Say Cheese!

You are looking at an English 121 University of Washington student e-portfolio; photographic evidence of progress and accomplishment in a service-learning based English class. My name is Ainsley, and I invite you take a peek as I illustrate, through a series of snapshots and portraits, what I learned in English 121 B.

This portfolio is the culminating project of an introductory level compositional English course at the UW. Taught by Jentery Sayers, English 121 B explores "Service-Learning, Sonic Culture, and Media Activism." The course includes numerous readings focused on opening the eyes of 121 B students to the concepts and implications of speaking about, with and for. Through blogs, podcasts and class discussion my peers and I explored the writings of numerous authors, including Sarah Kozloff, Ivan Illich and Linda Marting Alcoff. Additionally, my peers and I volunteered at local Boys and Girls Clubs throughout the quarter. This community interaction allowed us to mobilize and place in a real-world context the concepts we developed and explored during the opening sequence of the course.



The primary goal of an English 121 class at the UW is to stress four different course "outcomes". Ideally, by the end of the course my classmates and I have mastered each outcome, mobilizing them to produce writing which is effective and engaging.
The picture-perfect course outcomes are as follows:

1. "To demonstrate an awareness of the strategies that writers use in different writing contexts."

2. "To read, analyze, and synthesize complex texts and incorporate multiple kinds of evidence purposefully in order to generate and support writing. "

3. "To produce complex, analytic, persuasive arguments that matter in academic contexts. "

4. "To develop flexible strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading writing. "



In this portfolio, I present four pieces which I composed and revised in English 121. These pieces fulfill each of the four course outcomes outlined earlier, and demonstrate my proficiency and thorough understanding of each outcome. Additionally, each revised piece includes a brief analysis, tying my writing to the goals and projected outcomes of the course. These captions provide background information about the piece, while using evidence to demonstrate how I mobilize each of the course outcomes to develop productive pieces of writing. Though each piece engaged multiple, and often all, outcomes, I limit my unpacking of each outcome to a few snapshots from select pieces.