Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 22, No. 1 (2024) 

Developing Consultants’ Multimodal Literacy Through ePortfolios

Christopher Basgier
Auburn University
crb0085@auburn.edu

Layli Miron
Indiana University
lamiro@iu.edu

Richard Jake Gebhardt
Auburn University
rjg0043@auburn.edu

Abstract

Writing center consultant training must account for the multiple media and modes students use as they compose on new digital platforms. While most consultants come to writing center work already confident in traditional literacies, to advise on multimodal projects, they also need to understand how elements such as visual design, navigability, and accessibility play into the rhetorical situation. Starting in 2021, our writing center assigned an ePortfolio-focused professional development curriculum to our consultants, culminating with their creation of websites that integrated and showcased their knowledge, skills, and abilities. The authors studied the consultants’ responses over the first two years of implementation, collecting data from surveys, session observations, and interviews, which we analyzed through inductive and deductive coding. Our results indicate that consultants advanced their understanding of multimodality through their participation in the ePortfolio curriculum and applied their learning in consultations not only about ePortfolios, but also about other visually rich media and application materials. Other writing centers may consider incorporating ePortfolios into their tutor development programs.

Peer consultants today may largely be members of Generation Z, for whom “new media” is the only media, but they do not necessarily enter writing center work with expertise in digital composing or the vocabulary to converse skillfully with clients about multimodal texts. Cheatle’s survey on multimodal support indicates that “training is the best way to improve the confidence of administrators and students working with multimodal composition” (22). If program leaders want their writing center to support multimodal composing, they will need to provide this training to their staff. Several writing center practitioners have shared their own methods of multimodal consultant training, which typically involve hands-on practice with multimedia platforms and reflection on the learning process (e.g., Fishman; Clements; Del Russo and Shapiro; McGinnis and Gray). Yet, the field of writing center studies has a relative paucity of empirical research on effective methods of consultant training in multimodality or multiliteracies. 

We contribute a replicable, aggregable, data-supported (RAD) study on the effects of a required ePortfolio on consultants’ knowledge of, and ability to support, multimodal projects in the writing center. As detailed below, we conducted a two-year, mixed-methods, IRB-approved study on a consultant education pilot program. We required every peer consultant to create an online, interactive website that showcases their knowledge, skills, and abilities through artifacts and reflection—an ePortfolio—which is recognized as a high-impact educational practice benefiting student performance, persistence, and graduation (C. Edward Watson et al.). Our curriculum resembles the learning-by-doing training in “multimodal thinking” advocated by Lee, based on the “notion that consultants are producers not just users or readers (they should be able to ‘produce’ the modes they are analyzing)” (5). Yet, our curriculum differs from other training activities in its sustained, intensive nature, with each peer consultant developing an ePortfolio throughout their employment with our writing center. We have only found one other writing center that similarly incorporates ePortfolios into consultant development (Dietz & Derrick).

Learning not only happens via the creation of the artifacts included in an ePortfolio, but also through the creation of the ePortfolio itself, a potential Yancey has called ePortfolio as curriculum. ePortfolio as curriculum “engage[s] students as ePortfolio makers and in the process support[s] them in developing ePortfolio literacy, that is, knowledge about ePortfolios; about reflective practices represented in them; and about ePortfolio makingness, defined as ways to create ePortfolios” (3). By extension, organizing writing center professional development around an ePortfolio as curriculum, we reasoned, could help peer consultants develop multiliteracies in general, and thus support clients who brought in their own multimodal projects. Put differently, we wanted ePortfolio composing to become a catalyst for expanding peer consultants’ understanding of the kinds of projects they could support, the rhetorical dimensions of multimodal composing, and the potential value of well-structured reflection to integrate learning across contexts (e.g., employment in the writing center).

The principles informing our ePortfolio professional development derived from a wider ePortfolio Project that our office has spearheaded since 2012 (described further under “Institutional Context and Writing Center Background”):

1. Critical thinking through reflection focuses on analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creation within artifacts, arrangement, and reflective writing and across the ePortfolio as a whole.

