Liberal Studies Sonoma State University

Contact Information:
Francisco H. Vazquez, Provost
Hutchins School of Liberal Studies
Tel: (707) 664-3185
Fax: (707) 664-2505
Email: francisco.vazquez@sonoma.edu

Hutchins School of Liberal Studies

THE PORTFOLIO

Liberal Studies 302/402

Introduction to the Hutchins School

The Hutchins School of Liberal Studies is a broad-based interdisciplinary program which ranges widely across the many areas of enquiry that make up the Liberal Studies. More than just a collection of courses, Hutchins' program tries to provide the kind of educational experiences that will help students become confident of their ability to participate effectively in society. In this age of too-easy answers, well-educated citizens need to be able to think independently, but the skill is rare. For that reason, the program holds the fostering of intellectual development as one of its highest claims. To think independently, one needs to be able to ask the kinds of questions that are meaningful for the individual and effective in getting to the heart of an issue. One needs, too, to be able to make coherent sense of a wide and often confusing array of ideas and opinions. Finally, one needs to be able to bring a sense of values to bear in interpreting what is "out there." So that they may develop that independence of mind, students here are given a good deal of latitude in determining the direction their educations will take. Discovering how to use that latitude to shape a meaningful education is part of the challenge of Hutchins.

The portfolio allows the student to record and evaluate the range of educational experiences and ideas that constitute that individual's particular pathway through the Liberal Studies. At the same time, the portfolio is a means of assessment appropriate to the aims of the Hutchins program. Unlike tests, which are the usual means of evaluating a student, the completed portfolio furnishes a portrait of the independent learner and captures a sense of the shaping process through which he or she developed intellectually.

Hutchins Approaches to Learning

The Hutchins School of Liberal Studies provides many kinds of learning experiences through which you can earn the 40 units needed for the major. For example, you will be able to work independently or in small groups on projects you design; you can enroll in an occasional lecture or lecture/ discussion course with large numbers of students; some of your work may be creative in nature rather than limited to reading and writing; your study plan may involve you in an internship or "study away." Certainly, as you develop your major you will participate in several Hutchins seminars, for the seminar is, after all, the heart and soul of our enterprise.

Most of your work in Hutchins will be done in regularly scheduled Seminars, where discussions are led and assignments are made by a seminar instructor. A few of your courses in the program may be in the lecture format commonly employed by most disciplines. Still others, more focused on activities, are designated as Workshops. You may also earn units in Hutchins, however, through independent study projects, special projects or internships. Those designations may need some further explanation:

The Hutchins Major

Required Courses - First Semester

Libs 302. Introduction to Liberal Studies prepares students for learning in the seminar format, for reading critically and for writing effectively. Two major goals are 1) the application of multiple perspectives to ideas, concepts and events; and 2) the development of each student's ability to think independently.

Libs 304 A/B: These required key courses (304A - Fall, 304B - Spring) are to be taken conjunction wish Libs 302. 304A consists of an indepth exploration of the American experience, explored from a multi- cultural perspective; 304B employs cross-cultural themes to foster an international awareness.

Four Core Area Requirements

With regard to course content, you will find that most of your work will fall into the four core areas which mark Hutchins' upper-division program: Society and Self (Core Area I), The Individual and the Material World (Core Area II), The Arts and Human Experience (Core Area III), and Consciousness and Reality (Core Area IV). In order to complete the major, all Hutchins students take at least one seminar or course from each Core Area. Work in each of these Core Areas involves the student in a range of perceptions and attitudes from many disciplines. Our course description booklet each semester indicates which core areas each course fulfills.

Independent Study (Libs 310 or 410): This term indicates a kind of study you may undertake by contracting with an individual instructor that can be counted toward the major. It is up to you to propose the focus of your project and arrive at an agreement with the instructor about number of units, work to be completed, schedule of meetings during the semester, and so forth. Such projects are intended to give you the opportunity to study topics that are not already covered in Hutchins course offerings or which go beyond the boundaries of any single discipline. Independent study projects receive letter grades.

Special Projects (Libs 315 or 415): You may wish to do independent work, but in an area which is not appropriately given a letter grade. For example, certain kinds of work in the arts or other experiential learning may not lend themselves to letter grading. In such cases, you should still make your arrangements with an individual instructor and fill out a contract. In these Special Projects, then, Credit/No Credit grading is used instead of letter grades.

Internships and Study Away (Libs 397, Libs 398): A third important option for you is the Internship. Pre-credential students are not required to do Internship or Study Away. Internship allows you to contract for volunteer work in business or in public or private agencies. You receive academic credit for the research you do regarding your internship and the reports and a final paper you write discussing what you learn. You must have the Hutchins Internship Advisor's approval before enrollment: Hutchins students are expected to involve themselves at least once in an internship or to participate in Study Away. In Study Away a student makes arrangements for course work outside Hutchins, perhaps outside Sonoma State University, if that is appropriate. See your advisor to discuss these latter two kinds of work, since arrangements have to be agreed upon and put in writing before you undertake them. Work done in any of the above forms is appropriate for inclusion in the portfolio.

