Curating a Writing Portfolio
Instructor Guide
Created in partnership between the University Writing Program, the University Libraries Digital Literacy Initiative, and TLOS, this module ("learning session") introduces the rhetorics, practices, and habits of mind that make for effective curation and presentation of writing portfolios. This session is designed to take about 50 minutes and includes 3 short videos and 5 informal writing activities. The session concludes with a discussion post as the final deliverable.
Learning Outcomes
Upon completing this learning session, students should be able to do the following:
Practice four processes of curating a writing portfolio
Choose artifacts that support a portfolio’s rhetorical purpose
Initiate good habits for managing artifacts, folders, and drives
How to Use This Learning Session
This learning session was designed with potential connections to the ENGL 1105 & ENGL1106 Invention Portfolio assignment in mind, but could be used throughout or other writing or Discourse courses.
The design of this session allows for students to complete most learning activities asynchronously, including thinking ahead for their upcoming portfolio assignments, exploring examples of learning portfolios and showcase portfolios, and taking stock of their file management habits.
The session is designed for students' informal writing responses to be private and ungraded; such opportunities are valuable for engaging students in earnest reflection and metacognition. Moreover, letting students choose the material conditions of their own writing space (e.g. handwriting in a personal notebook or typing in their preferred notes app or word processor) promotes agency in their literacy development.
Recommended Follow-Up Activity (15–20 minutes)
As an extension of this learning session, the student portfolio examples from Activity #3 can be supplemented or replaced with more relevant examples of student work collected in your own course or program. For additional tailoring to your particular course, you can also lead students in a discussion of the second video "Writing Portfolios for Self Discovery vs. Self Presentation," noting the rhetorical differences between learning portfolios and showcase portfolios, then facilitate the activity below.
Activity: Planning Ahead for Your Writing Portfolio
Take stock of the projects you've completed so far in this course (or, alternately, other academic or personal writing, art, engineering, or design projects). Consider the artifacts you created for these projects, which may include brainstorming work such as maps, sketches, outlines; multiple stages of drafting and revision; peer review comments given and received; instructor comments; final drafts; reflective writing such as cover letters; reading and lecture notes; and so on. Access your writing space. Spend about 5 minutes writing a response to the following prompt:
Of these project-related artifacts, which ones would you include for each of the following scenarios? How might your approaches to these scenarios differ? Describe your reasoning.
Scenario A: Document your own learning and writing processes to a friendly group of peers and an instructor/trusted mentor. Your goal is to reflect on what you learned, how you learned it, and how you've developed over the course of the project(s), then share your key takeaways with others in your learning community.
Scenario B: Showcase your work to a group of potential employers or clients interested in your writing or other project work. Your goal is to represent the knowledge and skills you have to offer and to provide evidence of your abilities or qualifications.
Scholarly Context (Optional Further Reading for Instructors)
The Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” lists metacognition—the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge—among the essential habits of mind that make for successful learning. Writing scholars have recognized writing portfolios as effective pedagogical tools for engaging students in metacognition and reflective practice as part of writerly development (Hamo-Lyons and Condon 2000; Johnson et al. 2010). To promote metacognition, students should receive formative feedback with the opportunity to revise and reflect afterwards as part of their writing portfolios (Bader et al. 2019; López-Pastor and Sicilia-Camacho 2015).
In addition to offering guidance and outcomes for implementing portfolios into writing program curricula, the Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) "Principles and Practices in Electronic Portfolios" provides the following principles of writing portfolio pedagogy, which underlie and inform this learning session's content:
Digital Environments: "Students develop digital literacies in composing, collaboration, and records-keeping, and consider the rhetorical implications of circulating e-portfolios to both public and private audiences."
Virtual Identities: "Students represent themselves through personalized information that conveys a web-savvy and deliberately constructed ethos for various uses of the e-portfolio. Students manage those identities by having control over artifacts and who sees them through privacy and access tools."
Authentic Audiences: "Students engage in audience analysis of who they intend to read their e-portfolios, not only to accommodate faculty, but also employers, issuers of credentials, family, friends, and other readers. Students coordinate access to their e-portfolios with faculty, programs, the institution, and other readers."
Reflection and E-portfolio Pedagogy: "Students create 'reflective artifacts' in which they identify and evaluate the different kinds of learning that their e-portfolios represent. In particular, students may explain how various forms of instructive feedback (from faculty, Writing Centers, peers, and other readers) have influenced the composition and revision of their various e-portfolio artifacts, making teaching methods and learning contexts more transparent to their readers."
While the above principles emphasize digital portfolios, this learning session is applicable to portfolios in other formats insofar as it focuses not on digital tools or design, but rather on the metacognitive processes of curation and on the rhetorical nature of portfolios as multimodal compositions developed for particular purposes and audiences.
Works Cited
Association of American Colleges & Universities. "ePortfolios." AACU, https://www.aacu.org/eportfolios
Bader, Monika, Tony Burner, Sarah Hoem Iversen, and Zoltan Varga. “Student Perspectives on Formative Feedback as Part of Writing Portfolios.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, vol. 44, no. 7, 2019, pp. 1017–1028, https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1564811.
Conference of College Composition & Communication. "Principles and Practices in Electronic Portfolios." NCTE, Mar. 2015, https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/electronicportfolios.
Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and National Writing Project. "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (2011)." CWPA, 17 Jul. 2019, https://wpacouncil.org/aws/CWPA/pt/sd/news_article/242845/_PARENT/layout_details/false
Hamp-Lyons, Liz and William Condon. Assessing the Portfolio: Principles for Practice, Theory and Research. Hampton Press, 2000.
Johnson, Ruth S., J. Sabrina Mims-Cox, and Adelaide Doyle-Nichols. Developing Portfolios in Education: A Guide to Reflection, Inquiry, and Assessment. SAGE Publications, 2010.
Lopez-Pastor, Victor and Alvaro Sicilia-Camacho. “Formative and Shared Assessment in Higher Education: Lessons Learned and Challenges for the Future.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, vol. 42, no. 1, 2017, pp. 77–97, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2015.1083535.
Additional Resources
The Association of American Colleges and Universities ePortfolio site provides resources for learning, assessment, and professional development portfolios, including a repository of student work and the following research publications and databases: