Reflective Introduction

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Final ePortfolio

Logistical Matters: To submit your ePortfolio please make it publicly viewable. (We will talk

about how to enable the publicly viewable option.)

I. Its Contents

A. The Basics

Required Elements:

➢ Reflective Introduction (1300 words minimum, multimodal) ➢ Week 1 Self-Assessment ➢ Contexts Project, Graded Version (with or without final grade and comments) ➢ Advocacy Project, Graded Version

While the required elements will give a basic shape to your ePortfolio, the specific details of its

organization are yours to construct. Think of your portfolio as a growing archive that will

become full of interesting pieces of evidence as the quarter progresses. You will quickly

accumulate artifacts that document your learning. Some of these artifacts will become

particularly meaningful. Use them—things like drafts, instructor or peer comments,

organizational notes, before and after versions of sentences and paragraphs, final versions of

your compositions, for example—to document the work you have done, demonstrate your

role in your learning, and articulate your intellectual strategies as they pertain to college

level rhetoric, composition, and communication.

Be creative and attentive when making choices about organizing the sections and pages in your

portfolio. For example, are the compositions going to serve as major organizational elements by

following the reflective introduction in sequential order? Or, are you going to place the

compositions and other examples of your best writing together in one “Showcase Writing

Section” and organize the other elements of your portfolio in a different manner, along thematic

lines, (“Revision Strategies,” “Productive Mistakes”), or in terms of notable developments in

your writing (“My Breakthroughs”)?

B. Reflective Introduction (1300 words minimum)

This document introduces you as a college-level writer, thinker, and communicator to a

community of your peers. Its fundamental purpose is to illustrate the role you have played in

your learning over the course of the quarter in 39C. You take responsibility for the quality of

your work in this document (and in your ePortfolio) by assessing your performance. The

reflective introduction is an analytically incisive, multi-modal composition that delivers

balanced arguments about your learning and supports them with carefully selected pieces

of evidence.

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Guiding Suggestions for Writing the Reflective Introduction

➢ The reflective introduction should be an analytically rigorous multimodal composition that documents the rich textures of your learning this quarter and perhaps throughout the WR39

sequence of courses (39A, 39B, and 39C).

➢ Think of the rest of your ePortfolio as an archive of evidence that you will use in support of the arguments put forward in the introduction.

➢ Refer to the various pieces of evidence from the archival portion of the portfolio in the introduction. Guide the reader to them and clearly explain your artifacts.

The reflective introduction should address and analyze your learning in the following four

areas:

1. Transferring What You Know

Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find

useful.

➢ Now that you are at the end of 39C (and the Lower Division Writing Requirement), take a look back to where you were at the beginning of the quarter, or even at the beginning of your

college-writing experience, and analyze how your practices and habits of researching,

writing, and organizing have changed and evolved. You might consult your Week 1 Self-

Assessment to get you started.

➢ How have your experiences in your writing classes at UCI influenced your personal history as a writer in academic contexts? Has the WR39 series of courses and 39C in particular

influenced your ability to make effective choices about how to approach writing assignments

in other classes? Assignments such as lab reports, business memos, blue book exams, short

response papers, and any other examples of writing you have been assigned in here at UCI?

In other words, have you applied what you learned in the WR 39 series to writing

assignments in other classes? Have other classes and assignments influenced your writing

process; if so, which ones? Please explain using specific examples.

➢ Are you using a variety of different strategies to approach your writing assignments in all of your classes? Are you using the same strategies in different contexts as you consider the

demands of different situations and assignments? If so, please explain such situations and

assignments, and give examples.

➢ Over the course of this quarter, while you were in WR39C, did you bring any of the strategies you were learning in 39C into the other classes you were taking this quarter to help

you with writing assignments in these other classes? Please explain, and use examples.

➢ Did you bring strategies you learned in your other classes this quarter into 39C? Please explain, and use examples.

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2. Your Composing Process

Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find

useful.

➢ Your Writing Process: Describe the central strategies of your writing process. When and how did you learn them? How have they changed over time and what experiences have been most

influential to you? How do you expect to use them in WR39C? Explain and use examples.

➢ Have you experienced moments when the light bulb suddenly illuminated? Can you explain why and how this happened?

➢ Explain what you have learned about the process of generating a research-based composition.

➢ What have you learned about arranging the elements of your compositions? Have you become more skillful and able to control your presentation of evidence and integrate various

pieces of evidence into a coherent and meaningful argument?

➢ How did conducting research all throughout the drafting process help you to make decisions about the organizational logic of your compositions? In what ways, specifically, did you

formulate and reformulate research strategies, framing questions, and guiding

claims/arguments by using research?

