Kathleen Blake Yancey explains that students assume that they learn from one single curriculum, but actually, as she argues, they really work from three operating simultaneously:
The students bring with them their lived curriculum, that is, the product of all their learning to date. In the classroom, they engage in the delivered curriculum, which is the planned curriculum, outlined by syllabi, supported by materials and activities, and so on. The delivered curriculum, however, is experienced quite differently by different students: it is the experienced curriculum. The intersection among these three curricula provides the optimal place for learning; reflection is one means of establishing the location of that place … Through reflection students articulate their own native language, a combination of discourses infused with idiolect, the multiplicity of which is what they bring into class with them … Students can theorize about their own writing in powerful ways. Through reflection they can assign causality, they can see multiple perspectives, they can invoke multiple contexts. Such theorizing doesn’t occur “naturally”: as a reflective social process, it requires structure, situatedness, reply, engagement. When treated as a rhetorical act, when practiced, it becomes a discipline’ a habit of mind (Yancey, 1998, p. 19).
In response to this theory, please reflect upon your experiences within the writing practice minor. Today we know that writing is everywhere and in all that we do; thus, the hope of the writing practices minor is to develop practices and knowledge(s) that can be transferred to our rhetorical, personal, and social discourses. In order to effectively reflect upon your experiences within this minor, it will be helpful to go back and review course syllabi, activities, writings, and other projects that you did within these courses. How did the delivered, lived, and experienced curriculums come together for you? What do you understand about writing and yourself as a writer since taking the courses? What did you learn? How have you evolved as a learner and a writer? How did the three curriculums work together to help you evolve in both your identities and in your learning(s)?
This assignment helps you to begin to think through/about what you have learned and experienced in the writing minor courses, and as a result, will help you in the development of your ePortfolio.