Part 1: Overview

ENGL 1101 Portfolio Instructions Navigation

Part 1: Overview | Part 2: Composing Your Portfolio | Part 3: Portfolio Creation Tips

Part 4: Sample Portfolios | Part 5: Using Canvas to Create Your Portfolio

Assignment Summary

For the culminating assignment in English 1101, you will finalize and submit a multimodal reflective portfolio in lieu of a final exam. This portfolio will highlight how you see yourself in your current writing process, allow you to practice multimodal composition, and get you thinking about ways you’ll transfer your learning to other contexts—such as ENGL 1102 and other courses. Your portfolio will offer an argument for your growth as a communicator over the course. In determining how you have grown as a communicator, you will consider the course goals and student learning outcomes for your course. As part of this argument, you will: 

• select evidence to analyze from the body of work you have produced in the course
• provide a context for this evidence
• use the evidence as tools to support and clarify your argument and detail how you see your development moving forward.

This instructional guide for the required reflective portfolio provides information about your portfolio’s rhetorical situation (including audience, purpose, and context) and the contents of the portfolio.

Rhetorical Situation of Portfolio

Purpose

The purpose of the reflective portfolio is to both demonstrate and reflect on how well you have met the outcomes established for English 1101 at Georgia Tech. English 1101 and 1102 both emphasize the composition of research-based arguments through a rigorous, rhetorically sensitive, and reflective process designed to teach the habits of effective communication. This section of English 1101 prioritizes writing as a communication and thinking mode. Each section of 1101 and 1102 may also have additional, theme-specific course outcomes included in your course syllabus.

Audience

While your instructor is the primary audience for your portfolio, your instructor is not the only audience. Secondary audiences for the portfolio include other instructors from the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech;these instructors may read and evaluate your portfolio for programmatic assessment purposes. For this reason, you should assume your audience did not participate in your specific English class but is familiar with Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program.

Note: Programmatic assessment occurs after the semester is over and does not affect your grade, GPA, or record—only your course instructor determines your course grade.

Reflection 

When you explain why you made a change in revising a draft, you are more likely to remember that reason the next time you are faced with a similar composing task. Thus, a reflective portfolio serves multiple purposes for your learning, particularly as you build knowledge of concepts for English 1102, which emphasizes multimodal approaches. Most importantly, the portfolio requires you to reflect about your learning over the course of the semester, a concept called metacognition. Many research studies indicate that this reflection work improves your ability to transfer your strategic knowledge about effective communication practices to other situations—such as other classes and jobs. Careful reflection on your work gives you a chance to continue building your skills. Being able to document your choices and reflect on why you made them is important practice for workplace self-assessments often necessary for review/promotion processes.

In a portfolio, the quality of evidence (what you did) is as important as the reflection (why you did it). Reflection always begins with evidence, but it never ends there. You should identify what you didand why you did it in relationship to specific learning outcomes of the course. For example, if you want to discuss the ways you revised the organization of a paper , you need to explain why you changed the organization. Why is the new organization more effective? How does it respond to the audience or reflect the purpose of your artifact? By answering these questions, you not only demonstrate your engagement in the writing process, but you also demonstrate that you have developed a clearer understanding about the ways in which the sequence of your points might persuade your audience.

Additionally, this portfolio should be seen as another step in advancing your communication skills, as English 1101 and 1102 are sequential. While English 1101 is multimodal and emphasizes the W of WOVEN, English 1102 expands and builds upon what you’ve learned in English 1101 and emphasizes the full range of written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal communication. As such, in concrete ways you will also be tasked with considering how to revise the artifacts in this current portfolio for different genres, modes, and audiences.

Contents of the Portfolio 

In order to demonstrate that you have met the goals of the course, you will compile a portfolio of your best work using the Canvas portfolio application. Your portfolio is a collection of five individual pages that you will create (one for the reflective essay and one for each artifact). Your audiences will be interested in both the quality of the selected artifacts and the quality of your reflections as they consider your portfolio. They are also interested in the process documents (blogs, memos, drafts, feedback, brainstorms, etc.) that you provide in support of your artifacts and reflections. 

Your portfolio must include the following pages:

1. Reflective Introduction to the Portfolio: A page for a 1,000-1,300 word essay that introduces your portfolio and strategically employs multimodal elements to demonstrate to your audience how your communication habits have evolved.
2. Artifact 0: A page for your ENGL 1101 Common First-Week Assignment, which you produced during the first week of class, along with a reflection answering the directed reflection questions about the artifact.
3. Artifacts 1-3: A page for each of three additional artifacts that together best reflect your work and development in the course, along with an introductory paragraph and short written reflections (150-200 words) answering the directed reflection questions for each artifact. These artifacts must be chosen to highlight your development in all WOVEN modes.

Key Takeaway: Strong artifact pages will typically have four components—the artifact, a brief introductory paragraph, the short reflection, and process documents. Adding process documents in support of your artifacts and reflections can help strengthen your overall argument about your development as a communicator.