Because your work at the Writing Center is so complex, diversified, and individualized, an ePortfolio is particularly valuable for capturing, making manifest, and reflecting on the learning you accomplish every quarter you work at the Writing Center. As you participate in reflective practices to develop your ePortfolio, you will engage in self-assessment and find important connections between your work at the Writing Center and other parts of your life.
🤷 What Is an ePortfolio?
At its core, an ePortfolio is a “digitized collection of artifacts” (Lorenzo & Ittelson, 2005, p. 2). Within the context of higher education, ePortfolios are what the Association for American Colleges & Universities calls a High Impact Practice—“an ideal format for collecting evidence of student learning, especially for those outcomes not amenable…for standardized measurement” (AAC&U). An ePortfolio prioritizes metacognitive (i.e., reflective) practices, which “have been shown to increase the degree to which students transfer their learning to new settings and events” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 12).
Reason 1: Reflecting On & Documenting Work is Powerful
By using your ePortfolio to articulate the transferable knowledge, skills, and attitudes you develop at the Writing Center, you will be better able to share with an outside audience, including but not limited to future employers or graduate admissions committees, what you do, what you’ve learned, and what you’ve accomplished. Hughes, Gillespie, and Kail (2010) surveyed peer writing tutor alumni about how their experiences as peer writing tutors transferred to seven key areas of their post-tutoring lives, including “skills, values, and abilities vital in” their relationships and professions and “a deeper understanding of and commitment to collaborative learning” (p. 14).
Tutoring requires you to make many choices, often in the moment: what questions to ask, what concerns to prioritize, when to explain or model a strategy, when to change your approach, and how to respond to the particular goals and needs of the writer in front of you. Over time, some of these choices may begin to feel intuitive. Reflection creates space to slow those moments down and examine not only what you did, but why you did it.
Writing studies scholar Kara Taczak describes reflection as a deliberate mode of inquiry that brings together cognition—recognizing what we are doing—and metacognition—considering why we are making particular rhetorical or pedagogical choices (Taczak, 2015). Reflection can therefore help us move beyond simply identifying whether an appointment felt successful or challenging and toward identifying the knowledge, values, and assumptions that shaped our practice. As Taczak (2015) explains, “Reflection allows writers to recall, reframe, and relocate knowledge and practices” (p. 79).
Although Taczak writes specifically about writers’ development, this process is equally useful for thinking about our development as tutors. Metacognitive reflection gives us an opportunity to develop a language for the pedagogy we are already practicing. A tutoring choice that initially feels like I asked another question because the writer seemed stuck, for example, might also reflect a commitment to writer agency, responsiveness, or collaborative learning. Choosing to adjust a tutoring strategy when it is not working may reveal what you believe about accessibility or different ways of learning. Deciding not to address every concern in a draft may help you identify how you understand prioritization, transfer, or the scope of a tutoring appointment.
Reflection helps make that often-implicit teaching knowledge visible. For an example of this, see this UCWbLing blog post from Cailey Scott:“Wait, That Was Pedagogy?: Metacognitive Reflection & the Choices We Make as Tutors.” This kind of metacognitive awareness matters because the goal is not simply to identify a successful tutoring strategy and repeat it in every future appointment. Writers, drafts, assignments, and tutoring contexts change. Taczak and Robertson (2017) argue that metacognition and reflection help learners develop a repertoire of knowledge they can draw from, reconsider, and repurpose in new situations. Rather than relying on a fixed set of “best” tutoring strategies, reflective tutors can become more conscious of the choices available to them and more intentional about deciding which choices make sense for a particular writer and context.
A successful quarterly check-in ePortfolio will also help administrators in understanding how your your work is going at the Writing Center, help them prepare for your check-in meeting, and guide the discussion in your check-in meeting.
Reason 2: We Support Students Across DePaul in Making ePortfolios
The Writing Center serves as DePaul’s official source for student support in making Digication ePortfolios in courses and programs across DePaul. To effectively help writers develop ePortfolios, all tutors need expertise about 1.) effective design practices and digital representation and 2.) facility using Digication, the software platform DePaul uses for ePortfolios.
To make sure you have this knowledge and expertise, you complete an annual 
Digication Training .
Digication Training .📄 References
Taczak, K. (2015). Reflection is critical for writers’ development. In L. Adler-Kassner & E.
Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 78–79).
Utah State University Press.
Taczak, K., & Robertson, L. (2017). Metacognition and the reflective writing practitioner:
An integrated knowledge approach. In P. Portanova, J. M. Rifenburg, & D. Roen
(Eds.), Contemporary perspectives on cognition and writing (pp. 211–229). The WAC
Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado.
https://doi.org/10.37514/PERB.2017.0032.2.11