2. Visual literacy focuses on how the author uses visual elements to provide evidence, construct deeper meaning, and support and enhance the message of the ePortfolio.

3. Technical competency focuses on the application of technical elements that should enhance the way information is conveyed to an audience, differentiating an ePortfolio from other products (social media sites, blogs, commercial websites) to construct identity.

4. Written communication focuses on the message of the overall ePortfolio and the story it conveys, rather than the quality of individual components such as specific artifacts.

5. Accessibility focuses on designing a website that users of all abilities can comprehend.

6. Ethical literacy focuses on intellectual property, citation, and respectful representation of other people.

Each principle was taught through a lesson involving a short lecture and activity; handouts for these lessons can be found on our program’s website (auburn.edu/writing/resources). Consultants were also assigned to write a consulting philosophy and include at least two artifacts related to their work in the writing center. These artifacts needed to demonstrate knowledge and skills, going beyond simple written reflections about the job. We required peer consultants to exchange feedback, seeing the potential for them to learn how to give clients feedback on a range of multimodal genres, especially ones with visual and digital modes.

In this article, we detail our methods for investigating whether the ePortfolio curriculum bolstered peer consultants’ ability to support multimodal projects. Our results indicate that, generally, consultants advanced their understanding of multimodality and the rhetorical situation, albeit with different levels of sophistication. They applied their learning in consultations not only about ePortfolios, but also about other visually rich media and about application materials. Based on these results, we offer recommendations for other writing center professionals interested in integrating ePortfolio curricula into consultant development.

Institutional Context and Writing Center Background

Our writing center is housed in the Office of the Provost of a large, public, R1, land-grant university in the Southeastern United States. The university has especially strong enrollments in agriculture, engineering, and business, as well as smaller but consistent enrollments in fields like fashion merchandising and industrial design, meaning that multimodal communication plays a strong role across much of the institution. Given this context, we strive to serve all writers with all kinds of writing, which we have long defined capaciously to include multimodal genres like scientific posters, laboratory reports, websites, and slide decks. 

Furthermore, beginning in 2012, we became the stewards of our institution’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for accreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC): the ePortfolio Project, which sought to enhance students’ multimodal communication abilities through the creation of integrative, public-facing websites. During the QEP period, 47 departments or programs participated in the ePortfolio Project, meaning some subset of their faculty had integrated ePortfolios, reflective writing, visual communication, and/or technological literacy into their classrooms. We also offered an ePortfolio Student Workshop Series that helped students develop their ePortfolios, but attendance fell well below sustainable levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. We wanted to ensure students could get feedback on their ePortfolios and other multimodal projects, so we introduced the ePortfolio requirement for peer consultants beginning in fall 2021. This shift in ePortfolio support coincided with the end of the QEP period; by integrating ePortfolios into our day-to-day writing center work, we have been able to retain resources that might have been diverted to other institutional initiatives.

Methods

We designed our study as RAD research of the type called for by writing center scholars such as Driscoll and Perdue. Specifically, following the guidance of those scholars for the purpose of making our study replicable at other writing centers, we define our research question; discuss participant recruitment and backgrounds; share survey, observation, and interview instruments; state our transcription and coding methods; disclose all themes we identified via coding; and acknowledge our study’s limitations. 

Our central research question asked, “How does peer consultant professional development focused on creating ePortfolios impact consultants’ practices?” To answer this question, we conducted a survey, interviews, and observations of ePortfolio appointments.

All peer consultants were asked to take the survey at the end of each term from fall 2021 to spring 2023. At the end of the survey, they could select whether they elected to participate in the research study. The complete survey can be found in Appendix A. It includes Likert-type questions that gauged their skills in supporting clients with ePortfolio outcomes and their professional growth, as well as open-ended questions about their learning and professional development in the curriculum. Taken together, these questions provided us with quantitative and qualitative data to better understand the value of ePortfolios in writing center professional development and the curriculum’s impact on consulting.

