedback from others. (de)composition courses are courses that aim at helping writers grow. The specific goals in the official course outcomes describe the practice of a writer who is aware of their own habits, attitudes, and skills and can assess the way that writing serves specific purposes for specific audiences. I believe that developing a writing portfolio is a tool for pursuing and assessing our pursuit of that goal.

I will ask you to present a collection of your work at the end of the term. I am not collecting student portfolios in order to be fashionable or to rank order the writing that all of my students submit. Moreover, I do not understand your portfolio as just another collection of stuff you have to complete before you graduate. Rather, I see your portfolio as a record your growth and awareness of how what you do as a writer affects what you are able to do as a writer. As a (de)composition teacher, I hope to collect direct evidence of what writers have done as writers and what they think about their work as writers, so I use this assignment to ask you to pause in your work as a student writer for a moment and to develop a document that explains to yourself and others what you have done.

Of course, the writing that you collect in your portfolio does not stand alone as a representation of what you can do and have done as a writer. As the course grading contract indicates, your record also includes class participation and lots of assignments. But the portfolio will play a significant role in documenting your performance in the course. This may be new for you since many students are used to turning in a paper and getting a grade and then going on to write another paper. You will develop over many weeks the work you collect in your portfolio, but that work will not be “graded” until the portfolio has been collected and submitted. The absence of grades on your writing will not mean that you are not going to be challenged and stretched in class. In order to develop your best work for collection, you will need to engage course materials and to take risks.

The Portfolio

A portfolio is a collection of what you can produce using your writing strategies though what strategies you use will likely change during the course. You will have a chance to display a number of texts produced at various points during the term. You will explain how those texts came to be and the sorts of learning that those texts seem to represent. Because you will choose from all of the writing you produce, you will have a chance to select your best work though your selection will need to match the quantitative and qualitative criteria for a portfolio (see Table 1).

Table 1. Portfolio Characteristics

As you work through the course, there are three related activities that you will consistently engage in as you create your portfolio: collection, reflection, selection.

Collection

During the course you will work through a series of assignments ranging from taking notes to writing drafts to revising. You will need to collect all of these materials so that you can draw on them as you create your final portfolio. Doing those assignments completely will make collecting your work straightforward. At the end of the term, you will submit a final portfolio. Please keep in mind the following policies as your gather your work:

• Your portfolio will include finished texts for which you have submitted drafts to your instructor.
• Your portfolio will be submitted by the deadline.

Reflection

Frequently during the course (starting on the first day), you will recall and assess your own practice and attitude as a writer and your growing awareness of alternative practices and attitudes. Toward the end of the course, you will develop an extended reflective piece that will become part of your final portfolio. This document will draw on your evolving awareness of what it means for you to be a writer. You will draw on reflections written during the term to develop this document.

Selection

In the last weeks of the course you will choose from your collected work two texts that seem to illustrate your “best” writing practice. The word “best” is important here. Your best practice will be defined in part by the goals that English faculty have defined for this course as well as those that I have developed for the final evaluation of your work. Best will also describe that work you feel to be most effective at accomplishing one or another purpose or to be most interesting for you and a reader. The work you select (and revise with these goals in mind) along with your final reflective piece will make up your final portfolio.

Final Portfolio Assessment

The texts that you collect will be used in a variety of ways by a variety of readers:

• You will use it to determine your progress toward college outcomes.
• I will review this data to evaluate your overall performance in the class.
• Other English instructors may use your texts anonymously (along with that collected by many other students) to make note of ways that writers are thriving and also to identify areas where writers and instructors need to spend more energy.
• The college may use your texts to assess general student learning in this General Education course.

Your portfolio will be collected and assessed at the end of the term. I will use our rubric for assessing revised texts to determine whether your portfolio is “acceptable” or “in-depth.” I will also offer a holistic evaluation of your portfolio based on the rubric. These assessments, along with your own and your peers’ assessment of your work over the semester will factor into your course grade.

References

Lucas, C. (1992). Introduction: Writing portfolios–changes and challenges. In K. B. Yancey (Ed.), Portfolios in the writing classroom: An introduction. Urbana, IL: NCTE.