English Lit. I

Mulready

Final Portfolio Guidelines and Requirements

In lieu of a final exam in this course, I am asking you to prepare a portfolio that will provide a record of what you have learned in this course. This portfolio will count for a substantial part of your final grade (20%), and you should therefore put effort and care into its preparation.

Here are the basic components that you will include in your portfolio (further explanation below):

I.               Introduction (about two double-spaced pages)

II.             Three assignments from the course of the semester that you believe represents your best work.

III.           One piece of work from another class in which you incorporated something that you learned from this course.

IV.            One substantial new piece of work that you prepared especially for this portfolio.

V.              This work should be presented neatly in a well-organized format. You will be giving a brief presentation (about three minutes) of your portfolio during our final exam period.

Your Introduction should provide a discussion of each component in your portfolio. In it you should explain why you chose each of the items you selected (or created) for the portfolio, explain what you did to revise them (in the case of the assignments), and what you think makes them especially good examples of your work.  Your introduction should also include a broader reflection on your work in this course: what did you learn? What do you want to know more about? How have you seen your work (in this course and others) develop since the beginning of the semester?

The Three Assignments that you chose to include can be selected from any of the work we have done this semester (including group projects). You may revise any or all of these assignments in response to the suggestions I have given you, or after your own review of the material. This should be your very best work, in other words.

In selecting One piece of work from another class, you can show how you have applied lessons learned in this class in any number of ways. Here are just a few suggestions:

• An essay that demonstrates the use of magical/instant thesis statement formula.
• An assignment in which you conducted library research that was inspired by this course.
• A particularly well-constructed bibliography that uses good MLA citation formatting.
• An analysis of a text that employs distant reading tools.
• An analysis of a text that began with commonplacing.

Whatever assignment you choose, please explain in your introduction what specifically you took from this class in doing your work.

The substantial new piece of work is your opportunity to build on what you have done in an earlier project for the course, or to develop a topic or project from our course that is of interest to you. This can take the form of a traditional essay (aim for at least five double-spaced pages in length), but it could also be a creative project of some kind, a digital presentation of material, or anything else that is inspired by the work of our class. I am open to possibilities for collaboration on this portion of the project—please talk to me if you would like to explore this option. We will be looking at some examples of possible projects in the coming weeks.

The portfolio is due on Tuesday, Dec. 13^th, during our Final exam period (10:15-12:15). You will be required to give a brief presentation of your final portfolio that particularly highlights the new piece of work that you have chosen to prepare for this assignment.