Inspiring college writers with web portfolios.

Abstract

Writers sometimes come to college with attitudinal blocks to their development that an instructor can begin to overcome by listening to what they say about their early pedagogical experiences. One way to make use of this information is to situate their work in a public, Internet-based web ecology; web page portfolios, in fact, have distinct pedagogical advantages over traditional paper portfolios.

Introduction

For some educators, access to computer technology is the sine qua non to teaching people to write well. But technology is now so commonplace that educated people take it for granted--indeed, the early talk of motivating students to write better by using computers has quieted a great deal. The "gee whiz" factor has gone away. Technology by itself no longer motivates students the way it used to, and so instructors are back to looking for what makes people want to write well.

Listening to Students

I began to examine this issue by listening to the people in my classroom in part through on-going surveys of my composition classes first undertaken in the fall of 2003. Each semester I ask writers to complete the survey at the beginning of the course, and it includes questions like "what kind of writing assignments did you have in high school" and "what do you perceive as the goal of college composition courses." I wanted to gather data about what seems an odd discrepancy: although students say they hate writing, they do, in fact, enjoy it under some circumstances. The survey results have not been tested for statistical reliability, but I discovered some alarming anecdotal information. For example, when asked what criteria their high school teachers used to grade their papers, few writers responded with words describing anything like rhetorical effectiveness. Instead, they wrote that they had been graded on "spelling," "grammar," "MLA" style, "length," and most astonishing to me, "format." This evidence that writers have not been graded on rhetorical effectiveness is consistent with the types of assignments they said they had been given, which were mostly narrative (67 percent), informative (88 percent), or creative (92 percent) rather than persuasive and thoughtful. To be fair to high school teachers, for whom I have a tremendous respect, I do not know if the students just misunderstood how they were being assessed. But whatever the reality was of how their papers were graded, their perception of writing assessment is mechanically-centered and error-centered rather than effectiveness-centered or thought-centered. Interestingly, writers in my English Composition I classroom say that on a scale of 1 to 4, they rate their high school preparation for college English at 3.75; at the beginning of English Composition II, this number drops to 2.95. Clearly, writers come to the English Composition I classroom with a different set of expectations from what college instructors might prefer.

In addition to a shallow understanding of what makes a good paper, writers at least sometimes fail to see the relevance of the writing they are asked to do. My own son's experience in high school sophomore English is consistent with what my students tell me. He had a project assigned to him to construct a model hut with sticks and mud so that he could better understand Steinbeck's Pearl. This project was in addition to a paper in which he was asked to find out information about Steinbeck's life from the Internet and present it in a very short paper. My son and I both failed to see how these unchallenging projects would prepare him to join the discourse communities that would become part of his future professional, academic, social, and political life.

Someone can interpret these data in many ways. In high school and on into college, however, many people begin to dislike writing for school, either viewing it as a waste of their time (just something to do for a grade), or, if they receive poor grades over and over again without understanding why, as an especially cruel kind of operant conditioning. They may develop serious anxiety over format or other inconsequential details when they ought to place a higher value on depth or complexity of thinking. After all, what they remember about how their teacher grades, according to my surveys, is mechanical details: M.L.A. format and spelling. Whether high school teachers really grade this way is not important. Students believe these are the criteria. If these young writers' perceptions have any fairness or accuracy to them, a pedagogical reassessment is in order. Rather than compounding the inspirational problems that appear to emerge in young writers, college instructors ought to try to understand and overcome them.

Forces Pulling Writers Away

The factors influencing people early in their writing education are sometimes coupled with another issue that interferes with helping people write well. Jonathan Mauk has recently written about the increasing disintegration of traditional academic space and what he calls the "apparent placelessness" of many new college students and their consequent lack of intellectual investment. The students, he continues, are being "prompted elsewhere, to some other teleological point" unrelated to the traditional experience of living for four years in a community of young scholars. His own surveys of students show that they,

   scheduled classes adjacently, stacked as many possible into short
   spans of time--often leaving only a few minutes to get across
   campus for the next class. An individual course ... only "took
   up" a certain window of time, and the entire college experience
   only "took up" a portion of their day ... The meaning of their
   experience ..., then, was tied to some other place. (3)

My surveys show that writers in my classrooms work an average of twenty hours per week, almost the same as they did in high school. Many have cell phones, car payments, and credit card bills in addition to other living expenses they cannot control. Some even have children and full-time jobs outside of class. Thus an additional motivational problem faces composition instructors especially in non-traditional settings: there is a constant battle to make writers recognize that writing is both a time-consuming activity and one worthy of their time, an idea that seems to have been already undercut by their experience at the high school level. In addition, because writers in my classes have responsibilities like living expenses and increasing tuition costs, they are perhaps more utilitarian in their outlook than earlier generations. College composition instructors, therefore, face a Herculean task: not only must they overcome writers' learned attitudes about writing, but they must also convince them that their courses are worthy of significant time investment.