To triangulate the survey data, we collected two additional forms of data. The first was a semi-structured interview. We recruited interview participants by emailing peer consultants who had agreed to participate in the study at the end of each term, and we arranged interviews with anyone who responded to the request. Most interviews lasted approximately thirty minutes, and they centered on six questions devoted to the impact on consulting and professional growth. (The questionnaire has been reproduced in Appendix B.) We recorded the interviews via Zoom, and we began with the automatically generated transcript, correcting transcription errors as needed. The second form of data was our observations of appointments focused on ePortfolios, which involved one peer consultant giving feedback to another. All peer consultants participated in such appointments as part of the curriculum. Out of a total of 66 ePortfolio appointments, we observed 18. We used a standardized observation form (Appendix C) to record our observation notes; this form is organized according to our client and consultant learning outcomes.

Once data collection was complete, we cleaned transcripts and organized all data into 368 stable units, typically complete answers to survey or interview questions, or complete observation notes in a given form field. We elected to organize units this way to preserve the context of participants’ thinking across sentences and to provide a stable, rule-based way of segmenting data, focused on the rhetorical context of the unit (see Geisler & Swartz 69). The downside of this approach is that some units are long, up to 250 words, which means we had to allow for double coding of units that had multiple ideas or themes embedded. We undertook two rounds of coding, one inductive and the other deductive. In the first round, we worked individually, reading survey responses, interview transcripts, and observation notes holistically, identifying patterns, and organizing units into loose buckets; after discussion, we eliminated redundant codes and clarified definitions. 

Our final code list follows:

• Rhetorical Awareness: Participant reports or demonstrates helping clients think about audience and/or purpose.

• Visual Literacy: Participant reports or demonstrates helping clients with visual design.

• Technical Competence: Participant reports or demonstrates helping clients with choosing a platform, using a platform (e.g., Wix), or making materials accessible.

• Artifacts: Participant reports or demonstrates helping clients select and arrange artifacts in an ePortfolio.

• Reflective Writing: Participant reports or demonstrates helping clients work on reflective writing.

• Professional Documents: Participant reports or demonstrates helping clients with personal brand or application materials (e.g., résumés or personal statements).

• Reflection on Consulting: Participant explains that the reflections, consulting philosophy statement, or overall learning process helped them with their consulting style and/or increased their feelings of confidence in helping clients with ePortfolios or other projects.

• N/A: No applicable code.

We divvied units among the three of us so that each unit was coded twice, and we used Microsoft Excel to do so. After our first round of coding, our agreement was below the acceptable threshold of 80%, so we adjudicated select units with agreement below 50%. After adjudication, our agreement reached 96%.

Results

We received 60 eligible responses to the survey; several responses represent the same individual participant completing the survey over multiple semesters. Of those, 42% indicated that they had created an ePortfolio before participating in the professional development curriculum. Most responses (39) indicated that they had had between one and four appointments that dealt with digital media, visual design, multimodal projects/design, and/or ePortfolios. Table 1 includes the number of responses to Likert-scale questions about the impact of the ePortfolio curriculum on participants’ consulting practices. In general, participants agreed that the curriculum prepared them to grow as peer consultants who could support others in creating ePortfolios and analogous documents.

In addition to the survey, we conducted 12 interviews with consultants about their experiences of the curriculum, and we observed 12 ePortfolio appointments. Interview transcripts, observation notes (collected via the observation form), and open-ended survey responses constituted the qualitative data we coded. Table 2 includes the number and percent of units for each code. Of note, the large number of codes marked N/A is due to a subset of questions about participants’ own ePortfolios, which are outside the scope of this study. In the next section, we discuss each code, analyzing participants’ responses in light of our research question. 

Discussion

Our data indicate that peer consultants felt they gained valuable knowledge and skills for multimodal appointments via the ePortfolio curriculum. Their surveys and interviews reflected rhetorically informed, multimodal literacy. They said they grew more comfortable experimenting with new technologies. They told us they became more adept at guiding writers in shaping artifacts, reflections, and visual design into a coherent personal and professional narrative for specific audiences and purposes. And we saw indications that they were able to transfer this knowledge to other (non-ePortfolio) appointments. However, these positive effects were not ubiquitous. We also share instances in which some of our participants shared surface-level explanations or outright misconceptions of aspects of ePortfolios, such as mere tips and tricks in using technology or a notion of visual design as decoration. Still, despite these underdeveloped ideas about multimodality, peer consultants expressed an overall positive impact on their learning and ability to conduct appointments with new genres and media. In the following analyses, we name respondents using a number and letter indicating the year and order of response.

