ePortfolio in a CUNY Community College

Marisa Klages and Elizabeth Clark’s “New Worlds of Errors and Expectations: Basic Writers and Digital Assumptions” maps out the significance of ePortfolios in basic writing courses, specifically in the CUNY community college system, and even more specifically at LaGuardia Community College, in Long Island City, Queens. This college serves as a telling backdrop for Klages and Clark’s justification of ePortfolios because its student body generally is not only diverse, coming from backgrounds that range from “underperforming American high schools” to “ Caribbean schools based on the British-colonial model” (37), but also faces challenges such as caring for families or working full-time jobs, and views education as a means to socio-economic advancement rather than personal growth or cultural empowerment (37). Furthermore, the community college system creates an environment that students perceive as an “academic ghetto” (38) where they are required to write non-engaging essays that follow a strict format and do not allow for personal interaction with their own texts.

All of this seems to create a divide between many community college students and academic success. Students coming from backgrounds that do not prepare them for a competitive and/or demanding academy are alienated from their work because it does not engage them, or the prospect of treading water in remediation seems all too real. Digital literacy’s growing significance exacerbates that alienation, because, paradoxically, students are well versed in consuming and discovering multimodal, digital content, and they know how to create it to some extent, but “they do not think that a lot of material they create electronically is real writing” (36). Twitter and Facebook posts require us to create meaning textually, but it is generally “throw away” text; it is written once, with little though to revision or refinement.

And these texts are generally ones that spring from a personal narrative; Twitter, Facebook, and Instgram posts as well as blogs often “advertise” something about the poster. These platforms lend themselves more towards personal expression rather than abstract and/or academic ideas and are static once posted. What we put on Facebook stays on Facebook for all to see. It’s like the opposite of what happens in Vegas. 

This creates yet another divide between the student and academic writing. Students develop a skill in self-expression that does not translate to the academy, and to divorce themselves from this skill can leave students nonplussed. As Klages and Clark point out, many LaGuardia students see academic writing as “a one-way communication in which they seek to demonstrate acquired knowledge to a teacher-authority” (37), which, I think, is not necessarily one-way, insofar as it can create a circle of communication in which a student seeks the approval of a professor, who responds to the student, expecting results. Regardless, whether this relationship is one-way or cyclical, it remains atomized from society; students still write for their instructors alone.

The multimodality of ePortfolios potentially mitigates this atomization because of the public nature of online writing in a setting that invites revision and reflection. Students who formerly saw writing as static—in online posts, for example—perhaps saw authoring, as it applied to them, as isolated; they wrote and others read, with little input geared toward revision. With ePortfolios, students write for their professor as well as their peers, since online texts are public. Peer review, for example, is no longer “restricted to the number of copies a student makes of his/her paper” (41), which makes it easier and less financially straining to show one’s work to one’s peers. This opens up student texts to an entire class, if not a cross-curricular community or anyone with an Internet connection, depending on the security of the platform (Yancey 30), and mitigates the feeling that a student is writing solely for an authority figure. The potential for peer feedback can signify to a student that their work is not static. The author must work within a community of writers to create a text, as well as think about that community while creating.

Multimodal writing also allows students to incorporate their own narratives into their work. Klages and Clark include an example of a LaGuardia student who included photos “displaying herself in several different versions of her everyday life: as a student in jeans and a sweatshirt, in her native Nepali dress, in a headscarf and ‘Western’ clothing, sitting while studying and standing on the Staten Island Ferry” (46,47) in her ePortfolio, which allowed her “to shape the ePortfolio as a powerful autobiographical narrative, coupling academic and personal life” (47). The diversity of this student’s life was apparent, as was her developing writing skills.

Klages ad Clark’s approach to composition does not necessarily aim to disrupt the teaching of composition as we know it entirely. Yes, the movement from strictly alphabetic texts to multimodal ones marks a shift that Kathleen Blake Yancey rightfully calls “tectonic” (Klages, Clark 35), suggesting that the ground is shifting underneath composition instruction. But this affects the teaching of composition more than the results. Students must still consider their audience and engineer their texts to persuade and inform, and many of the conventions of composition that we can call traditional remain. For example, writing public, online texts can mitigate the temptation for student to write specifically to their professors, which gives them a significant reason to avoid using the second person “you” in their essays, which does not adhere to the standards of academic writing that I learned.

Additionally, the use of constantly changing technology allows instructors to learn alongside their students, as “we are simultaneously challenged with learning new media ourselves and bringing them to the classroom” (35). This can help shatter the perception among LaGuardia students (as well as others) that the college classroom is simply a place where an absolute authority gives them information, which they must use to produce texts that the authority judges. Since the “authority” must learn as well, the hierarchy of professor > student that partially creates that initial divide between academia and student who may not have been prepared for the academy, begins to break down. As we’ve discussed in class, Internet technologies constantly evolve, and all of us must re-learn them, so this dynamic of mutual learning can remain over time.

I find it inspiring that LaGuardia Community College faculty are employing multimodal composition practices. As a graduate of a CUNY community college, The Borough of Manhattan Community College, I have seen the opportunities these schools offer students who may otherwise not have the chance to pursue higher ed, and I am glad that multimodal approaches to literacy can make those opportunities potentially more fruitful for students and instructors.