Division II Portfolio

The Div II Portfolio
Portfolio assessment is the mainstay and a unique feature of Hampshire's Academics Core. For Division II, a student must compile information from the last four semesters of study. This leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and the specifics will vary from committee to committee. Generally, students should compile and include the midterm and final papers for courses they took that directly connect to their Concentrations, as well as provide a Self-evaluation, and Retrospective on the Div II process. Portfolios can be anywhere from 20 or 30 pages to entire binders overflowing with work, revisions, teacher comments, important reflections and responses, specific assignments that compelled student work. Students who engage in more classes during Division II will normally (though not always) have a larger portfolio than those who took fewer courses. In either case, one student's portfolio will most probably be vastly different from another's.

The Div II Portfolio must be turned in to committee well before the final Div II meeting.

Setting Up Your Div II Portfolio
Your portfolio documents the work of your Div II. You should be selective about what work goes into it and be creative about how you put it together. Here’s what it should include:


 * 1) Table of Contents
 * 2) Your revised contract.
 * 3) A list of all courses taken related to the Div II and that will be included in your Div II requirement (ie not courses that fulfilled Div I requirements).
 * 4) Copies of all evaluations for courses and other learning experiences that are part of your Div II (copied from the Hub – include course description, evaluative comments, and self evaluation(optional)). Also include five college grades, transcripts from other institutions, and additional letters of evaluation or recommendation applicable to your work. Make sure there is complete correspondence between what you listed on the Hub and the evaluations/grades put in the portfolio.
 * 5) Your retrospective essay. This is an essay that describes your concentration, discusses the experiences and questions that brought you to your Div II, describes changes in your thinking, and ends with your ideas about potential Division III work. A good retrospective is thematic and not simply a chronological description of your coursework. The essay should also point the reader to important work. It is a guide to the portfolio (there is no prescribed length but they generally range from 7-15 pages double spaced).
 * 6) Demonstration of how you met your multiple cultural perspectives expectation. You can include discussion of it within your retrospective or include a separate essay (no longer than 2 pages). It can also include reference to a section of the portfolio, depending on what makes sense with regards to the way you met this expectation.
 * 7) Your selected work organized in a logical way (usually students use dividers to mark different sections of a binder devoted to different disciplines, courses, etc.). Include a cover sheet introducing each section or paper explaining what it is and why it’s included. If in your retrospective essay you mention a book you have read or a paper you have written that marked an intellectual turning point, make sure that the book or paper is represented in your portfolio. Similarly, if a professor singles out a particular paper or project for criticism or praise, it is helpful to see it in the portfolio.
 * 8) Include original copies of important papers with professors’ comments.
 * 9) There should be papers that show your ability to use the literature(s) of your field(s) and to formulate and argument. These abilities, along with the challenges you faced and solutions you employed, are worth discussing in the retrospective.
 * 10) Consider and negotiate this with your committee how to best present visual or audio work that you are including – e.g. printed images, images or tracks on CD/DVD, or original work shown in the final meeting.
 * 11) Prepare work so it makes sense to the reader. For example, if you had an internship, do not simply include a daily journal. Write a short paper about the experience using excerpts from your journal to show your thinking and the experiences that affected it. Be creative in including non-course related work.
 * 12) You might choose to include a process or progress section to demonstrate your growth in an important skill. For example, if your writing has really come along in your Div II, you can have a section showing the change over time; you could show multiple drafts of a paper to show how you revise your written work.
 * 13) You might choose to include a bibliography of readings that you have done during your Division II, including what you read outside of courses.

The typical sequence of materials in the portfolio is:

Title page Table of Contents Contract List of Courses Evaluations/Grades Retrospective Essay Multicultural Perspectives (if not in retrospective) Papers (and if appropriate, images and/or audio) Other Learning Activities (internships, extra-curricular activities, etc.,)

Some people include a Division III contract draft if the ideas are not spelled out at the end of the retrospective. Some people also add a bibliography of readings from outside class to show what they were pursuing on their own.

Preparing for Your Final Meeting
In preparing for your final Division II meeting, you need to do the following:
 * 1) Make sure you and your committee members are happy with your contract. If it needs revision, revise it on the Hub and contact your chair and member(s) to review and approve it.
 * 2) Make it clear in your contract how you met your multiple cultural perspective expectation.
 * 3) Get your community engaged learning paperwork to Rachel Graham in Central Records.
 * 4) Prepare your Div II portfolio as described below and get copies to your chair and member(s) at an agreed upon date (generally 1-2 weeks before the final meeting).
 * 5) For your final meeting, be prepared to talk about the nature of the concentration (how would you describe it to the outside world?) and your learning. Also expect to discuss how your Division II leads to a possible Division III project. Use the meeting to help you organize your thoughts about Div III.