Prompt
Now that you have completed your ethnography for this semester, it’s time to take a moment to look back over all the hard work you have done. In order to do that, you will put together a portfolio that collects, represents, and reflects upon the processes and products of your work this semester. You can put anything in the portfolio that bears any relation to your project this semester. Of course, you will want to put much of the writing you have done, but you might also consider putting pictures of spaces and artifacts, audio clips from your interviews, drawings, or even poetry. In addition to these items, you will produce a reflective cover letter, an annotated table of contents, and a short piece for presentation. Each of these items are outlined below.

What to Put in the Portfolio
You may choose to put any piece of writing, drawing, photography, or sound into your portfolio. Following are some suggestions (required elements are noted):

• A reflective cover letter, addressed to your instructor (required)
• An annotated table of contents (required)
• A short piece for presentation (required)
• Your final mini-ethnography (required)
• Any of your previous papers, like the positioning paper, space/artifact paper, and/or interview paper.
• Any early drafts of any of the papers – if you feel like you made a lot of progress on one particular piece of writing, you might want to include multiple drafts of it to show how much progress you made, or to show the ways your thinking changed over the course of the research.
• Any writing you did on Blackboard.
• Pictures of artifacts from your fieldsite.
• Actual artifacts (must be small enough to fit in portfolio).
• Pictures of the spaces of your fieldsite.
• A map of your fieldsite.
• Transcripts of interviews.
• Audio tapes (or audio files) of the interviews.
• Selections from your field notes.
• Anything else that you feel reflects your project this semester.

The Reflective Cover Letter
The first thing in your portfolio should be a reflective cover letter, addressed to your instructor. This letter is similar to the cover worksheets you have written for each of your assignments this semester, but it is less about a particular piece of writing and more about your portfolio as a whole. You might try some of the following strategies (but you will not have space to do all of these):

• Discuss your best piece of writing and why it is your best.
• Detail the revisions you have made and the improvements and changes that you want readers to notice.
• Discuss each piece of writing included in the portfolio, touching on the strengths of each.
• Outline the process that one or more of your entries went through.
• Demonstrate what this portfolio illustrates about you as a writer, ethnographer, learner, or critical thinker.
• Acknowledge weaknesses in your work but show how you worked to overcome them.
• Acknowledge the effects of peer conferences on your writing.
• Reflect on what you have learned about your fieldsite, the university, or yourself through your writing.
• Prepare your instructor for a positive evaluation of your work.

Remember: this is not a checklist, but rather a list of strategies you might use. There is no one way to produce this letter, since it has to do with your own processes this semester, and will therefore be unique to you. This letter should follow the standard conventions of letter writing, and it should also come to about two, single-spaced pages.

The Annotated Table of Contents
The second item in your portfolio should be this annotated table of contents. You must list everything that went into the portfolio, and you must also provide short annotations to each item in that list. An annotation may run from one or two sentences to a full paragraph. Use these annotations to set up each item for your reader.

The Short Piece for Publication and Presentation
The third item in your portfolio should be a short piece that is intended for presentation in class. Be sure to consider the following:

• This piece should present, in some way, what you think is the most important thing to understand about your sub-culture. Make your audience understand something interesting about your field site.
• One of the big challenges here will be to condense all the work you have done this semester into a very short piece.
• Don’t discuss the obvious; rather, show your audience something new, something they would not already know.
• You can be as creative as you like with this piece, so long as you make some effort at making your audience understand your sub-culture.
• Try to make it engaging and entertaining.

This piece should run about two, double-spaced pages, and you will read it to the class during the final week of class.

Due Date
 The complete portfolio, with all required components, is due on Friday, May 7th by 2pm. Portfolios should be turned in at Derek's office, 59 English Building.