Re-inspiration through Web Portfolios

In spite of this unfavorable confluence of factors that complicates the task of college writing instruction, what especially strikes me about writers is how easily they forget how difficult writing is. As I watch my writers work on computers, I see them email their friends and happily type away in chat rooms, send instant messages, and increasingly, post comments on blogs. Over the past several years, I have harnessed this energy, this desire to write, through having them build web portfolios of their work, creating, in essence, a magazine about themselves in a networked environment. Web page portfolios are no panacea, but they do overcome, if even in a small way, some of the inspirational blocks college writers may have learned in their earlier courses. Although their enthusiasm is at first tentative, perhaps because they are unfamiliar with making web pages, they soon warm up to the project once they see its expressive potential.

I have found that people in college like to write, a fact that seems to contradict some of what I have just noted about how whatever inspiration they used to have has been taken away. What we are talking about, of course, are two different kinds of writing--the kind I have already talked about that they have learned not to like, written solely for the classroom, and they kind they do like, which usually involves social interaction. I am not saying, of course, that we should only have writers in our classrooms write emails, instant messages, and web logs for a grade, but if we listen to what they say about what they use language for, it becomes easier to inspire them. The academic language we want guide them toward is a form of communication, and if we treat it as an abstract exercise or fail to make clear the why of what we do, we have done the people in our classrooms a disservice. In spite of their early experiences, almost all English Composition I writers I have surveyed since the fall of 2003 agree that there is a link between thinking and writing. They see a real need to enter professional, social, and academic discourse communities, and they are motivated to do so if they believe that their writing answers practical concerns about communication. Writers in my classroom tell me they want a clear rationale for what I ask them to do.

I suggest helping writers overcome the motivational problems associated with their prior experience by getting them to see how the academy's goals are like theirs. If they want to be lawyers, then they have to be able to participate in professional conversations with lawyers; if they want to sell real estate, then they have to be able to communicate with their peers and with buyers. Do not misunderstand: it will certainly benefit them to read Robert Frost or Flannery O'Connor, but assignments to write about literature or write about anything, I think, need to have clear, relevant goals that students understand. Rightly or wrongly, the reality of their lives is that they have increasing demands on their time, and so if we want a slice of that--if we want to further our agenda as composition instructors--we must, as I have noted, explain the "why" of their writing. College writers more than ever need to know the "why" of an assignment before they will be inspired to excel at developing it.

In more abstract terms, Erika Lindemann hints at this same kind of distinction in what she calls "writing as a system," a practice distinct from both product and process pedagogy. She explains that by treating academic writing as part of a larger system, students realize that we,

   live in a culture shaped by language, and language is always a
   form of social interaction. Writing, then, is a way of living in
   social groups, of interacting with others and having them
   interact with us. Though we write to make meaning and discover the
   self, we also write to make a difference in the world. (6)

This approach recognizes that students are already part of discourse communities and shows them how to develop what they know for application in other discourse communities. As Lindemann again notes,

   Assignments in this kind of English 101 course rarely call for
   self-expressive writing; instead, tasks resemble those that
   students encounter in the academy. They usually call for
   referential and persuasive writing because informing and
   persuading members of academic discourse communities (including
   professors) are significant functions of academic literacy. (7)

Basically, college writers already write in order to manipulate and determine their social environment. As instructors, what I am suggesting is that we demystify our goals and prepare them more directly to join the social and professional discourse communities of which they will eventually become a part. We need to inspire the folks in our classrooms, breathe life into their dreams until they can do so entirely on their own.

Keystone Web Portfolios

Instructors might include a whole range of assignments such as literacy narratives, creative expressions, or in-depth literary analyses, but the rhetorical modes and individual paper assignments for this project matter less than the project itself, which situates student writing in a context that is simultaneously public and contingent. The writers in my classes include all of their formal papers as well as a review and a short autobiographical sketch. Like Celeste Diehm, however, I also like to keep the assignment fairly open and encourage students to include pictures, resumes, favorite links, and work for other classes. Although the portfolios that writers in my classroom produce do not rely on deferred assessment, I agree with Bonita Wilcox that portfolios should not be passive "showcases" of a writer's work, but that they should be active, "working" efforts. Even though portfolios must be assessed at some point, the broader audience for this project tends to decouple the assessment of writing from the instructor. Indeed, web portfolios interrogate, as Brian Huot explains, the "unexamined and untheorized ideas that inform our current assessment practices" (164) and address a recurrent problem in the teaching of writing:

   Assessment practices that use grades and teachers' written
   comments as ways to "sort" students or demand mastery of certain
   "skills" outside the context of a specific piece of writing
   remain at odds with a pedagogy that recognizes students' socially
   positioned nature as language users. (164)

The audience-centered focus of this project also helps instill habits of revision based on feedback from peers as well as from self-assessment skills, and the opportunity to revise, C. Beth Burch notes, is one of the "clearest advantage[s] students saw in portfolios" (43). My experience confirms that writers are more likely to revise their work if they see a benefit--hence they get two grades for every paper, a draft grade and a final grade, which rewards the self-assessment process. The web portfolio provides an opportunity for further revision and includes all of the writer's major papers as well as a review, an autobiographical sketch, and other design features such as pictures, favorite links, games, puzzles, and sounds.

