Barely Portfolios

I was asked to give a brief talk about digital portfolio platforms and student writing to the faculty at Black Hills State University in 2023. These are my prepared remarks:

The Dating App Approach #

As I prepared for this talk, I considered the word “portfolio” and what it conjures for me. If you are a middle-aged person like myself, you can probably still remember actual artist portfolios: the large thin cases that artists would carry around with them, much as you must have seen on the television show Mad Men as Peggy Olson and Don Draper sell a new client on an ad campaign. These sorts of portfolios hold finished, exemplary, excellent, (and supposedly representative) work products—things that an artist would use to demonstrate her competencies and creativity for a future employer or a client. My students would probably refer to this sort of artifact a “brag” or a “flex”. So when I think of “portfolios,” then, I’m thinking of finished and best things—things that construct an idealized version of ourselves or our abilities. And that’s fine. But there is a moment where our approach to the portfolio resembles our approach to the dating app. There we post and curate things that make us look better, cooler, hotter, and younger than we really are. Of course that picture of you on the dating site is still you; yet, there is something dishonest and perhaps unseemly about the presentation. So, later, when we sit down to the drink we arranged at the local bar, the instant we introduce ourselves to our companion we sense in her eyes the felt disparity between the carefully curated portfolio and the real self occupying the bar stool opposite her. And that disparity is the thing I wanted to talk a little bit about today.

To speak more plainly: I think, in many important ways, a portfolio can be a somewhat false or misleading thing. And this has consequences for student learning.

Writing in the Muck #

I probably respond to portfolios in this way because I am a writing teacher; specifically, I am a teacher of the basic writing curriculum at Dartmouth College. My students are plodders; writing is often extraordinarily difficult for them; they spend hours laboring over their work, trying to express a thought and make it come out clearly and correctly. The portfolio, however, often erases all of that labor. In its presentation of the perfect and polished artifact, all of the effort and struggle that went into its manufacture is obscured. As a writing teacher, the sort of work that I do with students occurs down in the muck—in the messy, convoluted, fumbling spaces where students try to assemble something from basic materials into a coherent and meaningful whole. To me, the muck is what’s real; that’s where students experiment and fail and try again; that’s where students make discoveries and learn to see things in new ways. It is, in short, where all the learning happens.

I don’t want to disparage portfolios (they do serve a legitimate purpose, after all). It feels good to reflect on something particularly fine that we’ve made; it feels great to see others appreciating what we’ve accomplished. But too much of an emphasis on the finished product creates a kind of fetish object that prevents students from honoring the labor and learning that was required to produce it. It can give students like mine a false and fatalistic sense that they could never produce something as good as the exemplary projects they encounter in another student’s showcase portfolio.

The Barely Portfolio #

For a long while at Dartmouth, I focused on the portfolio in the sense I described before, as the dating profile, the trophy case, the place to present the perfect and best work. This was, in all honesty, because they paid me to do it. But once the money dried up, a new vision of what the portfolio could be appeared to me. I decided to change my approach and figure out a way to emphasize the muck, the work, the struggle and to honor those things over and above the end results. For this reason, and a few others, I decided to move away from our more flamboyant portfolio software platform and chose instead to do this portfolio work with a much simpler tool: the common, pedestrian, Google Doc. If your students are like my students, almost 100% of them use Google Docs to compose their writing assignments. And since I was trying to find the most basic and frictionless tool to help me do this work I envisioned, I found that Google Docs really fit the bill. We might call this more simplified and stripped-down approach, if I may borrow a phrase from Nick Van Kley, the “barely portfolio.”

Primarily I have used these basic portfolios in a class that is focused on research writing. I usually teach two sections of 15 students each winter term. In this class students learn how to use the library and perform research; the main deliverable at the end of the term is a 15-page research essay. The course theme is “Apocalyptic Fiction, Film, and Art,” but students are free to choose to write on a topic of their choosing so long as it contributes to the broad themes of the course.

I created a Google Doc that worked as a hub or index and invited students to edit it with me. I created a model portfolio on a Google Doc page (what we call an “Author Page”) and then they reproduced it by creating their own Google Doc Author Page, linking out to it from my index. These Author Pages were where all of the work for the term was staged.

The Author Page consists of a few components: An essay/project title; a summary of the project; a continuously updated annotated bibliography with links to library resources; and a series of weekly reflections about their efforts to complete the project.

Some things that I really like about this: #

First, the emphasis here is on the work. It’s not beautiful or flashy. It’s messy. It’s real and honest. We are far, far, away from the dating profile and the trophy case here.
Since these pages are viewable to the members of both of my classes at any time, students can see each other working on their ideas, research, and drafts. I have found this to be extremely useful for two reasons. First, in a traditional research writing classroom, the experience from the student’s perspective is frequently one of isolation. They are trying to do something they’ve never done before and there isn’t a lot of help (they often don’t even know what questions to ask!). Often, the only help they get is from one-on-one interactions with their professor in either an office hour or via commentary on drafts. But here, students can see what other students are working on in real time. In many cases, students discover that they are working on a similar topic as a fellow student. Several groups of students formed last term on things like nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, or artificial intelligence. This provides an opportunity for students to assist each other and share ideas or research discoveries. We call this a “research alliance” in my classroom. I like how this approach more accurately reflects how academic research works and how academic communities function since students can begin to see how their individual project contributes to a larger, often collaborative, goal of creating knowledge. The second thing I like about these shared portfolios is that it defuses the imposter syndrome that students often experience. Many of my students lack confidence in themselves as writers; they imagine that all the other students in the class know exactly what they’re doing while they alone are confused. But being able to see other students struggling with the assignment and diligently working toward a goal is a powerful and disarming experience and form of knowledge. They are not alone; everyone feels in the same boat. This creates a sense of camaraderie and a “can do” attitude.
Something else I like: Being able to see everyone’s work as it unfolds in real time is also pedagogically useful. From my 20,000 foot view of the classroom provided by the “barely portfolios”, I can see who isn’t working, who’s struggling (and specifically what they are struggling with). This intelligence is very useful to me as I can make interventions at key moments in the evolution of my students’ projects such as by providing feedback in the form of a Google Doc comment; or suggesting some further research they should read; or by assisting them with search terms for use in querying the library catalogs. Absent these author pages I would have to wait until the student turned in the next draft of her project, and that might be too late. Generally, it means that I can be really helpful, at a moment’s notice, at any time, from anywhere.
A final thing I like about this approach is the opportunity for student reflection. It is in the nature of a portfolio to invite this sort of metacritical thinking, but I try to encourage this even more by asking students to provide a short weekly update on the author page, much as you would write a blog post, where they attempt to take stock of their project as it stands, describe any difficulties or questions, and grope toward their next steps. I don’t have the space to go into it here, but there is a lot of interesting research about how powerful these reflections can be for student learning. In addition to this, though, I really benefit from these narratives as the teacher since I can get a good update on what the student’s plans are and how they are struggling with the assignment week by week.

Key takeaways #

Portfolios can be a useful teaching tool, not just a trophy case for our best work.
Portfolios can be useful learning tools, where students get comfortable with the messy work of creation and revision: focusing on process, not product.
Portfolios help students make connections with each other as they embrace a more “open-source” attitude to learning rather than the more proprietary model that pervades the implementations of portfolios-as-showcases.
Including opportunities for reflection in a portfolio or assignments helps students integrate their learning experiences and can provide useful intelligence for the teacher on how best to assist students.