Prompt: What is one assignment you will include in your syllabus assignment that uses collaboration and/or technology and/or other things Yancey, Selfe, Breuch, Bruffee, or Shaughnessey have discussed?

In light of the Kastman Breuch article on post-process pedagogy we read this week and my presentation on Iowa State University’s ISUComm on Wednesday, I want to take this week’s blog to reflect on how we might engage with post-process theories of writing in our first year composition courses.

For those of you who weren’t in class Wednesday, the first year composition program at Iowa State University (ISU) is called ISUComm. Their curriculum revolves around WOVE – Written, Oral, Verbal, Electronic – forms of communication and contains appropriately multimodal assignments. The curriculum is broken up into English 150, taken sometime the first year, and English 250, taken sometime the second year. In addition, students take writing intensive courses throughout their undergraduate coursework, including those courses within their major. English 150 and 250 assignments include: describing an ISU campus place, investigating a campus organization and writing a profile, a visual analysis of a campus building or piece of art, repurposing one of these assignments into a brochure or poster, and tying everything together into a portfolio for a final reflection and assessment.

I’m fond of these assignments as a jumping point (or perhaps “diving” point?) because they encourage students to see communication beyond writing: there is a purpose and an audience in the writing of a paper and in the design of a building and in the creation of a sculpture. It also allows them to apply this knowledge: create a visual document that demonstrates an understanding of this artifact and your own audience and purpose. To me, the most significant of these documents is the portfolio.

Perhaps I’m biased. I created/revised a portfolio for at least three courses as an undergraduate, a portfolio for each job application after graduation, and a portfolio for each graduate program application. One potential graduate program specifically requested my application materials as separate Word documents, so I submitted them as such…in addition to my electronic portfolio. I didn’t just want to hand over my documents to be read in any order with any assumptions of intention; instead, I wanted my application to be read as a narrative, leading reviewers through my materials with brief reflections to situate these documents.

As Breuch says, writing is 1) public, 2) interpretive, and 3) situated. I think that the kind of reflection, intention, and audience awareness that goes into the creation of a portfolio emphasizes all of these post-process features of writing. Weaving together a portfolio not only encourages students to see how they’ve improved as writers, but it allows them to apply newfound knowledge of audience and purpose. Portfolios remind us that writing is public, as these once-private documents go on display; interpretive, as you must guide your reader through an understanding of them in your reflections; and situated, as not each document is appropriate for every portfolio and every purpose. Contemporary portfolios are almost always electronic and therefore necessarily technological. Critically engaged students will design a portfolio with an understanding of at least written, visual, and electronic communication.

Sidenote

I haven’t chosen to discuss it for this blog post, but when I was president of a technical writing student organization and we were holding a call for a social media blogger, we gave only one guideline: It must be one page. From there, you decide what kind of document will best represent your skills. Most submitted one page resumes – good resumes, but not the most creative approach to the task. The person we selected created a one page document that mimicked a social media profile and integrated her qualifications onto the page. I’d love to see what students would do with an open-ended assignment like that.