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
Contents
Composing The Reflective Introduction To The Portfolio
Write a reflective essay of 1,000-1,300 words that makes an argument about your work this semester, focusing on the artifacts you chose for your portfolio and the ENGL 1101 Student Learning Outcomes. The essay introduces the portfolio; it also introduces the artifacts that serve as evidence for your argument for your development as a thoughtful communicator. Your reflective essay should contain multimodal elements, including images, screen shots, and/or other media that support your case. However, your reflective essay can’t cover everything you learned in the course. Instead, it should be focused on the most important learning—concepts, strategies, skills, practices, approaches—that you acquired, in relation both to the course outcomes and to your own priorities as a student.
Hint: You may want to think of this essay as a way to help your readers understand and make sense of the work you did this semester and allow them to understand the ways you developed as a communicator.
A successful reflective essay should do the following intellectual work:
- Introduce and analyze evidence from your portfolio in order to make a specific and focused argument about your own intellectual development as a writer and communicator in this course. In determining how you have grown as a communicator, consider the ENGL 1101 student learning outcomes for your course. You may choose to focus on one aspect of the student learning outcomes, or you can write about more than one aspect.
- Articulate the intellectual and communicative priorities of the course as you understand them (see the list of course outcomes on the syllabus and also consider your instructor’s goals concerning the content of your course), especially those related to the composing process.
- Reflect upon your strengths and weaknesses in relation to the stated course outcomes.
- Describe the methods and processes that were the focus of your communicative work in the course.
- Articulate areas and strategies you would like to focus on for continued improvement in English 1102.
- Practice multimodality, including images, screen shots, and/or other media that support your general argument about your growth.
Hint: You should not simply write a paragraph about each topic in this order. Rather, just as you would with any assignment in this course, you should determine what would be the most effective approach given your audience, purpose, argument, and context. In other words, this essay should prove what you have learned not only by analyzing what you have learned in each artifact but also by enacting that knowledge in this essay. (For example, if you say you have learned to better organize your arguments to persuade your audience, your reflective essay should be a well-organized argument that persuades your readers of your competence.)
Example 1 is an ENGL 1102 reflective essay created using Canvas. The essay displays vertically and includes written text and related embedded images. The student-creator used multiple Canvas tools (refer to the technical instructions below for examples) to highlight the multimodal qualities associated with their reflective essay within this portfolio.
Note: Rather than linking you directly to a student portfolio, which contains personally identifiable information such as IDs and names, we have elected to share screenshots with you. These screenshots (best viewed with magnifying features) are meant to give you a glimpse of what previous students have created using Canvas. Remember, each portfolio is an individual creation!
Composing Portfolio Pages for Artifacts 0-3
For Artifact Pages 0-3, include Artifact 0 as well as three different, major artifacts that you produced in your ENGL 1101 course that reflect your development as a written communicator over the course of the semester. You will use Artifact 0 and the other three artifacts as evidence to analyze to support the argument you make in your reflective essay. When choosing your three artifacts, be sure to meet the following requirements.
- All artifacts must emphasize written English.
- One artifact must emphasize communication in more than one mode (written, oral, visual, electronic, and/or nonverbal)
- Two artifacts must have been completed individually, and one artifact must have been completed collaboratively.
- At least one artifact must reflect a substantial revision process. The revision process must be exemplified through process documents, the most common of which are multiple drafts. Other options include brainstorming notes, outlines, proposals, drafts with peer review letters, draft cover letters, video reflections, etc.
- At least one artifact must integrate scholarly sources.
Note that each of your artifacts will likely meet more than one of these requirements. The three artifacts you collect in the portfolio (outside of Artifact 0) must together meet all of the requirements listed above.
Write a one-paragraph introduction (150-200 words) to the artifact that articulates your intellectual process in composing this artifact. Put another way, explain where your ideas came from and the ways they evolved during the course of the project. You should also discuss ways the composing processes (examples: prewriting, outlining, drafting, peer reviewing, revising, editing) affected your intellectual process, and vice versa.
After the introductory paragraph, answer each of the five reflection questions below, composing one to three bullet points in response to each question.
- Goals: What were the main intellectual goals of the assignment? Please situate these goals in terms of the course theme and in terms of the communication strategies you were to learn or practice.
- Argument/Purpose: What is your argument or purpose? How did you make the argument or purpose visible and persuasive in your artifact?
- Audience: Who is the intended audience for your artifact; why is this an appropriate audience? How is your choice of audience reflected in your artifact? How would your approach change for a different audience [professional/potential employers, more general audience, different age,]? Be specific about the potential audience you’re considering.
- Defining Features: What are the defining features of the genre or media that you are using in this project? How do you make use of these features? What changes would you make if it was a [different genre/mode]?. Be specific about the alternate genre you’re considering.
- Ideas for Revision: If you had more time for revision, what would you change and why?
- In a brief paragraph, explain how this project has helped you to develop your composition process. Compared to your process before beginning this project, how will your composition process be different going forward?
Hint: Since the reflection questions are common across all artifact pages and e-Portfolios, you do not need to reproduce each question in full, but instead can use headings like “Goals,” “Argument/Purpose” and “Audience” to label your bullet points.
Example 2 is an ENGL 1102 Artifact page composed in Canvas with an introduction, embedded media, and reflection. This student-creator also used multiple Canvas tools to showcase the multimodal aspects of a specific project, in this case, a picture book detailing scientific concepts created in Dr. Rebekah Fitzsimmons’ Fall 2018 class.
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