Portfolio/Senior Synthesis

The portfolio is a tool to enable you to plan and document your own development of the major. The portfolio begins in Hutchins' gateway course, Libs 302: Introduction to Liberal Studies; it evolves each term as you complete your course work; it culminates in your final semester in a capstone course, Libs 402: Senior Synthesis. Each portfolio is different. Yours will reflect the pathway you followed in your interdisciplinary study. We expect you to include in it examples of your achievements in each of the four core areas, key courses, independent study and study away.

All essays returned to you from your work accepted for the major are to be included in the portfolio. Brief reaction papers should not be included. Other possible and equally valid kinds of items might be slides or pictures of art work you produce, tapes of performances you give, ethnographies, records of oral interviews and case studies. Reports on learning that you do outside the regular classroom, through internships or at museums, concerts, field trips, cultural ceremonies, for example, can be included. Activities or experiences which are difficult to document in writing need to be discussed with your advisor or instructor. Generally, whatever attests to your growing understanding can be suitable. Your Senior Synthesis instructor may agree that supportive upper-division work from courses outside of the Hutchins major may be acceptable for inclusion in your portfolio.

The portfolio is not something to "get done" as soon as you start work in Hutchins; it should "grow" as you do, semester by semester. Because you will become surer of yourself as you build your major, the earlier work you include in the portfolio may (but will not necessarily) strike you as less representative as time goes on. It is nevertheless to be valued as significant of who you were at a given point. In other words, don't be discouraged if you find you have included items in a sense you have out grown. They are certainly acceptable, even important, in a book like this. They do not have to be updated or revised; if they met the requirements of your instructors, they belong in the portfolio in the condition in which you submitted them to the instructor. Your work in Libs 402 will be based on the content of your portfolio. It is thus essential that you save all your work.

While the Hutchins School places great emphasis on reading carefully and writing effectively in a number of fields, it acknowledges the validity of human expression in other forms that go beyond what can be achieved in expository writing. So strongly are we persuaded that other kinds of expression are important that we urge you to included them in your educational experience and record them in your portfolio. While your attempts may perhaps seem amateurish, they are no less important for that: the "non-discursive" can let us "say the unsayable," and the attempt is worth it.

In Libs 402 you will write an intellectual autobiography tracing the development of your thinking in the major. The second feature of Libs 402, the Senior Synthesis, explores an area or issue of special concern for you which builds on aspects of works included in the portfolio and will eventuate in a paper or project.

SENIOR SYNTHESIS Libs 302
Checklist

1. Assess intellectual skills; see Libs 402: Self-Assessment.

2. Put all essays and other materials for the portfolio in chronological order.

3. Write brief abstracts from essays.

4. Write intellectual biography.

5. Complete academic graduation forms (and waiver/concentration for those on credential track).

6. Senior Synthesis project/paper a. Develop topic b. Complete research c. Complete project/paper d. Present project/paper

7. Receive portfolio assessment.

8. Complete portfolio self-assessment.

Libs 402 SELF-ASSESSMENT

Your portfolio demonstrates that in your written and other work in Hutchins you have attained the following levels of competency in the areas listed below:

LEVELS OF COMPETENCY	LEVEL 1	LEVEL 2	LEVEL 3
Interdisciplinarity	Usually views issues through a single discipline	Sometimes uses more than one discipline to work on an issue	Often combines disciplines; thinks beyond disciplinary boundaries.
Depth of understanding/use of materials: -level of diversity of sources -interpretation of sources	Level too simple; too few Inadequate and/or inaccurate	Level adequate, number sufficient Adequate and/or accurate	Level sophisticated, number substantial Insightful and/or precise
Multiple perspectives in overall portfolio work: -pluralism, multiculturalism, etc.	Consistently employs monocultural or ethnocentric perspective	Occasionally sees from "other" point of view	Consistently aware of other perspectives
Creativity and higher-level synthesis	"Plays it safe"; depends on authorities ; keeps ideas separate from one another; wants answers	Sometimes tries "new" approaches; somewhat independent in ideas; tolerates ambiguity	Finds imaginative ways; takes risks; pulls ideas together; sees relationships; enjoys ambiguity
Communication ability (written & oral) -clarity of expression -cogency -diversity of media	Confusing Needs work One type of presentation	Straighforward Satisfactory More than one type of presentation	Elegant Good Several types of presentation (3 or more)
Seminaring skills	Babbles or else fails to participate	Adequate	"Barn builder"; sophisticated insight into material and creative application of ideas

Excerpt from:
Portfolios in the Major: A "Success" Story?"

