894 Annotated bibliography

Zanzucchi, A., & Truong, M. (2013).  Thinking like a program: How electronic portfolio assessment shapes faculty development practices. In H.A. McKee, & D.N. DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.), Digital writing assessment & evaluation (n.p). Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/14_zanzucchi.html

                Probably like most of the contributions to this collection, Zanzucchi and Truong open by emphasizing the significance and timeliness of eportfolios as a pedagogical and assessment advance for bringing writing instruction into line with digital literacies and practices. However, the specific contribution of this article is to explore the ways in which student eportfolios can be used at the program level, particularly in ensuring that faculty share the same pedagogical values and assessment practices.  The authors discuss the ways in which their program in particular has addressed the challenge of uniting a large group of instructors in shared instructional practices built around eportfolios.  The program, the Merritt Writing Program (MWP) at the University of California at Merced (UCM), is somewhat unique in that the department was established and developed outside of the English department.  However, in many ways, the institutions practices can be a good case study for other institutions.  For example, although the program offers an academic minor, much of the work of the faculty, as in many institutions, is within the FYC program.  The sixty instructors currently working within the program all use eportfolios as an assessment strategy, and the institution has developed ways to work with this faculty to ensure shared practices.  After briefly discussing their program’s experience with eportfolios, the author outline the faculty development approach they have developed.  This is probably the heart of the paper. They conclude by discussing the value of multimodal approaches generally and the importance of low-barrier technologies in particular.

                The article should be generally helpful to institutions seeking to develop or improve an eportfolio approach. The authors include enough information about the faculty development workshops that they have developed to offer an overview of what another institution might do. Links back to their program page can also offer some ideas about the sorts of resources that institutions might use to support faculty.  Although it is not the main idea of the article, it also offers some impressions about the degree to which an institution might unify practices.  For example, by having shared assessment activities and offering workshops, the program can foster a shared philosophy for teaching and assessing writing.  However within this loose framework, instructors can still develop their own assignments.  But the fact that all instructors use the eportfolio and the fact that the rubrics are shared means that assessment is done in very similar ways for all classes. This means that students have the confidence that their experiences are in alignment with those of other students in other sections.  It also makes the task of instructors easier.  The desirability of using faculty development to find a balance between shared and diverse instructional practices is a key insight of the article.

In terms of my own experience within my institution, this article offered me some good ideas for taking back to our writing program coordinator.  We do not use eportfolios and, in fact, do little with multimodal composing.  I am not sure if there is much interest in doing so.  However, because we are interested in bringing our diverse practices into greater alignment and because we are forced by our accrediting body to evaluate a sample of student work, I think I might be able to sell the idea of an eportfolio.  We already have composition meetings where we meet and assess student papers, both for our accreditation requirements, and more often, to ensure that we are teaching and assessing our students in similar ways. It makes sense to do this same type of work with digital documents instead of paper documents.  By moving towards digital documents, we might also bring more multimodal practices into our writing program.