Portfolios in the first course
Your first course in the writing sequence might be Writing 5, Writing 2-3, or Humanities 1. We've loaded a First Course page into your portfolio because we think its important to reflect on and remember what you learned in that course. If you take the time to reflect on that course, it can set you up for success in the rest of your Dartmouth career. You can use your First Course page to make a record of your transition to writing at Dartmouth.
Building your First Course page
Depending on the course you take, your faculty might require you to do some work in the portfolio for the course. If that's the case for you, your faculty will give you guidelines for how to complete that work.
If that's not the case, it's up to you to determine how to make a record of your experiences. Based on scholarship about student learning and writing at the college level, we recommend that you use your First Course page to:
- showcase your best work from this course and write a brief description that answers the question, "What makes this your best work?"
- showcase you most challenging project from this course and write a brief description that answers the question, "what was challenging about the project?"
Recording these projects and experiences should help you remember what you did in years to come and make you adept at consciously re-using and adapting the strategies you develop in your first writing course at Dartmouth. You'll need to re-use those strategies in your second course, but you'll also need to change your approach to fit your new academic context.
For guidance on how to upload documents, see directions on the Pre-College page of this site.