By Emily Cook, TLS staff writer
In a course on Medieval history, cuPortfolio is helping students use multimedia to understand how pop culture sees the Middle Ages.
Second year students in Professor Marc Saurette’s class, Discovering the Medieval and Early Modern Past, explore pop culture conceptions of the Middle Ages. Saurette says the multimedia nature of cuPortfolio encourages students to use less conventional research and analysis methods.
“Our approach to these discourses of the Middle Ages is not limited to text, as historians tend to usually focus on, but rather to engage with music, YouTube videos, webpages, as well as art work and architectural schematics,” Saurette says.
Saurette uses cuPortfolio for two types of assignments in the course – analytical writing and critical reflection. He says the first asks students to evaluate an artefact from pop culture that depicts Medieval past. The second assignment is a reflection on pre-conceptions about the Middle Ages, and how these change during the course.
“These two different kinds of assignments overlapped very well and made [students] more aware of the process by which they were learning,” he says.
Throughout these two assignments, Saurette says students are assigned to give feedback to peers and rewrite assignments accordingly. They are then asked to write a critical reflection on this process. He says this experience, combined with their multimedia sources, has helped students work in ways they typically wouldn’t in other history courses.
“At end of term, it was that experience that students were quite consciously aware of as being something different, something harder than they would have wanted to do, but also the most rewarding,” he says.
Saurette says the greatest struggle for him has been assessing creativity. As a solution, he says he’s created multiple, small assignments and used small group tutorials to get a greater sense of students’ knowledge and abilities.
“Assessment is both difficult, but also rewarding, because you’re seeing students being engaged and working in different ways,” he says.
Saurette’s advice to other instructors interested in incorporating cuPortfolio into their courses is not to teach the course in the same way it’s always been taught. He says integrating cuPortfolio into his course pushed him to redesign assignments that ask students to be more self-aware and to engage in critical self-reflection and critical reflection on their peers.
Since the introduction of the new cuPortfolio assignments in his course, Saurette says he is pleased with the high level of student engagement and collegiality.
The key to these successful results, he says, is that he built cuPortfolio into the course – giving students grades for their work and assigning peer-review partners so that students could provide feedback on each other’s portfolios. Thoughtful assignment design is critical, he adds.
“Students are willing to give a lot, as long as they know what is being expected of them,” he says.
To find out more about Saurette’s experience with cuPortfolio, watch the full interview below. You can also watch interviews with other instructors on the cuPortfolio instructor peer support site.
Below is a list of time codes related to the start of a new question in the video. You can jump to a new topic by moving the video time bar to the respective time codes.
3:57 – What value did using cuPortfolio add to your course?
5:38 – What value did using reflection in cuPortfolio add to your course?
7:29 – How did you assess student portfolios?
10:26 – What advice do you have for an instructor who is thinking about using cuPortfolio in their teaching?