Kathleen Blake Yancey

Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.

Sometimes, you know, you have a moment. For us, this is one such moment. In coming together at CCCC, we leave our institutional sites of work; we gather together-we quite literally conveneat a not-quite-ephemeral site of disciplinary and professional work. At this opening session in particular, inhabited with the echoes of those who came before and anticipating the voices of those who will follow-we pause and we

Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work

What we ask students to do is who we ask them to be. With this as a defining proposition, I make three claims: (1) print portfolios offer fundamentally different intellectual and affective opportunities than electronic portfolios do; (2) looking at some student portfolios in both media begins to tell us something about what intellectual work is possible within a portfolio; and (3) assuming that each portfolio is itself a composition, we need to consider which kind of portfolio-as-composition we want to invite from students, and why.

WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition

Kath leen Blak e Ya nce y is Pearce Professor of English at Clemson University, where she directs the Roy and Marnie Pearce Center for Professional Communication and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and professional communication. Editor or author of six books and numerous articles and chapters, she chairs the College Section of NCTE and is vice-president of WPA. Her current interests include reflection as a means of enhancing learning; the design and uses of electronic portfolios; and ways of assessing digital texts.

The perils of creating a class Web site: it was the best of times, it was the …

Abstract This article explains the visual and computing demands of Web-site authoring in a junior level, undergraduate honors course at a large public university. We argue that the students in this course—highly literate and skilled in the production of conventional printed academic writing—performed much like basic writers when challenged with acquiring a broad set of new visual and computer literacy skills. We argue for the value of the illustrated essay as a halfway point for connecting our expectations of Web site authoring to students’ previous experiences with the production of printed academic discourse.

The Social Life of Reflection: Notes Toward an ePortfolio-Based Model of Reflection

For many, reflection—be it self-assessment, account of process, or synthesis of learning—has been constructed as an individual process. For others, reflection, like other forms of learning, is a social process, one that puts individual account, perception, inquiry, and judgment into dialogue with those of others. This second definition of reflection relies on the context of others for the making of meaning that is unique to reflection. This form of reflection can be fostered in an environmental model of ePortfolios; here, portfolio composers and their peers participate in what I am calling “the social life of reflection.” In this chapter, then, I’ll focus on the ways that curricular design, an environmental ePortfolio, and reflection provide a context for creating the social life of reflection, a practice incorporating both formal and incidental learning. As a consequence, through the social life of reflection as expressed inside the ePortfolio, we see students weaving together various strands of reflection into a coherent whole. And not least, a review of this reflection shows both the development of the student and the myriad ways that reflective practice, in John Seely Brown’s terms, both shapes and supports learning.

Grading ePortfolios: Tracing Two Approaches, Their Advantages, and Their Disadvantages

How does one grade an electronic portfolio? This question is one I have thought about, have enacted, and have written about, primarily in reference to ePortfolios used in writing classrooms (Yancey, McElroy, & Powers, 2013). But what happens when the content and developmental levels are changed, in this case from an undergraduate first-year writing class to another required class, this one offered at the graduate level, Digital Revolution and Convergence Culture? Is using a scoring guide, the preferred approach in writing classes, the best approach in this new context? Or, following Moss, Girard, and Haniford (2006), could one use outcomes to “stage a conversation” around a students ePortfolio; if so, what might a staged conversation look like? Or what might happen if instead of using outcomes as a framework, students themselves set the terms for that conversation? Here, I consider these options, attending especially to the importance of making good judgments and of fostering learning.