Mini-Portfolio: Critical and Creative Thinking

The purpose of this assignment is to help you achieve the course learning goals shown in bold:

By the end of the course, you should have:

Created a final portfolio that draws from your work completed in the program and uses the portfolio-building process to integrate and reflect on your undergraduate education as a whole.
Developed skills in drawing on evidence in your portfolio to support claims about your learning and capacities for various audiences (friends, family, employers, grad school admissions committee, etc.).
Become articulate about linkages between learning portfolios and professional portfolios.
Developed your capacities to present your work orally and in writing to various audiences.
Worked collaboratively with other students to enrich your understanding of interdisciplinarity.

IAS Learning Objective (Links to an external site.): Critical and CreativeThinking

IAS students develop their critical and creative thinking abilities by learning how to identify assumptions, and to work out how those assumptions inform results. They assess multiple perspectives, with an eye to understanding why and how they differ, and developing the capacity to engage in controversy productively. Students learn to identify central questions or concerns informing other work, and to develop their own work with clear animating questions. Students develop a range of skills in interpretation, analysis, argumentation, application, synthesis, and evaluation.

For this assignment, you will create a mini-portfolio focused on your critical and creative thinking capacities as described above and as re-interpreted by you in class.

Choose two to four artifacts from your work archive that provide evidence of these capacities. If you like, you can choose one artifact in which your abilities were less developed, and another in which they were better developed, to make a comparison. You may add more artifacts to your UW Google site for this purpose if you like.
Write a 300- to 500-word framing essay that explains your current capabilities in critical and creative thinking. Keep in mind that you are describing where you are in this moment in time, so it would be helpful to consider what came before this moment and where you intend to go after you graduate, and talk about your critical and creative thinking in those terms. Refer to your selected artifacts and explain how they serve as evidence of your capabilities in critical and creative thinking. You should aim to be as specific as possible in explaining to the reader how the artifacts you have chosen demonstrate your abilities with regard to critical and creative thinking. Remember that your reader will be unfamiliar with your work so you will need to describe it (rather than simply mentioning it). To this end, some of the writing from your annotated bibliography might be useful. If so, feel free to reuse it here.
As you complete this assignment, please draw on the IAS description of the critical and creative thinking learning objective, your revision of that description, and/or other materials and readings.