Lu Mattson, Professor
Hutchins School of Liberal Studies

In the belief that a discussion of what has not worked may save others from unnecessary difficulty, and is therefore more important than explaining what has worked, we offer a number of our own criticisms of what we designed. A critical reader has probably already guessed some of the difficulties that our use of the portfolio, for all its possibilities, has introduced. Some of them are relatively insignificant, but the most important probably has to do with simplicity, or the lack thereof. We were unaware how perplexing this portfolio could be for faculty and students alike. Nor did we calculate how formidable portfolios can seem in courses that use them extensively. Both problems--lack of simplicity and formidability--show up in the introductory course. The portfolio does indeed include important information about the interdisciplinary major, about graduation requirements, precredential requirements. It does get the student to respond to serious questions about goals and to analyze his or her own level of achievement in previous courses. After working on the portfolio, the students seem to understand where they are headed more clearly than was previously the case. However, that first course has been seriously affected by the needs of the portfolio itself. Asking the students to read and write about each of the four Core Areas can consume too much of a semester. Admittedly, the students do have a clearer grasp of what can be included in each area, but that understanding is gained at a price. In fact, the students need that course in order to learn to seminar and to write That first aim is achieved under present circumstances, but the problem is that course materials are now selected so that each Core Area is explored by a few brief works or one longer one. The writing, too, is directed to each of the Core Areas. The papers are adequate, but not better. The problem for us is that we overdesigned the use of the portfolio in the introductory course, thereby sacrificing course focus. Unlike our other courses that do take a concentrated look al a single issue or idea, Libs 302 now takes four looks, and the result is superficiality. The students do not learn in this course how to dig deeply into a topic, and that affects the quality both of their writing and of their verbal discourse.

The portfolio is not presently used during advising in the middle semesters of the student's stay with us. In fact, the student's ongoing questions are not about portfolio development at all, nor do the advisors pursue the issue. In this instance, we have probably underdesigned rather than overdesigned our protocol. If we do intend to switch to advising about the student's intellectual growth, then we need to provide time in the semester's schedule for it to occur, and we need to work together to explore what we mean by the growth we are looking for in each student as represented through the collection of products. The idea of ongoing advising based on portfolio materials is not a bad one; it is simply an undeveloped one.

Our assumptions about the final course also needs reexamination. We realize that we sent two messages to the students regarding the Senior Synthesis paper, and each had a weakness inherent in it. One of our instructions was for the student to return to the collected materials, synopsize the work present for each Core Area, and write a major essay "bridging" two or more of them. That is exactly the kind of thing that sounds wonderful during planning stages. The reality of the situation is that no one, neither faculty nor student, knows what a "bridging" essay is. If we did know, we would probably recognize that writing one is far too formidable a task for an undergraduate. Besides, who wants to put out a major effort to revisit last semester's work?

The second message we sent the students was that they could write a Senior Synthesis which looked at where they had been intellectually, where the program had taken them, and where they expected to go in the future. It is not hard to imagine which of the two essays the students choose to write. It is also not difficult to imagine how self-serving and sycophantic those essays can become. When pushed, many of the students will cop to it that they select the latter option because it is easy, and because it is political to praise us. That, needless to say, is not what we intended. We could, however, have guessed what we would get. The first batch of portfolios presented the latter type of essay exclusively, and it was nice to read them. So did the second batch, but by then we began to understand what we had invited. Obviously, another piece of work remains for us to get straight among ourselves what we should be asking for. The exercise so far has been illustrative.

Use of the portfolio for program evaluation, too, presents some problems. In fact, sitting down with colleagues over several students' collected works is quite an interesting exercise. At present, the procedure looks to be more promising than we at first assumed it was. Our intention to use it to see how a student had (or had not) developed under our tutelage led us to instruct the students to include their papers in the condition in which they received them from their instructors. We wanted to see what kind of guidance the student was receiving. We had not calculated that the students are reluctant to put anything less than their best foot forward. They want to edit their work or to exclude any of it that got less than raves from the instructor. And yet, sanitized papers will not tell us as much as we want to know. The use of the portfolio, which goes down a different path than that used by art majors who collect only their best work, needs to be made more effective. We recognize that having the students place materials in four categories with the Core Areas defeats our ability to see easily how a student has developed through time, and so a proposal is before us simply to have them arrange their work chronologically. In our attempt at elegance, we missed the obvious.

So far, this report says little about the achievements of the portfolio. That is probably as well, for we are truly in a middle state right now in which we are beginning to understand what is, for us at any rate, a new medium. Even if we did not recognize that the portfolio would seem formidable to some students, we were right in believing that they, as well as we, would find satisfaction in signs of their growth, and that should be mentioned. The formidability is itself interesting in that we didn't anticipate it: We assumed that the student would see the portfolio as an opportunity to create something uniquely one's own, and, for most of them, that is proving to be the case. But there is always the overlooked angle. The student who doesn't see the portfolio as a creative challenge is likely to see it as a frightening task. At the outset the book is, after all, empty except for material we provide describing the program, and they are to fill it. It turns out that we need to remember that not all juniors will be thrilled at the prospect, even while we know that they will probably be proud of the outcome.