English 200: Introduction to English Studies
Spring 2002
Stephen C. Behrendt
Course Portfolios
A substantial portion of your course grade – a full 80% – will be based on your Course Portfolio, so this is a document you will want to prepare with care. For the Course Portfolio to be adequate and sufficient, you will need to maintain it carefully and add to it regularly. You should plan to add materials to the Course Portfolio at least weekly; daily additions are an even better idea.
Here is the summary information about the Course Portfolio, copied from the information sheet for this course:
Course Portfolio. Your Course Portfolio is a sort of documentary "snapshot" of your entire semester's work. This is where you save (and submit) all the written work you produce over the course of the semester, whether it is graded or not and whether I have seen it previously or not. The Portfolio will also include your own comments on what it contains; that is, I will expect you to reflect on what you write during the semester and what you have learned. When you submit your Portfolio at the end of the semester I will ask that you write an accompanying cover letter in which you discuss your Portfolio as an indicator of the nature and scope of your work – and your thinking – in this course as a whole.
Although you may keep your Course Portfolio in any form you choose, you may find it most practical to set it up in one of those pocket folders containing dividers and a fold-over flap; this will allow you to keep various kinds of writing separate from one another and perhaps to index contents when you submit the Portfolio.
What this means is that the Course Portfolio will contain a variety of materials including these four required items:
1. Project #1 (due Monday, 11 February)
2. Project #2 (due Monday, 4 March)
3. Project #3 (Due Wednesday, 24 April)
4. Portfolio Cover Letter (due with complete Course Portfolio, Friday, 3 May)
I will give you specific details with the assignments for each of the three Projects. The Portfolio Cover Letter is to be a letter of at least two pages in which you discuss your Course Portfolio as a record of the work you have done in the course and an indicator of what – and how – you think about the area of English Studies as your academic major. The letter should reflect both the reading, writing, and group work you do in the course and your assessment of how you have done your work, what you have learned, and how you propose to "use" all of this as you pursue your studies in the university and your life outside it.
In addition to these four required items, I encourage you to add to your Course
Portfolio a variety of other supplementary materials, which might include any
or all of the following:
• notes on the readings;
• post-class notes, mini-essays, and responses to the reading materials and to the class discussion of those materials;
• additional materials you discover in the course of conducting research on the authors and texts we study, the problems and issues we discuss, and the group projects we conduct;
• your own personal reflections on how the course is going for you, what you are learning, what you are discovering about your own interests, skills, and passions;
• questions – and the answers to them – about the English major at UNL;
• questions about the "real-life" purposes and applications of the work you are doing at the university; and
• notes and thoughts about other course-related matters that are of particular interest and relevance to you.
As noted in the course information, I will give formal grades to each of the three Project essays. I will not formally grade anything else in the portfolio, although I will read it and consider it in assessing both the quantity and the quality of the work you have devoted to the Course Portfolio.
Feel free, by the way, to add to your Course Portfolios copies of materials you find of interest, whether they are xeroxed from books and other sources or whether they are downloaded from the Internet. For all such "copied" materials, I ask that you attach to each a brief statement that explains:
• why this material is included,
• what you have learned from it, and
• where it came from.
For the final point, please provide either the bibliographical citation (if the material is from a book, periodical, or other print source) or the full URL (if it is from the World Wide Web).
Course Portfolio Format
It will probably make the most sense to keep your portfolio in one of those flap-enclosed folders with dividers that can be labeled. Alternatively, you might use a loose-leaf binder with pocket-pages or other devices for keeping your materials organized and reasonably neat. Whatever works best for you will be fine, so long as I can make sense of it when I come to evaluate the Portfolio.
Questions
Please ask me at any time if you are uncertain about any aspects of the Course Portfolio. As you begin working with the Course Portfolio, you will probably find the process becomes "second nature," even if this sort of procedure is new to you.