This photo was taken by Kathi of the lemon tree in her yard.
While the ePortfolio product is the most tangible and visible outcome to students, for many educators the intrinsic value of ePortfolios lies in the process of ePortfolio creation. This process involves some combination of tasks: collecting and selecting artifacts as evidence, curating and reflecting on relevant artifacts, conversing and sharing with others, and connecting and integrating past experiences with future situations. Kathi provides a more nuanced perspective on the relationship between the process of ePortfolio creation and learning.
Read below to learn more about Kathi’s orientation to ePortfolio makingness.
In 2019, Kathi characterized the spectrum of approaches to ePortfolio framing and orientation. Anchored on one end is the ePortfolio as wrapper approach, where the ePortfolio is a host for learning that occurs in the creation of the constituent artifacts. In contrast, the ePortfolio as curriculum approach highlights the integrative and inclusive affordances of ePortfolios beyond being a simple container of artifacts and reflection. This continuum is reproduced below in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The continuum of ePortfolio as Wrapper versus ePortfolio as Curriculum. This image originally appeared in ePortfolios as Curriculum, p. 3
This new way of thinking about ePortfolio approaches paralleled the development of ePortfolio tools from simple repositories to spaces that present multimodal narratives. As Pablo Avila will explain below, the process of developing that narrative and supporting it with artifacts can be the most challenging aspect of portfolios for many ePortfolio creators. The ePortfolio as curriculum approach at its core is integrative learning, which has served as a foundation for ePortfolio work as well as a liberal education promoted by American Association of Colleges and Universities. AAC&U provides definitions for integrative learning in their Integrative Learning VALUE Rubric.
Hear from Pablo Avila, Associate Director of ePortfolio and Digital Learning, LaGuardia Community College or read below:
I was first introduced to ePortfolios in my ENG101 course in my second semester at a Community College in New York City. I thought that building it would be the most difficult, but I quickly discovered that content would be what I had to think most about. What and why would I want to include in this ePortfolio? It wasn’t till much later that I realized my instructor’s approach was effective. She encouraged us to have an introductory page about ourselves and to document assignments for her course. The main audience for these ePortfolios, she told us, was her. These questions about who I am and what I want to show in this ePortfolio have stayed with me over the years, even as I transitioned to my role of helping other students build their own ePortfolios. The evolving ePortfolio scholarly work has given us the language and tools to foster a culture of ePortfolio and to deepen our practice across programs and disciplines following those principles that I was introduced to back in my early years in college. One key aspect of our work is reflective practice. We use reflection as an approach to help students in their first year in college to think about career choices, connect on-campus experiences with what they learn in the classroom, and document academic work that they can showcase to an outside audience. We value this approach in our ePortfolio practice because it sets students on the path towards graduation.
The characterization of ePortfolios as something “more” than just a repository for artifacts reiterates the idea of an ePortfolio as being more than the sum of its individual components. When asked to make the case for ePortfolios, a portfolio is so much more than a folder of documents and files. The description of the ePortfolio as curriculum resonates deeply with educators who are designing assignments and opportunities for students to adopt and practice the mindset of being an ePortfolio maker. The emphasis on all stages and aspects of creation serves as a model for fostering lifelong and lifewide learning, within and beyond higher education (Rinne, 2021). To get students to engage with us in the processes inherent to good ePortfolios practice—scaffolding, reflection, identity development—involves trust. And so, at the center of this work is a Yanceyism that is likely included in the Y entry of this collection [Link]: we must “trust the process.”