1. ePortfolios as the
"Real” [E]state
of Composition

2.  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.”

3.  “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.”

4.  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.

5.  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.”

6.  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.”

7.  “[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.”

8.  The sustainability of process pedagogy suffers when
there is no place for it to take root.
 Processes must be sustained in a place.

9.  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.”

10. 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.

11.  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.”

12. 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.”

13.  “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. “

14.  “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.”

15.  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).

16.  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)