Poster presented at AERA division K 2012
Frankie Stein’s ePortfolio: A creative ethnography unstitching a Teacher’s body of knowledge
Objectives
To create life Dr. Frankenstein carefully chose the perfect “pieces”. He methodically put these together to create his masterpiece but instead was faced with a catastrophe. Despite the fact that his pieces do make a whole, the connections between them were missing; there was no soul. Thus, his Monster was alive - but fundamentally flawed (Shelley, 1984). We feel this captures the fundamental flaw in teacher education. As other scholars have articulated (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Korthagen, Loughran, & Russell, 2006; Russell, McPherson, & Martin, 2001), teacher education programs too often focus student teachers on learning isolated content packaged as ‘best practices’, taught in fragmented programs that lack opportunities to build the deep connections between personal understandings, professional knowledge and school based experiences. We address this challenge, presenting our findings through five ethnographic fictions that speak to the lived experience of doing an ePortfolio.
The Prezi presentation below shows the poster in panels stictched together for the 5" by 3" poster.
Prezi of Frankenstein poster
File(s) to Download
Theoretical framework
In this poster we will construct a creative ethnography (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Sparkes, 2002) intended to evoke a visceral response from the reader suggesting how an ePortfolio (eP) practice offers a way to begin addressing the flaws in teacher education programs. Using creative ethnography, we will represent the lived experience of being a student teacher in a teacher education program using an eP. We believe that an eP process (multi-media storage and retrieval of electronic learning evidence) as an aspect of eLearning, systematically developed within a teacher education program, can create a self-renewing system that grows from both individual and programmatic assessment of student learning. Our analysis of the student teachers’ insights showed how the eLearning processes of the eP enabled what Osberg, Biesta, & Cilliers (2008) describe as an emergent learning system.
A critical issue that has emerged around ePs is the fostering of student ownership. As noted by Strudler and Wetzel (2005), there needs to be a balance between specifying portfolio entries and letting students determine their entries, with prescription focused on form rather than content. As Borko et al., (1997) warns a lack of ownership will make the portfolio something that diverts students’ attention away from learning and teaching not supporting and building their confidence as teachers. Creating an electronic framework offers spaces for students to choose from life experiences, assignments and practicum materials, thus inviting and encouraging a range of artifacts. With student choice at the core we have examined our ePortfolio process drawing on what Davis and Sumara (2006) call complexity thinking. Throughout our analysis we examine how key components of complex learning systems such as internal diversity, enabling constraints, bottom-up organization, redundancy, nested knowing and decentralized control are features that are both evident in eP interactions and potential to extend our theorizing about teacher education.