Rhetorical Awareness

We begin our discussion with rhetorical awareness because it figures prominently in many of the other codes we discuss subsequently. Here, we want to establish the ways in which the ePortfolio curriculum appeared to attune peer consultants to matters of audience and purpose. In several of the sessions we observed, consultants engaged their coworkers-as-clients in conversations specifically about the ePortfolio’s potential audience beyond the writing center. For instance, one consultant, 22B, guided their client to discuss their career goals, asking them to share knowledge about their prospective industry, publishing, and potential internships. Another consultant, 22F, similarly engaged their client in a conversation about the fashion industry’s expectations for professional documents like the ePortfolio. According to the observation notes, “They also talked about how this field gave [the writer] more space to talk about herself as a person with the understanding that her future employers would be interested in getting to know her as a [person] outside of her formal professional identity.” Such observation notes indicate that consultants discussed how audience expectations depend on the field, encouraged writers to tailor their websites to potential employers, and leveraged the wider variety of modes available in an ePortfolio when compared to written mediums.

More expansively, survey and interview participants reported that the ePortfolio curriculum had helped them become more capable of drawing writers’ attention to audience and purpose, whether in ePortfolios or other writing projects, and supervisors noted several instances of this in later observations of ePortfolio sessions. Many of these responses focused on helping writers analyze their audiences and reflect on their goals, typically for application-related documents (CVs, cover letters, and personal statements). As 21H wrote, “I have learned how to help students reflect on what they would like their audience to know about them in order to further develop their writing project.” One interviewee, 23E, commented that, although they had held few ePortfolio-focused sessions, they thought they had transferred ideas about tailoring writing to “future careers” to helping with other genres. They said they now attended more to the rhetorical situation: “asking more about the purpose, and, like, finding out what exactly they want to do and what they’re going to do, because I can help shape kind of the overall idea.”

Visual Literacy

Sometimes, peer consultants’ responses and practices represented visual literacy as a rhetorical means of communication. This mindset could be difficult to see, especially when we coded units that simply mentioned our participants helping peers with their visual design, even when they did not elaborate on the nature of that help. Often these comments briefly mentioned specific aspects of visual design, such as “color palette” (22B, survey), “galleries” (22F, observation), “image selection” (22I, observation), “white space, alignment, relative sizes of content” (21F, observation), “decorative images” (23E, observation), and “aesthetic appeal” (21G, observation).

When our data does go deeper, several significant themes arise. The first is the link between visual design and accessibility, which participants frequently mentioned. For example, in a representative survey comment, participant 23D wrote:

The ePortfolio curriculum has taught me a lot about inclusion and accessibility with visual media. For example, in one lesson, I particularly remember learning about font, sizing, and background colors that can make it easier for readers to view. This lesson made me much more cognizant of how I designed both my ePortfolio and other media, such as presentations and visual media, and I have applied this to my tutoring practices in sharing this information with clients and working with them to make their works more accessible to their audiences.

Here, participant 23D connects specific elements of visual design, which were only mentioned offhandedly by others, to accessibility as a crucial literacy practice. This individual also reports sharing these principles with clients, echoing many other participants who said the same thing.

Participant 23D also elucidated how they transferred knowledge of visual design to other genres: 

I have had people come in with PowerPoints that have, like, a lot of writing on them . . . and they really just wanted to work on the writing. But we ended up working on the PowerPoints themselves and saying, how about we separate this and make the font bigger just so it’s easier to follow, easier to read different fonts and colors against different backgrounds, different things like that.

Likewise, in an interview, participant 22E told us that when peers brought in scientific posters or slide decks, “I was able to show them . . . the layout, the designing, the contrast, and all those things.” These responses illustrate how the ePortfolio curriculum supported visual literacy across genres in the writing center.

