Portfolios

Sally Fincherhci Disciplinary Commons

First Meeting: 5th October 2007

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What is the genre?

• Artists

• Models

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From the container …

• Political & monetary portfolios

BRIEF OF SURVEY OF BRITAIN’S WARTIME ECONOMIC ORGANISATION FORWARDED BY NOTE BY HONORABLE ARTHUR GREENWOOD,

MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO,29 AUGUST 1940,

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From the container …

• Political & monetary portfolios

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What do they have in common?

• The purposeful selection of artefacts to achieve an end

• Selection is not random: you choose the contents to reflect the parts that are most important to you (and/or your theme)

• What end? This requires consideration of audience and purpose

• Our Commons Portfolios may be quite different from a portfolio you would compile for promotion – different audience, different purpose

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The Lab Report

• Title

• Hypothesis

• Materials

• Procedure

• Data

• Calculations

• Results

• Conclusions

• Title page

• Abstract

• Introduction

• Materials and Methods

• Results

• Discussion

• Literature Cited

The Journal Paper

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The power of form

• Allows comparability

• Allows for different sorts of research, with different emphases

• Content is guaranteed by peer review

• The Journal paper is to research as …

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… the Portfolio is to teaching ?

• Context(or environment or place and space)

• Content

• Instructional Design

• Delivery

• Assessment

• Evaluation

• Allows comparability

• Allows for different sorts of practice, with different emphases

• Content guaranteed by the nature of the evidence (and how it is structured) and peer review

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The Nature & Structure of Portfolio Content

• Paired elements

• Nothing admissible without an evidential artefact

• Necessity of capture

Artefact – Commentary

Evidence – Analysis

What – Why

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The Portfolio?

• Common headings … but how do they fit together?

“I would propose four different formats and themes that might be useful frameworks for our course investigations and documentation: the course as anatomical structure; the natural history of a course; the ecology of courses; and courses as investigations.”

Lee Shulman, "Course Anatomy: The Dissection and Analysis of Knowledge Through Teaching", in The Course Portfolio, Hutchins, Pat (ed.), 1999.

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The Portfolio?

Anatomy

• parts, structure, part-part relations, aggregations of parts, function of parts and aggregates.

Natural History

• developmental trajectory; narrative, journey, itinerary, coherence.

Ecology

• programmatic context; it's “fit” within the scheme of things.

Investigation

• course as series of experiments to test learning conjectures. What do you want to understand about your students?

Summarized list by Josh Tenenberg

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Developing Reflective Practice

The Course Portfolio can be thought of as a document that provides different levels of access to different audiences:

• Private

• Protected

• Public

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Portfolio: Levels of Access

• Private: The Individual Teacher - just you This material is for your eyes only. A diary space for

self-disclosure and reflection.

• Protected: The Group of Peers - a few friends This is material that you share with your peers. For

our purposes, we can certainly consider one another as peers, though you might want to consider colleagues in your department or in the broader discipline as part of this group as well. Sharing here is relatively safe and contained, and will be where we’ll draw most of our peer reviews from.

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Portfolio: Levels of Access

• Public: The Wide Wide World This is the material that we will post on the Internet,

for all eyes to see, the final product that is often referred to as The Course Portfolio. We’ll want to ensure that there are no gaffes or errors, and, as a result of this being accessed by a wider audience, we might want to include more context and navigational aids

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