Summer Plans to Wed Eportfolio and Active Learning in Literature Classes

As over the last several years I have been developing and using active learning strategies in both my composition and literature classes, and more recently I have designed and implemented an eportfolio approach for my core composition classes, what I would like to do now is to design this summer, with the possible goal of implementing it this fall, an eportfolio-based literature class working in an active learning environment, or in short, bringing these designs together in the most effective way. I’ve been pleased with the eportfolio model over the last academic year in my redesign of core composition classes, with their student caps of 25. Those students, working together in the environment of Haley Center active learning classrooms 2213 and 3184/94, have been more inspired to draft, revise, and work collaboratively than I had ever seen them in past traditional settings and formats because their writing projects are scaffolded and given a purpose beyond simple academic exercise. Distributing prompts, assignments, and artifacts through Canvas groups, I have promoted team-based learning geared toward inquiry and problem solving.

I am convinced this eportfolio model should produce similar results in my core literature courses where I have already developed an active learning design. Bringing eportfolio into this active learning literature design would involve the adjustment to larger class sizes as I teach both the regular sized core courses of 30 students and the lecture-sized core courses of 90 students and three Graduate Teaching Assistants. And, whereas in my composition classes, my students worked on individual eportfolios, in my literature classes, I would want my students to collaborate on group eportfolios over the semester, and I would need a flexible design to accommodate different class sizes or even the possibility of different rooms, which, if they are not ideally suited to active learning, could at least be temporarily modified with portable whiteboards, for instance, to provide a space more conducive to active learning.

What I would need to investigate in order to accomplish this course redesign are the best combinations of group sizes and specific themes to most effectively teach analysis, composition, interpretation, cooperation, and presentation. Ideally I would want a design that increased student comprehension, retention, and communication. I would also like the students’ work to not only be a learning experience for each group, but also for the whole class, and I would want a design that could extend beyond the semester to incorporate future classes. For example, if I used WordPress to create and maintain a central site for Dr. Simkins’ Auburn students to share their explorations of literature, its contexts, and its connections with other cultural productions, then I could have each group of students to create its own eportfolio on a very specific theme and link it into the central site, a gallery of texts and other artifacts that would not only engage students in their principle study, but also provide immediate avenues for exploration for those students whose further interests are stirred.

The key would be making the individual portfolio projects specific enough to permit further elaboration by other groups in upcoming classes, but significant enough to meet the SLOs for the course and to produce meaningful learning. (I also have an iPad on loan from the College of Liberal Arts IT staff to investigate its possibilities in this project and I’d also like to experiment to find the best WordPress arrangement for the project.) And since I’m already using Canvas to help me coordinate groups of students and their active learning exercises, I’d like to see where I can expand on that platform, too, to promote this redesign. I hope that working on group eportfolio, sharing their strengths and remedying each other's weaknesses, would better prepare each student to produce their own individual eportfolio before graduation, and I believe it would be another useful strategy for training our graduate teaching assistants who would also be involved with these group projects in the large lecture classes. Frankly, I think this would be a better way to promote our department’s and college’s goals for the students to become better analytical and critical readers, more informed citizens, and also to be more aware of the cultural diversity of this country and the world, and more cognizant of how art and aesthetics may improve their own and others’ lives.