Process-oriented model
- Using different texts – visual, print, digital, verbal – to demonstrate the composing processes engaged in within the classroom (3)
- Often uses “mapping as a means for representing the composing processes” (4)
- Does not use portfolio practices that are medium specific (i.e. can be accomplished in a print portfolio as well) (4)
- “assumes a learning ecology with process and the individual at the center” (4)
- Sustainability of learning: “the hope is that the portfolio is superfluous, that the processes engaged in by students, both in composition-making and portfolio-making, are internalized and sustainable” (10)
Structure-oriented model
- Typically structured around “curricular outcomes – to the inclusion of learning across courses and experiences – and to explicit instruction in the genre of electronic portfolio” (6)
- Focus is on “institutional outcomes rather than student-generated outcomes” (6)
- Sustainability of learning: “the aim is likewise to inform students such that the portfolio is merely a vehicle, its path to the goal a structure that literally links individual student with texts and responses and institutional outcomes” (10)
Reiterative-oriented model
- Students make more than one portfolio
- “assume[s] a curricular ecology that is site-flexible, site-multiple, and site-mobile, occulting in many places, with school serving as one site only and that assume the student is the principle agent of his or her own learning, that understands learning as a social phenomenon, and that enact learning as an ongoing process” (9)
- Sustainability of learning: “aims to foster learners who see portfolio-making, and work in related genres like bogs, as an ongoing way of being that continues beyond the school day, semester, year, and graduation. Thus, in this model, both the artifacts and the processes aim to be sustainable” (10).
She ends with the following recommendations for portfolio use:
- “students need to set their own outcomes,” but “assisting students in setting their own outcomes…is critical” (12)
- “asking students to create but one portfolio doesn’t provide them with enough experience in portfolio-making, which is itself a reiterative process, as is learning itself” (12)
- “inviting students to situation their eportfolios is larger contexts…beings a new salience to the portfolio, making it a public exercise as well as a personal one” (12)
- identity-making is involved in portfolio-making
- “instead of seeing portfolio-making as a culminating activity, we might see it as beginning activity” (12)
- portfolios should be embedded in the everyday
Key Words
- Circulation: “the distribution of texts and…the relationships among composer, texts, and audiences” (1)
- Multiple mapping: “thinking through and with the general education matrix as well as through and with the disciplinary matrix” (5)
- Sustainability: (a) “in terms of the human and technological resources needed to keep such efforts alive” and (b) “how [learning] is sustained” (10)
- Composition: “a unified text speaking to a personal and cultural expression of” the composer; it’s a space for identity-making