Provocative Suggestions from Yancey

Kathleen Blake Yancey in "Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work" makes some bold claims about portfolios and how they affect students' learning and identities.

One of the most important quotes in the article says that "through practice, we compose identity, task by rhetorical task, moment by reflective moment" (757). In other words, the kinds of assignments and strategies we create and use affect both our knowledge and our identity. This claim is essentially a practical portfolio-related application of Kenneth Burke. He says that we used to think that social context did not change what we learned, just how we learned it. Now, we understand that most knowledge depends to a great extent on context--or is created by context.

Most notably, Yancey says, "What we ask students to do is who we ask them to be" (738). To some extent, that statement is frightening because it makes it sound like we teachers have more power than I like to think we do. However, her claim has value, especially in thinking about structuring portfolios. As Mikhail Bakhtin says, a writer's identity is not a solid characteristic but an expression of a person's basic, continuous line of social orientation, crystallized for that context. Put differently, a student does not write straight from a concrete identity, or even an identity that is concrete at that particular point in time; rather, he or she creates a context-appropriate identity for that particular task. D. Diane Davis notes that sometimes we talk as if the writer can transcend senses and the situation to reach "disembodied, rational thoughts." But we are not completely in control, and context affects how we say things.

For these reasons, it makes sense to think even more deeply about how we construct our students' portfolio assignments because those decisions will affect how our students construct their identities, for that particular undertaking, anyway.