Critical Feminist Studies 2013: Preparing your Final Web Portfolio

Instructions for Preparing Your Final Portfolio Critical Feminist Studies Bryn Mawr College Fall 2013 Anne Dalke DUE Fri, 12/20 (by 12:30 p.m.)

This process invites you to reflect on all the work you have done for this course, to chronicle what has happened in your evolution both as a writer and a speaker in class, and to contribute to and assist me with the evaluation of your work. You've already created three web events and made multiple weekly forum posts. Now you will also

* participate in our final "teach-in": join with several other students to share your reflections on your experiences over the semester, encouraging, in a provocative and entertaining way, further exploration on the part of others in the class.

* post a description of your contribution to the "teach-in." This can take one of various forms: it might be a script you used for your performance, a description of the activity you planned, or of what happened during your portion of this final session (anything that surprised you?). One of you can post the script; each of the others in the group should add a comment or explanation or further reflections.

* after meeting with me for a final writing conference, post your final (10-pp. or equivalent) web event on-line; you'll want to do this early enough to give yourself time for what follows.

Then! please log on to Serendip; in the bar across the top of the page you'll see "my portfolio." Clicking on that will call up your web events and my comments on them, as well as all your forum postings and comments. [NOTE: if you have not yet tagged your webevents as such, you should do this now. It's a hassle--but it will make that material more findable, and the shape of the whole portfolio more readable.]

* Review all this material, and ruminate for a while on what you’re noticing as you re-visit your semester's work.

* Then write a short (2-3 pp.) essay reflecting on where you were when we began this process, where you are now, and what’s been happening in between. How have you been learning? What have you been learning? Where do you think that the edges of your learning now lie?

Be specific and descriptive in this process, but also evaluative. These are some prompts for thinking about your work in the course (you do not have to answer each question!):

** Review the checklist. The "on-time" dimension of this checklist may be of particular interest to you, given our class conversations about "queering" and "cripping" time. If you have missed deadlines, I invite you to reflect both on what that means for you as an emerging public intellectual, and what implications your particular time-frame has had for our shared work as a class (postings and responses that are not made available, for example, "in time" for others to make use of them).

** Review your participation in our group work: how present-and-contributing have you been in our discussions, both large and small? What role have you assumed in our group dynamics, both in-class and on-line? How much of your class work was focused on your own learning? In what ways have you been contributing to the learning of others?

** Who among your classmates did you learn the most from? Who were most helpful to you in your writing and small discussion groups, as well in our large group discussions, and on-line?

** Re-consider your reading for the course: What were your joys-and-pleasures? What were your challenges? What were the ways that you grew as a reader? Where are your learning edges as a reader?

** Review also your written work: How much of your on-line writing was "stand-alone," how much written in response to others' reflections? What on-line response did you garner from your classmates (or others in the world)? How much effort have you put into the web postings and each of your essays? What can you say about the quality of these productions? What have you learned about your writing and thinking processes in this class? Where have you "moved"?

** Think about what you are taking out of this class into your future academic work and/or life.

* Click "Self-Evaluation" here.
Select there the option to upload a banner image to illustrate your portfolio.
For examples of what this could look like, see
/exchange/portfolio/et502
/exchange/portfolio/mturer
/exchange/portfolio/rachelr

Complete the self-evaluation form with the material you've written above. Refresh your browser, then check to make sure that this self-evaluation has shown up @ the bottom of your portfolio (which you can access from the list @ the top of the page).

Note that this means that your evaluation, as part of your portfolio, will be publicly available on the web (you can unclick the audience when you create or edit it, however, if you don't want it to show up in our ongoing on-line class conversation).

You should e-mail me any comments that you do not want to be public.

* Complete the checklist and submit it electronically (this is the only dimension of the portfolio that will be private = readable only by me).

ALL WORK IS DUE  Fri, 12/20 (by 12:30 p.m.).

In my response to this portfolio, I'll be giving you a grade not just for the quality of your written work, but also for class participation and process. Your self-evaluation will assist me with my own, as I reflect on your engagement in the course.

I very much look forward to seeing what you come up with, as well as what you have to say about it.

Thanks for joining in the exploratory journey we've taken together this semester.
I've enjoyed it very much, and learned a lot--

Anne