Professional Development Session – Friday, November 3, 12:00pm -2pm-
“Including the Non-Traditional Assignment in the Portfolio.”

The new CLOs for ENG12 expand composition by emphasizing practical understanding of rhetorical strategies and genre concepts, including purpose and audience. We may feel encouraged in our teaching to include assignments that go beyond college-type or print-based texts. But students’ opting to include this work in the portfolio may find us hesitating: How can students successfully represent these experiences (visual, sonic, digital, class-presentational, multimodal?) in the portfolio? In what ways can we enlist student self-assessment to show portfolio readers that students are meeting the CLOs through these alternative or non-traditional assignments?

This workshop explored the kinds of assignments instructors have been trying out since the new CLOs were put in place, reflecting new encouragements toward a wider range of genres and forms. Prior to the session, Hope had queried some faculty whom she had heard were using non-traditional activities and genres for the portfolio and created a chart detailing both the non-traditional assignment and how it was represented for portfolio readers. In some cases, the actual assignment was included in the portfolio and students described their experience in creating the assignment in the Self-Reflection. In this way, including the assignment in the portfolio fit the usual pattern of how assignments generally are and have been featured in the portfolio for readers to assess. In other cases, though, the non-traditional assignment was not actually included, or only partially included, and a separate piece of reflection, tailored specifically to the doing of that assignment (and serving as a demonstration of good writing in itself) served as its main representation.

In other words, to answer a question that has seemed to stand in for the quandary of having portfolio readers assess non-traditional assignments in light of the CLOs, the way one might include a podcast, for example, in the portfolio might be to have students do any one or a combination of things, like: include a transcript or transcribed excerpt; write about their planning and difficulties of process, as in choosing their interview subjects or fine-tuning their questions; compare their podcast to another podcast in terms of style or other features, or analyze how the podcast is actually in conversation with another source (whether an article or other podcast) on a closely related topic.

So yes, we found, it’s possible to include a podcast in the portfolio for readers to assess. While some non-traditional assignments come close enough to essays to make a unique and separate meta-commentary (apart from the required Self-Assessment) unnecessary, such as power-points and transcriptions of oral presentations, many other non-traditional assignments might follow the same sort of “writing about” model as we discussed for podcasts. Again, the goal is to critically capture a process and demonstrate the achievement of CLOs to the portfolio readers.

Along the way, as we noted, providing students with options for representing their process opens the door to new genres of reflection.  These include: reports or accompanying essays that describe the questions, planning, surprises, frustrations, and take-aways of their projects; excerpts of projects, such as interviews or oral histories, which students can use as evidence in essays that encompass the topics of those interviews; scripts and explanations for visual projects; and a Reflection Remix in which students input meta-commentary into a second version of their project, such as a flyer, as a kind of self-reflective overwrite on it. (Thank you, Greg, for making us away of this uber-texting of a work’s text and visuals.) Not least, for where students produce two different versions of a project—via two genres–they can compare each for audience, purpose, and other rhetorical elements.