Web portfolios access as well what Edward Soja calls "thirdspace," which is a "purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings" and highlights "new ways of thinking about space and social spatiality" (2). Like the web portfolios I assign to my students, thirdspace is a contingent architecture, and electronic technology highlights the spatiality of texts. I call these student portfolios "keystone" portfolios not because I think they should be set in stone but because a keystone is the central point in an arch, something sometimes decorated with carving. The idea I am trying to suggest is that support, centrality, an opportunity for creativity, and most importantly to system pedagogy, the marking of a doorway constructed by the writer to empower him or her to enter the discourse community he or she wants to enter. The "why" of writing becomes easy to see: one learns to write well in order to empower one to live a self-chosen life rather than a life chosen by others. Web portfolios inspire students because the plasticity of the medium mirrors the plasticity of their own destinies.

The creativity of a web portfolio is what fascinates my students. The web portfolio reinforces the idea I have already planted that argument papers, research papers, literary analysis papers, and other college-level writing assignments are creative and communicative endeavors rather than dry academic products. The portfolios, rather than "stored" like a project, provide the basis for an ongoing revision, and the very medium suggests a continuing conversation ("this site last updated on ..."; "you are visitor number ...") and a site of economic, political, and personal exchange rather than a fixed product. Assessment should do more than show where a writer has been; it should show writers where they are now compared to where they should be if they want to reach their goals. Indeed, writers who have enrolled in my English Composition I class sometimes take their entire portfolio and revise it again as part of their English Composition II portfolio.

In addition, web portfolios give writers long-term benefits that other portfolios do not. They are not retrospective and passive, but active and forward-looking, suggestive of conversation, change, and an entire ecology rather than a single position or a place. Web portfolios allow young writers to make a connection between self-expression and a public audience, a link that my surveys indicate college writers increasingly demand. Learning how to create a web page helps writers see their work as part of an on-going conversation about the world because it is part of the world. Web portfolios create a gateway for them to enter into the world of academic and professional discourse because by publishing their work they rehearse some of the skills they will use in other discourse communities.

One of the issues with asking writers to create web portfolios in the classroom is that many instructors either do not see this technology as especially relevant to their pedagogy, or, like the writers in their classrooms, they are simply intimidated by it. I think, though, that any kind of project is relevant to someone's pedagogy if it inspires people to write well, and it is not a distraction from the goal of passing on critical self-assessment abilities to developing writers. In addition, my experience has been that writers are very forgiving of teachers who do not know something as long as they are honest about it. When I first started giving this assignment, I had very little idea what I was doing, but I wanted my classes to write in the kind of technological environment I thought they would be writing in after they left my classroom.

Some writers, moreover, appear intimidated by web portfolios. Only about ten percent of the people in my classrooms have ever created a web page before, and many want to use Yahoo Page Builder or some other server or Internet-based program. My first step is to calm their fears and show them in a computer lab how easy it is to use a program like Microsoft FrontPage or Netscape Composer. (Netscape Composer is part of Netscape 7.2, a browser available as a free download.) Their initial intimidation begins to turn to enthusiasm for the project as they master basic skills like inserting pictures, creating links, and developing an overall theme. Later, they revise their papers and link them to the pages, creating a network about themselves and their work. Within one or two class periods, writers come to my office with questions, and this project provides an opportunity for me to work one-on-one with each student both on their page and on their revisions. The ability to build a web page has the additional benefit of being a skill that many of their friends might not have, and it is a new one they are inspired to show off.

Conclusion

An approach like this one does not use technology for its own sake or merely justify the existence of a computer lab, and it is certainly no panacea for overcoming past writing problems. No technology can magically overcome a lack of effort or a poor basic education. Web portfolios simply help writers see the relevance of their work and harness their desire to participate in conversations. They prepare writers to participate in conversations within their discourse communities and help overcome the negative connotations of the classroom that they might have learned. A web page portfolio facilitates the transfer of writing energy from one environment to another by helping writers forge their own connections rather than having them forged for them. Lastly, web page portfolios model the idea of writing within a system of writers and reinforce the why of writing as a mode of personal empowerment and participation in future discourse communities.

Works Cited

Burch, C. Beth. "Inside the Portfolio Experience: The Student's Perspective." College English 62.3 (Oct. 1999): 134-49.

Diehm, Celeste. "From Worn Out to Web to Web-Based: Better Student Portfolios." Phi Delta Kappan 85.10 (June 2004): 792-94.

Huot, Brian. "Toward a New Discourse of Assessment for the College Writing Classroom." College English 65.2 (Nov. 2002): 163-80.

Lindemann, Erika. "Three Views of English 101." College English 57.3 (March 1995): 287-92.

Mauk, Jonathan. "Location, Location, Location: The 'Real' (E)states of Being, Writing, and Thinking in Composition." College English 65.4 (March 2003): 368-88.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Wilcox, Bonita. "Writing Portfolios: Active vs. Passive." English Journal (High school edition) 86.6 (Oct. 1997): 34-37.

Stephen A. Raynie, Gordon College

Stephen Raynie, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of English at Gordon College where he teaches undergraduate composition and literature.