Self + Genre + Discourse → Portfolio
An 8-week asynchronous course that ends in a portfolio built to make the projects talk to each other.
Process: Directed draftingFirst draft
- Personal
Autoethnography
800–1,000 words, drafted by the end of Week 2.
- Research
Composition Studies Synthesis Posts
About 1,100 words of discussion posts on scholarship.
- Multimodal
Digital Genre Analysis and Rhetorical Choices Defense
1,400–1,500 words or the equivalent, from a corpus of 5–10 samples, plus a 500–1,000 word written defense.
- Capstone
"Your Writing Journey" portfolio
1,500+ words of written reflection and revision, organized around a throughline the student chooses.
What carries forward
This course changed partway through the session, which happens in 8-week courses: the window is short, and students struggle in different ways. The original plan ended with a standing-challenges paper. The revised plan replaced it with scholarly discussion posts and a portfolio. In an 8-week course, Stage 3 is the piece that flexes.
The portfolio is the strongest link between projects in any of my pathways. Students pick a throughline and show how one piece changed another. Examples from the sheet:
- the power of recursion
- from personal story to public argument
- multimodal thinking in traditional writing
- writing as identity work
- from private reflection to public voice
It requires a cover letter (250–500 words), a substantially revised autoethnography with 300–500 new words, commentary on the discussion posts, a written reflection on the multimodal project, and a short process conclusion.
Where I've used it
- College writing workshop II · 8 weeks, asynchronous · Spring 2026