Ensuring Tech Isn’t “Just More Work”: Transforming ePortfolio Anxiety into Faculty Agency in the Composition Classroom

In Spring 2018, the grant team shared the design of and some initial conclusions regarding the Mind the Gap IDW grant during the national Conference on College Composition and Communication. In particular, the team focused on strategies for fostering faculty buy-in to a digital initiative.

CCCC 2018 ePortfolio

Presentation is available at this link.

Recognizing the ability of ePortfolios to foster Integrative Learning through reflection-driven metacognition (Yancey, 2016), the increasing need for greater digital literacy, and the call for college writers to develop engaged and reflective habits of mind (“Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing”, 2011), the general education writing program within the English Department at a large four-year institution recently began transitioning their established, decades-long tradition of collecting student portfolios from print to digital formats. During this transition period, faculty have had a mixed, but often intense, response to this implementation. As participants involved in efforts to address these concerns, the team detailed revisions to past methods and shared strategies for moving forward with an ePortfolio initiative across two separate pilot phases: first, requiring faculty use of Google Drive for prompting students to actively engage in archiving practices and, second, focusing on voluntary faculty use of a WordPress template for student showcases. The team reported on the labor required of this two-part pilot ePortfolio initiative, highlighting the obstacles, successes, and ongoing challenges faced by faculty and administrators.

Drawing on the concept of “languaging,” this presentation suggested that student ePortfolio projects are not, in fact, the express purpose of portfolio pedagogy. As Watson and Doolittle (2011) suggest, ePortfolio initiatives succeed based on “the pedagogy within which the ePortfolio is embedded” (p. 30). Likewise, this initiative seeks to foreground pedagogy over technology, involving faculty at every stage of the ePortfolio program’s design and acknowledging that for students to produce effective digital archives and capstone projects, the faculty must also develop digital pedagogies (Parkes, Dredger, and Hicks, 2013). Although ePortfolios often represent an end goal, effective portfolio pedagogy encourages faculty and students to value the learning process and archive throughout so they might later reflect on their experiences and synthesize a rhetorical identity from their available materials. Reframing the anxiety surrounding technology into a discussion regarding established portfolio pedagogy illustrates the way in which languaging regarding instructional design and ongoing student learning can foster faculty engagement, agency, and even advocacy in curricular development.

Throughout this transition period, faculty unfamiliar with the ever-changing landscape of learning technology have expressed a multitude of concerns including assuming this change would mean a distraction from course content, having difficulty understanding and incorporating digital tools, and needing help with how to properly respect and maintain student privacy. In recognizing faculty as major stakeholders in this process, the writing program leadership values their involvement at all stages of technology-based initiatives and in all discussions of proposed changes in curriculum. Instead of faculty receiving a digital mandate without input, critical framework, or resources, the initiative attempts to involve faculty in the design and implementation process.

The speakers provided an overview of each pilot phase before focusing on how the ePortfolio implementation, with a goal to address flawed assessment practices in the past, also created new issues of faculty resistance. Emphasizing early collaboration in the project design, funding for professional development, and recursive feedback processes, the presentation also analyzed the ways in which writing programs can and should draw upon institutional resources and existing support mechanisms to build strong interdepartmental relationships and collaborations throughout the process of embracing technology for classroom usage.

Speaker 1, Jenn Sloggie-Pierce, discussed the institutional history of composition courses within undergraduate curriculum and the role of the writing program as part of new initiatives to improve disciplinary writing. Speaking from previous research on the identification of the “writing gap,” an often multi-year absence of writing-intensive courses within disciplinary curriculum, Speaker 1 also described ongoing work with an internal grant in using ePortfolios as sites for metacognition and a process of moving students between archival and showcasing stages of ePortfolio development across courses.

Speaker 2, Dan Cox, shared the history of portfolio collection in the writing program and the ongoing and planned phases of ePortfolio adoption, as well as the programmatic obstacles faced during the first pilot phase and how writing program leadership and other stakeholders worked to ensure that the move to ePortfolio collection would better align with 4C’s Principles and Practices in Electronic Portfolios (2015) in pilot phase two. Describing the pedagogical and departmental assessment motivations behind the move away from print portfolios, the speaker discussed how this transition has affected perceptions of labor and necessitated increased and continued involvement of full-time and contingent faculty in program design and ePortfolio implementation.

Speaker 3, Megan Mize, identified general principles for easing the adoption of ePortfolios within a writing program, providing professional development models of events and materials situated within this framework. The speaker highlighted methods for involving faculty, such as focus groups and training opportunities, as well as formal and informal strategies for administration to productively listen to faculty anxiety, such as surveys, interviews, and monthly ePortfolio “screenside chats.” Finally, Speaker 3 shared methods for fostering a faculty ePortfolio community through collecting internal resources, celebrating faculty achievements, and building a distributed, institutional memory of expertise and active developmental resources for future use.