Third Parallel: Emphasizing Purpose

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 First Parallel Second Parallel Fourth Parallel New Directions: Into Infinity (Expanding Ideas) Tangent Line 1 Tangent Line 2 Tangent Line 3 Final Reflections References

Growth, in a writing course, can mean many different things. Some instructors define growth as a student’s ability to pick up on rhetorical strategies and apply them first to one document and then to another. For other instructors, growth implies a student’s awareness in regards to her work. For still others, growth has to do with acquiring skills or traits a student did not have at the beginning of the course. For Murphy (1999), growth is intimately tied to “dimensions of performance or learning, derived from curriculum standards [… that] describe selected, but essential elements of the execution of a particular kind of work, action or deed, much link length, width, and thickness describe essential elements of space” (p. 121). Both portfolio assessment and practice in multimodal composition can help students grow in all of these ways. With the particular emphasis on scaffolding and building that is evident in process approaches to portfolios and to multimodal composition, growth can be more solidly established. What scaffolding can provide in terms of growth is the word on many teachers’ lips: critical/analytical skills. Both the use of portfolios and exercises in multimodal composition demonstrate growth of critical skills, growth precipitated by the scaffolding exercises of a process-based pedagogy and a process-based approach to course design. Portfolios, while showcasing process and product, allow for students to demonstrate their critical thinking and writing abilities. Multimodal compositions allow students a new understanding of what it means to be critical. As Gruber (2003) points out, teachers often assume students have developed analytical skills, as evidenced by students’ purely textual portfolios. She argues, though, that teachers need to be wary of students’ analytical, multimodal skills. Instructors must give students multimodal models and allow them to delve into multimodal composition in order to help students see connections between critical, print-linguistic-only documents and critical multimodal documents. Critical growth becomes apparent when students compose multimodal documents in which rhetorical strategies are clearly being used and rhetorical criticisms are being employed. Growth is demonstrated throughout the semester, but portfolios and “finished” multimodal texts also suggest growth outside of the classroom. By using multimodal texts in the classroom, and reflecting on their uses of those texts in portfolios, students are more likely to bridge their academic and everyday lives, carrying that growth into different realms. For example, students might think critically about the web pages they use, the flyers they see, and the commercials they view (Gruber, 2003; Selber, 2004). Additionally, by involving students in multimodal composition, and then asking them to reflect on those compositions in their portfolios, instructors make learning more applicable to students’ lives and more engaging, which leads to a new understanding of the purposes of being enrolled in a writing course or other liberal education requirements (Handa, 2003; Williams, 2008; Murphy & Smith, 1999).