ePortfolios as the

"Real” [E]state

of Composition

Johnothan Mauk in “Location, Location, Location: The Real

[E]states of Being, Writing, and Thinking in Composition”

“Students do not merely buy the terrain of academia as

one might buy a new house. As students enter into

academic space, they must, at the same time, enter into

its making….Students must learn a vast array of

cartographic skills which help them gain a sense of

location, a sense of where. And without those

skills, without a sense of location, students (and their

teachers) are quite lost.”

“In composition courses, perhaps more than any

other place in the institution, students and academia

interface (collide?) for the first time; hence academic

space and the nonacademic spaces drift together. And

because compositionists witness this spatial collision

first hand (some of us even consider it part of the

job), we have a unique opportunity to explore what it

all means.”

The official rhetoric of Mauk’s school (a community

college in the Midwest) pointed toward the students’

future (future meaning, future earning potential)

rather than to their present. At this school, the

students did not have a place of their own.

Instructors’ view: “The problem, as they perceived

it, was that students’ non-academic lives were in

constant tension with

academia, intellectually, ideologically, physically, and

metaphysically. “

“The consequence of that tension was students' lack

of intellectual investment in the courses.”

Karen (full-time writing instructor):

[Students] have a hard time finding the time to make

[writing] a process. We can say, "Writing is a process"

until we're purple, but when people have a full-time

job, all these kids, three other classes [. . .] finding

time to make it a real process is difficult. They sit

down and crank it out the night before because that's

all the time they got.”

“[P]rocess pedagogy, which suggests that students

should experience writing as a recursive set of

behaviors that evolve into increasingly focused

discourse, assumes, at the very least, that students

have time to invest themselves in such an act. But

students at Gordon [not the school’s real name] did

not, often could not, envision themselves engaged in

such activity.”

The sustainability of process pedagogy suffers when

there is no place for it to take root.

Processes must be sustained in a place.

Michael de Certeau (philosopher, author of The Practice

of Everyday Life): “The body, in other words, creates

location, a sense of where.”

Doreen Massey (geographer/theorist): “The social is…

inexorably spatial…space is not simply a template, an

objectified and abstracted entity, or even something

that is "mappable” outside of the social.”

Critical geographer Edward Soja:

suggests that in "third space," "things and thought" are on

equal terms-always working and reworking the relationship

between consciousness and space.

Consciousness, sociality ,and space are bound together.

Third space/ a term borrowing from Lefebvre's

multidimensional understanding of space, but which also

evokes a sense of a space away from home or work place.

Mauk’s argument:

“Academic space must extend itself, not merely

outward, but in all the directions of being which

constitute the lives of students.”

“Academic space is not simply a transparent template

in which teaching and learning go on; the materiality

of a campus (and/or life beyond campus) is

inextricable from its sociality.”

Due to the dispersion of students’ location in school

and community:

“…the field (or house) of composition as we know it

will change dramatically. The standard tools of daily

composition instruction are likely to change, and

online courses and virtual spaces are bound to help

promote change.”

“Pedagogical tools such as workshops, peer

editing, debates, informal discussion, impromptu

writing, small group discussion, and conferences (and

the perspectives that give them meaning) will

increasingly become only particular (and maybe a

particularly small) components of writing pedagogy-or

their features will be entirely transformed. “

“As the number of commuter students rises

throughout higher education, as students with jobs

(or with bills and no jobs) hurry into colleges, as new

generations of students locate themselves in coffee

shops and bookstores, and as Internet-minded

students situate (at least part of) their identities in

cyberspace, the traditional classroom may still exist

but it will signify something different. It will not be a

center or even a solid place.”

Mauk: “In fact, it seems only fitting that classrooms

(and academia in general) come to be seen as places

in a continuum of signifiers for intellectual space.”

While workshopping and peer editing may always be

valued practices in the composition

classroom, instructors will have to prompt students

into new kinds of reflection, invention, and planning.

These behaviors will fundamentally include all facets

of the students' lives (such as workshopping/peer

editing that occurs in the public readership space of

the portfolios rather than in class).

ePortfolios in progress demonstrate the sustainability of process—locating the individual in learning process/place.

1. Christina (locating the past of the childhood play practices in the research paper)

2. Joseph (location…Jones Beach..place memory as the catalyst for a major in environmental science)

3. Perry (using the ePortfolio to establish confidence in self and that the process will succeed)