A few of our participants began asking sophisticated questions about the relationship between visual design and communication. On the one hand, participant 22A explained that the relationship between image and communication was closely related. In an interview, they said, “I was looking at, I think it was [consultant’s], she did a really minimalist one. And then [consultant] did a really, like, creative looking one, and so we were talking about, like, how much do you want to . . . show yourself, and then how much you try to keep it, like, professional.” In this comment, we see 22A describing the ways visual choices can communicate a more personalized and idiosyncratic self-representation or a more polished and professional one. On the other hand, participant 22B distinguished between design and content, from which we inferred a distinction between design and communication. In an interview, they considered, “how are we balancing you know content with—with design.” This balancing act, while understandable, does lead us to ask whether some consultants saw visual design as less communicative than decorative. 

Technical Competence

In interviews and survey responses, several participants described their ability to help clients begin a new ePortfolio site, most often in the platform Wix. For example, in an interview, participant 20A reflected, “I’ve had a few ePortfolio appointments, where I was able to be like, oh yeah, I’ve used this technology before, here’s a few tips that I learned through this and such.” Similarly, participant 23A told us, “I’ve been working with Wix for a long time. Now I have found, like, a bunch of little ways to get around certain common problems. It kind of helps with like making the design, like, cohesive.” These responses treat technical competence as a matter of knowing “tips and tricks” about website builders. 

In at least one case, however, a participant indicated learning what we understood as transferrable technical know-how. Participant 22A explained that they had recently had a client using the presentation platform Prezi, and although it was unfamiliar, learning Wix helped them navigate the platform: 

Because I was so used to, like, using Wix . . . I, like, could figure out how to use Prezi, and then there was something she had done, where she added a page and not added, like, a sub-topic. And so it looked a little different, and so I was able to, like, figure it out and fix it because being exposed to this program helped me learn a new program faster.

This response demonstrates how technical competence can be a kind of literacy, rather than an assortment of tips and tricks. Participant 22I demonstrated a similar, deep technological literacy differently during an appointment in which they helped a client find and peruse the Wix help guide, a move we see as scaffolding the client’s independence.

Indeed, during our observations, we witnessed many sophisticated consulting approaches beyond sharing tips and tricks. Our observation notes frequently mention the patience our participants demonstrated towards their clients during technical appointments, many of which involved building new ePortfolio sites from scratch. Several observation notes also reflect our participants’ willingness to experiment. For example, one of us observed, “23E’s patient help with the technical aspects of the platform was exemplary. She didn’t necessarily know how to do everything from the start, but she had a can-do attitude to investigating and exploring.” During these experimental sessions, participants often empowered clients to hold the metaphorical pen by pausing and giving them time to use the site editor to make changes.

In addition to these technologically literate consulting practices, two participants appeared to bring a rhetorical mindset to their technically oriented consultations. During an interview, participant 22B described asking clients to toggle between the editing view and the published view so they could get multiple perspectives on the site: “when you’re looking at something from like the editing side of the platform, you know, it can look like XYZ. But then when you change it over and you’re navigating it like someone else would, you’re like, ‘Oh, this does not look right,’ or ‘This isn’t as easy to navigate as I thought it was.’” With this move, 22B invited clients to take on an audience’s perspective, something we saw participant 21F do during an appointment when she asked her client how her target audiences would be viewing the website: on a phone or on a computer. A rhetorical mindset also influenced the technical dimensions of accessibility that reflected our training. For instance, during an appointment, participant 22F suggested that a client revise the text describing hyperlinks to make them accessible to users of screen readers. These rhetorical suggestions influenced how clients utilized the technical affordances of site builders to guide audiences.

Artifacts

Just as peer consultants varied in their technical competence, so, too, did we observe some misrepresentations of what counted as an artifact. Some participants named reflections a kind of artifact, whereas we taught artifacts as evidence of the ideas presented in reflections. In an interview, participant 23C described a student who wanted “help with artifacts”: “So we kind of just went through and kind of talked about what she found important to, like, be presented in a portfolio like this, and we decided that reflections would be very important for her style.” Participant 22C made a similar error when they told us, “An artifact is, like, literally anything you want to put on there. It could be reflections and blurbs.” However, almost immediately after this, 22C added a correct statement about the relationship between artifacts and reflection: “If you can add, like an actual reflection to an artifact . . . that could add so much more like depth to it.” 

