Portfolio Building: The relationship with literacies in students’ everyday lives

This article explores some propositions about how students’ everyday lives may interact with their success at learning in a large Further Education College in England. Some students, on paper, have all the appropriate entry qualifications, but still struggle to complete their courses. Indeed, some do not complete at all. So, what could be done to help these students achieve success? As a member of a large-scale research project team, I have been investigating the home literacies of further education students. Papen (2005a:14) points out that ‘it is useful and necessary before any intervention can be planned, to carry out research which identifies learners’ everyday literacy practices’. Of course, there are many other aspects of people’s everyday lives that will influence their learning success. However, in this article I want to focus on the possibility of the influence of home literacy practices, by exploring how the reading and writing in the everyday lives of students could be drawn upon and utilized in order to help these students to succeed on their chosen college courses.