final ePortfolio & reflective essay

Portfolios play many roles in academic and professional life: artists use them to  document and to showcase their work over time; architects use them to present drawings, media, and projects to clients; writers use them to make connections between the kinds of work that they do individually and collaboratively for any number of creative, academic, and professional goals and readers.

In each case, purpose and audience help to guide your rhetorical selection of materials, your reflections on those materials, and their presentation. In the First-Year Writing Program at DePaul, we use digital portfolios as a way for you to showcase your work, to explore what you've learned, and to show how you've met the First-Year Writing Program's learning outcomes and your course outcomes.

Reflective essay

Your ePortfolio must contain a reflective essay that shows consideration for what you did and learned in WRD 102, how you met or are working to meet the learning outcomes for the First-Year Writing Program, and how you plan to use the strategies and knowledge you gained in the future.  

You have a series of Instagram photos to help you showcase your WRD 102 learning and to complement your reflections.  Use these photos as evidence of the claims you make in your reflective essay.

Reflection refers to the iterative process that we engage in when we want to look back at some activity or decision we’ve made, to think about what we’ve learned from it, and how we might use it in the future. Reflection is a powerful tool in teaching and learning — think of it as a dot-connecting mechanism — and outside of academics, reflecting is a common tool among professionals and organizations as a way to establish values, goals, and future actions:

• What did I do?
• What was significant about it? Did I meet my goals?
• When have I done this kind of work before? Where could I use this again?
• Do I see any patterns or relationships in what I did?
• How well did I do? What worked? What do I need to improve?
• What should I do next? What’s my plan?

Some other questions to consider for your Reflective Essay:

• How do you define revision? What steps have you taken this quarter to revise for different audiences and contexts? Provide clearly labeled specific examples.
• To what degree does the target audience, purpose, or context impact the work in your portfolio? Provide clearly labeled specific examples.
• How do you analyze texts (including the work of other students)? How do you define critical reading?   Provide clearly labeled specific examples.
• What role(s) has peer review played in your development  as a reader, writer and thinker?  Provide clearly labeled specific examples.
• What do you consider to be the most important components to your writing process? Why? Has that changed over the course of the quarter?
• How do you edit? How do you manage to ensure correct surface features: syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling? What considerations figure into your editing?
• Describe your approach to writing in different genres.  
• Describe your intended audience-based rhetorical effects on a project or paper and the steps you took to achieve those audience-based rhetorical effects
• Beyond the learning outcomes, what individual goals did you have for your reading and writing this term? What have you accomplished that you feel proud of? What would you like to continue to work on? 

Length requirement: at least 650 words