In our observations, we saw participants discuss artifacts with clients in two different, rhetorically oriented ways: an audience-oriented approach, and a message-oriented approach. In the audience-oriented approach, our participants suggested clients select and organize artifacts, in one manner or another, “for the sake of greater usability,” as one observation note put it. In the message-oriented approach, our participants asked clients to use their artifacts as evidence of their knowledge, skills, abilities, and personal brand, which is how we taught it in the curriculum. For example, in one appointment, participant 20C noticed a theme of “passion” in the client’s ePortfolio and suggested that they use that theme to tie together various artifacts which otherwise seemed disconnected. The mix of accurate and inaccurate descriptions of the relationship between artifacts and reflections suggests to us a need to further revise the curriculum to clarify peer consultants’ understanding.

Reflective Writing

Despite some confusion around reflection, we did find evidence in observations that consultants were helping their clients (in this case, fellow consultants) think and write critically about their experiences. Both 20G and 22F helped their clients with the “About Me” page, which, as the site visitor’s introduction to the author, requires deep reflection on how to convey a compelling identity and personal brand. Other consultants prompted their clients to think reflectively about certain experiences as a first step toward writing reflections. 22F helped their client brainstorm “some key principles of consulting as a way to begin drafting her consulting philosophy statement.” 22B asked their client about the “key points” they wanted their ePortfolio to focus on, prompting the writer to share “issues or ideas he’s interested in,” which generated bases for reflective writing. 

We hoped the consultants would transfer the reflection honed through their ePortfolios to helping writers with various reflection tasks, and we found some evidence that our hope was realized. Interviewee 23E related how a client was seeking assistance with a personal statement for a graduate school application. When 23E reviewed their outline, they noticed it offered only barebones facts, without considering how the experiences affected the applicant. The consultant counseled that every applicant would have “the internships and the grades,” and to stand out, this writer would need to show “why it’s important.” Through their conversation, the writer reflected on their experiences, realizing that they displayed “communicative” and “adaptive” attributes. The consultant recalled telling the writer, “The story, people will remember that much more than just, like, saying, ‘I did this internship,’ and then it also shows all these soft skills.” 23E commented that their approach “definitely comes from, like, the ePortfolio.” Thus, the ePortfolio curriculum enabled this consultant to lead a writer through an effective reflection exercise. 

Professional Documents

As the previous section suggests, some participants told us or demonstrated to us that the ePortfolio curriculum bolstered peer consultants’ ability to support writers’ professional documents. Personal brand, a core identity that unifies a person’s materials, features prominently in our ePortfolio curriculum. By definition, a personal brand should apply to all of one’s application materials, i.e., their professional documents. So, even though the ePortfolio curriculum didn’t provide consultants with direct instruction on professional documents, the concept of personal brand should have helped them approach such consultations—and our evidence indicates that it did.

Multiple survey respondents connected their learning from the curriculum to their ability to consult on professional documents, frequently naming résumés, CVs, cover letters, or personal statements. For example, 20C recounted,

I’ve had multiple clients come in with either ePortfolios or similar professional documents. Completing the curriculum (especially the Personal Brand module) has helped me to guide clients with these projects. Specifically, I often help clients create a professional identity around which they can organize their résumé, CV, etc.

Similarly, 23F gave the example of applying their learning by “helping one client who was applying for graduate school decide which parts of her personal and professional identity would allow her to stand out to the admissions board.” Apparently, more than a few consultants recognized that the concept of crafting a professional identity for a given audience applied broadly.