➢ Did you carefully select multimodal pieces of evidence? Why did you choose such examples? Did making your argument visible by using multimodality help you to clarify

your thesis?

➢ Explain how your process of writing drafts, source evaluations, and annotations evolved over the course of the quarter. Did you become more effective at pre-writing tasks?

3. Rhetoric, Argumentation, & Multi-modal Communication

Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find

useful.

➢ What have you learned about argumentation and persuasion through the process of generating two multi-modal compositions?

➢ Explain how creating a multi-modal composition helped you to articulate your arguments and understand your ethos as the author.

➢ How did conducting research all throughout the drafting process help you to make decisions about the organizational logic of your compositions? In what ways, specifically, did you

formulate and reformulate research strategies, framing questions, and guiding

claims/arguments by using research?

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➢ Did you carefully select multimodal pieces of evidence? Why did you choose such examples? Did making your argument visible by using multimodality help you to clarify

your thesis?

➢ Can you explain how you arrived at the solutions you chose to analyze in your advocacy composition?

➢ Was there a specific moment when your thesis became clear to you, when the light bulb illuminated, and can you explain what you did to arrive at such a moment of clear insight?

➢ Did using multimodal elements help you figure out how to arrange your evidence and deliver your argument in a well-put together narrative?

➢ Explain and demonstrate why and how you used various arguments and counter-arguments and numerous and different sources to strengthen your claims.

4. Revision

Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find

useful.

➢ Explain your process of revision. How big of a role does revision play in your process of generating and discovering arguments?

➢ Explain how you benefitted from feedback from your teacher and from your peers both in workshops and in office hours. How do you respond to criticism? What sort of critic are you

becoming? Use examples of feedback you received on your work-in-progress, your final

versions, and in workshops, as well as advice you gave to your peers to address these

questions.

➢ Analyze how you benefit from writing multiple drafts in terms of argumentative presentation, evidentiary support, and narrative development.

➢ Explain and analyze the types of revisions that benefit you. Do you make broad, conceptual revisions? Do you make structural revisions and reorganize paragraphs? Do you rewrite

sentences? Do you make fine word choices? Do you alter your body of evidence through

research or omission?

C. Supporting Materials

1. Selections & Selecting

Your portfolio should be populated by numerous artifacts. All of the “process” work you do will

generate artifacts; put them into your portfolio as you go along, knowing that you will continue

to organize and reorganize it over the course of the quarter. But select the most meaningful

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artifacts carefully, and write detailed captions for them so that whoever views your ePort

understands your reasons for choosing a specific piece of evidence.

Possible Artifacts:

➢ Examples of your best writing ➢ “Before-and-After” examples of writing you revised ➢ Source evaluations and annotations ➢ Research proposals ➢ Examples of your writing from other classes in comparison to the writing for your WR 39C

course

➢ Instructor & Peer feedback ➢ Cellphone pictures of your notetaking strategies, diagrams of your arguments, or other things

that represent you and your learning.

➢ Your source materials: video, pdf files, websites, cartoons, etcetera and so forth ➢ What else might you select?

II. Portfolio Grade (20% of Final Course Grade)

A. Grading Method: Reflective Introduction, Captions & Artifacts, and Organization &

Creativity

➢ The grade for the reflective introduction establishes the base grade for the portfolio. ➢ The quality of the captions for numerous artifacts, and the clarity and creativity of the

portfolio’s organization may move the base grade up or down, in increments of 1/3, by one

full letter grade. For example, suppose you write a good reflective introduction and receive

the grade of B on it, but you submit a very well organized portfolio with detailed captions

that explain handfuls of artifacts in meaningful ways. Your overall grade for the portfolio

may move up by 1/3, and you would receive the grade of B+ for the portfolio. Suppose you

get a B on your reflective introduction but submit an excellent ePortfolio, one that’s

meticulous in its organization and is bursting with artifacts and detailed captions. Your grade

may go up by 2/3, and you would then receive the grade of A- on the final ePortfolio.

➢ There may be no adjustment of the base grade if the other aspects of the ePort are similar in quality to the reflective introduction.

Guiding Questions for the Instructor:

➢ What is the overall quality of the reflective introduction in terms of argumentation? Are the arguments well supported by multimodal evidence? Are the arguments substantive and

supported by artifacts? Are the arguments convincing?

➢ Has the student made persuasive arguments about his or her learning in the four specified areas in the reflective introduction and throughout the portfolio?

➢ Are there enough artifacts to substantiate the arguments? Are the captions useful and well detailed?

➢ Is the portfolio well organized? Is it creatively organized? ➢ Are there typos, grammatical glitches, and other surface-level hitches?