Steve Krause nails it yet again: “Shari Wilson’s” attempt at a critique of portfolio pedagogy in first-year writing courses offers little more than an indictment of her own intellectual and pedagogical laziness. It’s a genre essay, in fact, of a species that writing teachers know quite well; the reactionary kick against process-based pedagogies we’ve been venturing and evaluating for a while now because such pedagogies take us out of our safe zones and don’t match up with the way we’ve always done things. “Wilson” implies a predetermined syllabus, a predetermined evaluation scheme and weighting, and most curiously a predetermined practice of keeping students in suspense and not reading and evaluating their written work and offering suggestions on how to improve outside of “rubrics” and “due dates.” One wishes “Wilson” might acquaint herself with some of the basics of process pedagogy and how to fundamentally engage student writing beyond “rubrics” and “due dates,” and wishes that “Wilson” might as well figure out how to compose a syllabus that states exactly and precisely her expectations of students. As she admits, though, precision of language in a syllabus is something at which she arrives unfortunately late. Such late arrival seems, I’d suggest, to be not so much a shortcoming of portfolio pedagogy as a shortcoming in other areas. So, too, with the indictment of “loopholes”: this seems to be a teacher who has scant idea how to assign and evaluate writing, and blames her failures on a system she’s failed to adequately implement.
The later portion of the essay bears this out, with anecdotal support offered by the picture of peers drinking in bars after norming sessions, and by the use of the word “suffered” that Steve picks up on: what are the standards of evidence here? How do they correspond to the standards of evidence expected from students by the teacher?
Are “Wilson’s” complaints evidence of the failure of the exhaustive and compelling rationales offered for portfolio pedagogies by Pat Belanoff, Kathi Yancey, and others in composition’s canonical pedagogical literature? Hardly. And, in fact, “Wilson’s” complaints offer zero evidence of any awareness of such literature. Lazy and uncritical teaching and failure to base one’s pedagogy in established scholarship does not indicate that a discipline’s long-standing and well-founded attention to various aspects of pedagogy is lazy and uncritical. It stands, rather, as evidence of nothing more than its own lazy and uncritical nature, and blames the student for the inadequacies and shortcomings of the teacher.
Most of us, “Shari,” try not to do that.
It was a very disappointing article. I was glad to see the type of response it received. From her background, I would have expected that she would have investigated the use of portfolios in a different discipline, but apparently she wasn’t as curious as I would have been.
And, I’m curious about the situation that led to her teaching college composition. What are her qualifications? Based on her article, I have to wonder why someone would hire her to teach writing aside from the need to have a warm body in the classroom. In some ways, this seems to speak to labor issues in the teaching of comp.
I’ve used portfolios for over ten years. I NEVER have student complaints about grades in these classes (that only seems to happen when I teach a non-portfolio course). My students usually figure out after about the first month that the portfolio process helps them, and they stop asking about grades. I think, as you say, Mike, she’s clearly a poor communicator with her students as well as a poor teacher.