The purpose of this project is both to allow you to develop a presentation "package" that will represent you as a person with skills and accomplishments and will allow you to reflect on your development as a writer during your undergraduate career. This whole work fulfills the departmental mandate for assessing the progress of majors through the program.

All portfolios will have at least three parts; teaching majors' portfolios will have four parts:

Part I:

This section is where you present a variety of your best works and documents, as follows:

• Approximately 3 to 5 of your best works (these can include creative pieces, but shouldn't be ONLY creative pieces) where you demonstrate what you believe are your best written accomplishments. You should introduce each piece with a short discussion of why you chose it, what strengths you believe it shows, etc.
• At least one piece should be a researched essay with documentation--references and citations in proper format. This selection should not be the same one that appears in your Case Study in the Autobiography.
• A philosophy of education (at least 200 words)

This is a reflective section where you assess your own growth as a writer through a Literacy Autobiography, which will examine your development over your English-major career (most people will use 210 as a starting point) in detail. It will also serve as a "home document" from which to link to example works and passages in a hypertextual presentation mode. The Autobio will serve as the main point of grade evaluation for the portfolio.

Part III:

This consists of the two major projects from the Senior Seminar, the Lit-Lit essay and the Hypertext Critique (of course these will  be added toward the end of the semester).  You should also include your Group Project, but, if that becomes unwieldy because of the size, at least include the part of your Research Project that you were responsible for.

Part IV (Teaching Majors):

Teaching Majors will have an additional section presenting sample lessons that teach writing, reading, and/or literature. At least 3 lessons should be included here, with the possibility of including more if desired.
 

Process

We will follow a loose workshop structure during these first weeks, usually beginning our sessions with instruction or demonstration of computing functions for creating hypertext documents--a look at PowerPoint, MS Word, linking, including outside links, including multimedia, etc. The remainder of many sessions will be open workshops and consultations, so BRING YOUR PORTFOLIO MATERIALS each class session. I recommend that you purchase 2 new 2MB floppy disks at the minimum, and consider purchasing a 100 MB Zip disk, which is more spacious and reliable.

Tyra Pickering will be helping in this project--if you have questions or concerns you may contact Tyra directly by email.