Creating Context and Purpose
Although I always liked writing, college composition classes never appealed to me as an undergraduate, and while the reasons for this may be overdetermined, nevertheless, I'm sure that the ennui of twelve years of public school and the aimlessness of my freshman composition classes were significant factors. Looking back at that education in the previous millennium, I see a series of mindless exercises, handbook recitations, and assignments that were academic in the worst sense of the word. I wrote description, observation, narration, process, and analysis papers and with a dramatic dose of teenage angst, I was incredibly bored and unchallenged. I saw little point to what I was doing and I had no teacher at that moment to help me see beyond my limited young perspective.
When I began years later to teach the classes that had been so cruel to my younger self, I was asked to fall into a similar pattern, albeit, with the forewarning and ability now to create connections between the major assignments and to focus them on the students' interests, but, otherwise, I was still rather limited, and rarely encouraged, to go far beyond this at the institutions where I taught. Try as I might to make the class more appealing to my students, it still resonated less with me than I would have liked.
Now that the gravity of fate has brought my commission to develop eportfolio-based first-year composition into the orbit of my active learning approach, I am seeing interest rise not only among my students but for myself as well. What the context of the eportfolio has done for the class is to create a purpose that binds our work together, and which may even make its value evident beyond the classroom. Let me illustrate this with three specific examples.
As I observed last spring in my composition class before I added the eportfolio, working together in designated groups in an active learning environment on textual analysis, brainstorming, documentation, and even grammar and editing exercises, has clearly helped to build familiarity and trust among the group members. And as I had hoped, even just halfway into this new fall semester I see this familiarity and trust translating into more productive peer interview and peer review sessions. It's difficult enough being critically honest with people whom one hardly knows, but with a small community that one has worked with consistently since the first week, that wall of diffidence and formality seems hardly more than a speed bump.
And then, having established that the students will be assembling their texts into an eportfolio as a final assignment, this should encourage them to revisit my observations and suggestions about their writing in order to revise them for that final graded project. Part of what drains the pedagogue's soul after grading and commenting on so many essays is the thought of how little attention any of that will get, a fear that is sometimes confirmed in the next round of assignments. My strong suspicion is that the eportfolio will incentivize revision for the students and give more purpose to the teacher's efforts.
Moreover, designing both the large and the small assignments in the context of the larger project, still keeping it focused on the students' interests, creates both purpose and consequence for the students' work. We are building a large platform from which the students can discover more about themselves while engaging with the world beyond them. It's certainly easier to discuss context, purpose, and even audience when we can create them in the classroom. Within the limitation of a one semester class, the students are offered an opportunity to shape their own identity and, at least, to nudge their destiny a little in a way that favors them.
