Early Thoughts on the Fall Eportfolio

I'm trying to create a model of the eportfolio design I want for my fall Composition I classes in our active learning classroom, something around which the theory and the research I've read this summer can coalesce and allow me to see more clearly how it might work. As an eportfolio design, the model needs to encourage the students' metacognition, analysis, and synthesis. As a first semester, freshman composition class it should strive for our student learning objectives of critical and analytical reading, effective writing, informed and engaged citizenship, and an appreciation of diversity. And since I'm teaching it in an active learning environment, I want it to involve student-directed and collaborative activities. Fortunately, some of these goals either overlap or, at least, reinforce each other. My preliminary model has each student analyzing a cultural trend, and though I haven't decided how much, if any, research I want to allow, I know I want the first half of the semester to be driven by inquiry (of both an autobiographical and a sociological kind).

To these ends, I am trying to use the grade rubric feature in Canvas to assist the students in developing a semester long project organized around five major elements: an overview essay, an autobiographical essay, a progress essay, a thesis-driven cultural analysis, and a final reflective essay that also projects where this project might go next if it continued. As of yet I haven't determined how detailed I want the rubrics for the assignment elements to be nor, beyond the rubrics themselves, how I want to manage the grading as an element of the students' feedback.

As for active learning components, I am already planning on creating four narrated PowerPoints to move key lectures out of the classroom and into Canvas: one on common errors of grammar and syntax, one on the thesis, one on transitions, and one on variety of sentence structure and length. The idea here is that the online mini-lectures will address elements that will be included among the grading rubric items. As for in-class, collaborative exercises, I plan on the peer review (and ideally one session for each of the five major elements); the generative interview (where pairs of students, with some guidelines provided from me, will interview each other about their interests to help find topics which they might analyze); the transition story exercise (each group uses a different sort of transition to add an element to a story we compose in class); an audience awareness exercise (whereby each group of students critiques a hypothetical thesis for possible questions and objections); and the opening week carousel exercise that has each group adding to lists of things they were previously taught or had previously assumed about writing.