Fresno State DISCOVERe: Day 4 Reflection – Pathbrite

As an English teacher and rhetorician, I am always thinking about purpose, audience, and context, and I want my composition students to be thinking about these things too, particularly when they generate a portfolio at the end of our courses as a kind of culminating experience. When we were introduced to pathbrite and ePortfolios earlier in the week, my interest was initially piqued, thinking this could be a new opportunity for students to consider purpose, audience, and context. In today’s pathbrite breakout session, I’m further convinced that this will be a move in a positive direction, potentially redefining what portfolios look like in our university’s first year writing program.

Pathbrite LogoAs our world context changes—digital literacies becoming an intrinsic part of academic literacy and citizenship in general—it only makes sense that portfolios in our first year writing program should evolve to reflect those world context changes. But my sense is that pathbrite can allow us to do more than merely shift portfolios from one textual form to another (from print to digital media in this case). The element of public consumption—that added dimension of audience and purpose—will invite both students and faculty to orient these texts differently throughout the writing process, from annotating texts they read to editing texts for final publication. In the past, I have invited my students to consider both their real audience (their classmates and me) and their imagined, ideal audience (a broader college-educated audience, other interested public intellectuals, the authors they’re responding to in their writing, etc.). Pathbrite allows us to shift parts of the imagined, ideal audience toward the real audience. This will certainly effect the way both students and faculty think about student writing because their writing and the publication thereof more closely reflects real-world writing models.