Indeed, several interviewees recounted using their learning about personal brand to help writers develop application statements. One interviewee, 22F, reflected on how the ePortfolio had taught them that, to keep their target audience’s attention, they needed to write concisely. This insight helped them guide an applicant to refine their scholarship statement. Another consultant, 23A, commented that “the module on personal brand, and making our consultant philosophy, that [guidance] helped me a lot on how to write personal statements and help people a lot with their applications.” Specifically, they used their knowledge of personal brand to help several graduate school applicants by posing questions and synthesizing experiences:

What are your career goals? How is what you’re learning now applicable to those goals? What would you like to continue learning? And we kind of just worked through those steps of how any experience kind of builds towards that knowledge, even if that experience doesn’t seem cohesive with the rest of what you’re learning.

College can feel to students like a jumble of discrete experiences, yet as this anecdote suggests, an ePortfolio mindset encourages students to turn that jumble into a structured narrative of growth—not only to stoke their personal sense of achievement, but also to articulate their story to the gatekeepers who will influence their next steps in life.

Reflection on Consulting

Some responses described instances when peer consultants directly applied their new knowledge of ePortfolios in sessions about ePortfolios, thus strengthening their consulting abilities. For example, interviewee 23D recalled,

There was one appointment in particular, where someone actually came in with an ePortfolio, and we were able to look at that, together with those different concepts in mind, and we were able to add descriptions to pictures and make sure that everything, like, we went over like, “Where did you get this picture? Is this […] picture fair use? Did you ask this user?”

In this scenario, the consultant applied concepts from the curriculum’s lesson about representation, fair use, and copyright.

Additionally, some consultants commented that because of the curriculum, they felt more confident helping with a range of projects including ePortfolios, visual media such as PowerPoints, and professional documents that benefit from personal branding. In the words of survey respondent 21F, 

I have had a few appointments that were for ePortfolios or Résumés and I feel as though the curriculum for the ePortfolios has greatly helped me in these sessions. Before starting work at the writing center this semester, ePortfolios were the thing that made me the most nervous. I was scared that someone would bring me one in a session and I would have no clue how to help them. That never happened! 

The consultant’s trajectory from worrying about their ability to help with ePortfolios to feeling relatively confident is heartening, as it confirms that the ePortfolio curriculum’s most basic learning outcome was accomplished: writers can now get informed help on their multimodal work from our consultants. 

For many, the takeaways were more indirect, having less to do with specific knowledge and more with mindsets and strategies. Some consultants reflected that the experience of creating an ePortfolio enhanced their compassion for writers struggling to adapt to new genres and disciplinary writing expectations. Frustration at trying to learn how to use a website builder without much technical guidance proved to be a common feeling. This struggle had a revelatory effect, as they realized that many writers feel the same way about their academic assignments. As one interviewee, 22C, explained, 

Creating a portfolio is kind of frustrating, and I don’t get a lot of—I don’t get like really frustrated with like just straight, like, writing assignments. So, it’s kind of put me in a headspace of like, oh my God, this is gonna kill me. I can’t get this design right or take it. So, it’s kind of made me be like, okay, I can see how some of my clients, you know, might be in that position for some of the writing, if they’re not, like, used to that genre, because you know, the ePortfolio is an incredibly different genre from anything else that I’ve produced.

For peer consultants who are often confident writers unfazed by academic writing, being thrust into an unfamiliar type of writing attuned them to clients’ emotions and needs—for instance, in the words of survey respondent 22A, the need to “take certain appointments slower and take the time to explain things clearly.”

Another influence on consultants’ mindset is their increased appreciation for the role creativity, individuality, and personal voice play in writing. Our ePortfolio curriculum encouraged expression, pushing our consultants to find a personal brand and to display aspects of their personality. At least one consultant, 22B, said they recommend ePortfolios to their clients as a way of “introducing people to that more creative aspect,” where the site “showcases who I am.” Others reported applying the valuation of individuality in ePortfolios to their consulting mindset more generally. Survey respondent 23E reflected, “every student has a different writing process and way they like to do things. I have begun thinking of this as their own personal brand. So although it may not be my personal brand, I am able to remind myself that everyone has a different process […].” Another respondent, 23B, noted, “I have been able to see how individuality comes through in writing, mainly from how people interpret the assignment of ePortfolios to look and include whatever they think is important. This has helped me notice clients’ voices in writing and work with them to get that individuality included.” The ePortfolio curriculum’s emphasis on self-expression formed a basis for these consultants as they described a shift in their mindset about writing toward valuing diverse styles.

