Portfolio

Order Description
NO SOURCES REQUIRED
ALL MY ASSIGNMENTS CAN BE FOUND ON – www.dhariniabbott.com

Format your letter like you would an MLA paper (double-spaced, last name and page number in header), save for a list of works cited, which you don’t need to include. You also don’t need to do parenthetical citations because it’s given that you’re citing your own work. If you’re writing in the “letter genre” (e.g., Dear Assessment Committee), you do not need to include a title, either.

Reflective Portfolio Letter
Develop a letter addressed to the Portfolio Assessment Committee that shows how you’ve achieved the learning outcomes for your first-year composition course. This letter should exhibit and discuss in detail concrete examples from your portfolio. You should write between 750 and 1250 words, not including the exhibits from your portfolio that you reference in the letter.

The Assessment Committee is composed of a number of first-year writing instructors as well as graduate students from across the university who serve as fellows in the Writing Program. Several of these individuals helped create the program learning outcomes and they are excited to see how students have achieved the outcomes.
Possible Approaches
Feel free to use first person and write a narrative of your experience, rather than writing an argumentative essay. You can document your learning for the committee by

Telling a story in which exhibits from your portfolio play major roles.
Exploring each piece of your writing process and the part it plays in producing a final product.
Discussing your failures and how they turned into successes.
Describing your successes and then discussing how you intend to improve in other areas needing further developing.

Artifacts as exhibits within the letter
Back up assertions you make about your learning by including exhibits from your portfolio. Depending on how your instructor has asked you to develop your portfolio, an exhibit might be

A link to the part of a document that you discuss in your reflection letter.
A screen capture with callouts.
A screencast in which you show and talk about one or more artifacts.
Quoted or block quoted material from an artifact.
Reported or quoted feedback from others.
A series of illustrations (or quotations) that show how a particular artifact or part of an artifact evolved.

In every case, you should embed your exhibit in a discussion about its significance for your learning.
Use the Learning Outcomes as Guides for Reflective Writing
The committee will be especially interested to see whether and how you’ve achieved the outcomes listed below. Keep that in mind as you write and try to apply the rhetorical vocabulary that makes up the outcomes in your reflection.

Outcome 1: Rhetorical Composition. Students compose texts in multiple genres, using multiple modes with attention to rhetorical situations.

Description: Through composing a variety of texts and using a number of composing technologies, students demonstrate understanding of audience, purpose, and constraints. They use and adapt generic conventions, including organization, development, and style.

Getting started: Describe your portfolio. Walk the reader/viewer though the works it contains. Describe how these projects allowed you to practice writing for an audience in various ways, emphasizing in your description organization and word choice. Discuss the genres in your portfolio and how those genres speak to the audiences and situations your assignment asked you to address. How many different genres are you including in your portfolio and why? What did you exclude and why?

Outcome 2: Critical Thinking and Reading Resulting in Writing. As they undertake scholarly inquiry and produce their own arguments, students summarize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the ideas of others.

Description: Students may encounter the ideas of others in a variety of texts generated both inside and outside the classroom: print, visual, aural, oral, spatial. Students learn accepted and ethical ways to integrate other texts into their work, rightly handling citation and adaptation. Students use writing as a critical thinking tool.

Getting started: Think about what you have learned this semester in your development as a critical thinker and reader. What new realizations do you have about yourself as a person engaged in inquiry and scholarship? What projects in particular in your portfolio show your growing abilities to craft an argument, read other’s arguments well, and incorporate and challenge ideas from other’s writings. Explain one or two important choices you made in this project and how that work developed you as a critical thinker and reader.

Outcome 3: Writing as Process. Students understand and practice writing as a process, recursively implementing strategies of research, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection.

Description: In learning about their own writing process and doing guided reflective writing about that process, students learn to critique their own and others’ works. They also become aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text.

Getting started: Consider describing the changes in one of the projects included in the portfolio from beginning to end. Did you use techniques that your instructor may have mentioned: outlining, word webs, response paragraphs, and blogging? Did informal kinds of writing find their way into the process such as emailing a professor about an idea, sketching out notes on a napkin at a coffee shop, or talking to a friend about your ideas? Ultimately, your writing process includes each step you take from the coffee shop napkin to an outline to a first draft and eventually, a final product.
Here are some sample exhibits showing revision –
http://www.english.uga.edu/fyc/moran/srivastava/Edit_Profile.pdf