To what extent has your work in this course helped you to improve your critical reading, writing, and thinking skills?
Knowledge Acquisition:
To what extent have you gained knowledge of important concepts, ideas, and perspectives through your study of the humanities? Remember to include a discussion of ethical theories that you have studied.
Practical Application: To what extent have you learned how to connect course material to contemporary society and to your own life?
Each section of your portfolio should include a narrative assessment that gives your honest and incisive reflections on your progress in these areas. Your comments should include both an overall evaluation and reflective comments about your progress. For example, in the first section you might describe exactly how much your writing skills have improved this term, and then you might discuss the work habits that contributed to your success. Your discussion should be objective and balanced; for example, if there are factors that have made it difficult for you to achieve a certain course goal, you should include them in your reflections.
Each section of your portfolio should also include specific evidence that documents your reflective narrative. For example, if you believe that your writing skills have improved, you might want to document this observation with examples of weaker writing from your first paper alongside examples of stronger writing from later papers. Likewise, if you observe that you took the writing process very seriously, you might want to document this by including examples of outlines, rough drafts, rewrites, etc.
The documentary evidence you include in your portfolio can be anything related to the course: papers, discussion postings, seminar interactions, your own notes or reading diary, course-related email, etc. You do not need to have evidence to back up every point you include in your reflections, but you should include evidence that documents the most important claims you make.
You have two options for synthesizing your narrative evaluation and documentary evidence. One option is to give the narrative and then give a separate listing of evidence. If you do this, you will need to carefully organize your presentation of evidence so that it is clear to your reader which items of evidence relate to which claims in your narrative. The second option is to integrate documentary evidence into your narrative.