Limitations

Although we used mixed methods to triangulate our findings, our study still has several limitations that might be addressed by future research. First, different administrators took different approaches to recording observation notes. Despite our use of a standardized form, some administrators’ notes were more detailed than others; those with less detail required us to rely on inference or memory when coding. By recording ePortfolio sessions, ideally with video and audio, researchers could develop more nuanced pictures of multimodal practice in writing center appointments.

Second, nearly all observations were conducted during appointments with two peer consultants, one of whom was a client. This approach was mainly for convenience: since we set up these appointments as part of consultants’ professional development, we could plan observations in advance. Other clients might make an ePortfolio appointment at any time, requiring constant monitoring on our part. Thus, the consultations we observed were conducted amongst coworkers with similar levels of experience with ePortfolio principles. Appointments with completely inexperienced clients might proceed differently, although we anticipate that consultants would likely use many of the same skills.

Third, our results may be skewed because of the opt-in nature of the study. This limitation applies especially to the interviews, which were likely conducted with our most motivated peer consultants. Apathetic or trepidatious consultants may have opted out, potentially resulting in more positive results.

Fourth, to maintain our consultants’ anonymity, we did not collect their ePortfolios as part of this study. Therefore, we do not have an empirical measure of the quality of peer consultants’ multimodal compositions, which may be related to their ability to conduct high-quality multimodal appointments in the writing center. Because our program has a rubric associated with the four outcomes listed above, a quality assessment may be possible in a future study.

Finally, although our study participants regularly discussed how they applied what they had learned about ePortfolios to adjacent genres, such as PowerPoints or personal statements, they rarely mentioned other genres. Future research could explicitly examine the extent to which ePortfolio-rich writing center professional development also builds consultants’ knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy with a wider range of genres.

Conclusion

By providing evidence for an effective method of preparing consultants to support students’ multimodal composing, we have aimed to contribute to the conversations on multimedia and digital literacy that have circulated among writing centers for several decades. Using ePortfolios in consultant education stimulates consultants to confront the challenges of a highly visual, digital medium, which reflects the contemporary expectations for successful, engaging communication. The resulting struggle to master an unfamiliar platform is in itself educational, as consultants not only learn some practical digital composing skills, but also remember what it feels like to face a daunting writing task, a common feeling among the students we serve. Despite initial frustrations with the learning process, all our consultants eventually produce personal websites. 

We believe that having consultants create ePortfolios could produce similarly effective results for other writing centers without huge labor or monetary costs. Our ePortfolio curriculum is available in our unit’s collection of open educational resources (auburn.edu/writing/resources). Along with this freely available curriculum, there are many free website platforms such as Wix, Weebly, and WordPress; our materials on platforms and technology offer some basic information about each of these three popular options. Writing center leaders might feel they need to master website design or pay for a particular platform before implementing the curriculum, but that is not the case. As our experience proves, consultants can figure out the technical aspects of their chosen web platform through independent problem-solving and seeking help from coworkers—both important competencies for their professional growth. If using ePortfolios to develop consultants still seems out of reach, components of our curriculum, such as the consultant-to-consultant sessions and the consulting philosophy assignment, can still help consultants refine and reflect on their pedagogy.

For our own part, we plan to continue requiring all our consultants to develop ePortfolios indefinitely, while periodically updating the curriculum. As we found through this study, many of our consultants appear to need more scaffolding to select or develop strong artifacts that demonstrate their skills and knowledge and to write compelling reflections. We envision developing more advanced lessons on these topics that consultants who already have a full draft of their ePortfolio can use to improve their site. No doubt, as technology evolves, we will need to make further revisions to our training, yet we anticipate that communication will only become more multimodal in coming years—our digitally mediated, screen-saturated world seems unlikely to return to its analog roots—making the need to train consultants in this regard a permanent priority for writing centers.