First Parallel: Emphasizing Purpose and Audience

Portfolio Contents Home The Background Guiding Questions Portfolios, Technologies, and the Composition Classroom EPortfolios Why Portfolios? Outlining Multimodal Composition The Cs Enhanced Writing   Parallel Educational Tools Second Parallel Third Parallel Fourth Parallel New Directions: Into Infinity (Expanding Ideas) Tangent Line 1 Tangent Line 2 Tangent Line 3 Final Reflections References

Murphy (1999) claims portfolios are an ideal form of assessment because “they encourage us to examine the ways in which writing varies across situations, portfolios can help to bring our assessment practices more in line with current theories of writing” (p. 122). Murphy also suggests student portfolios should demonstrate a student’s abilities in regards to an awareness of diverse audiences, communicating different purposes to those various audiences, and offering data/evidence pertinent to audience needs. By allowing students the opportunity to work in stages and to work with a multitude of genres, portfolios encourage greater attention rhetorical strategies. All of the work the students perform in this class becomes connected—one project influences the next, which influences the next. With this type of portfolio assessment in place, students see links between genres. With links clear and apparent, students can make better choices about who to address and how—they even begin to make their own decisions about genre (Murphy, 1999; Callahan, 1997; Yancey, 2004, 1992). Portfolios alone, though, do not emphasize purpose and audience for students. Instead, the genre of projects being worked on is a key element in understanding how to apply different rhetorical techniques to different rhetorical situations. Genres can function as new situations that students must learn how to write to (Selfe, 2004, 2007; Kress, 2003; Wysocki, 2001). Multimodal assignments urge students to take into consideration various purposes and audiences for writing. For example, students might create posters or brochures. They might create PSAs or basic websites. They might create postcards or PowerPoint presentations. They might identify how to effectively use visuals in a research paper. Each of these documents forces students to think critically about why they are creating the document. After defining the document’s purpose, students have to analyze perspective audiences and then tailor the document to the audiences’ tastes. As noted above, portfolios highlight differences and bridges from one genre of writing to another; multimodal assignments offer a variety of genres. When multimodal assignments are linked together in a writing portfolio, students can better understand the changing contexts of their writing. The portfolio can act as a document that visually shows students all of the audiences and contexts they have written to and for over the course of the semester. By seeing these diverse contexts and audiences and by reflecting upon them, students become critical participants in a writing public (Yancey, 2004). Being engaged members of a writing public helps students to put purpose and audience into a meaningful context. The portfolio links different assignments, the assignments are applicable to real life, and the portfolio demonstrates success of application.