A Learning Portfolio of Teacher Education Students
While undertaking their formal professional Teacher Education studies at Notre Dame Institute of Education, the participants in the Bachelor of Education (BEd), International Graduate Certificate in Education (IGCE), and Master of Education (MEd) courses are encouraged to pursue a breadth of intellectual tasks, introduced to research skills, and assisted to develop a range of professional skills and techniques while advancing their pedagogical knowledge. As "the call to prepare teachers reflective about their practice is a dominant theme in recent teacher education literature" (Borko, Michalec, Timmons & Siddle, 1997), the NDIE courses demand from the students to be reflective in their approaches towards their professional learnings and teaching practices. The constructing of portfolios over recent years has gained attention as a tool to promote reflection among student teachers (Borko et al., 1997). Portfolios enable students to acquire reflective (and reflexive [sic]) learning which is derived from the careful consideration of prior activity with a reconstructive purpose (Retallick, n.d) i.e. considering the activity that has already been undertaken and trying to make it better for future use. This can also be seen as learning from a mistake. Apart from reflection, portfolios help student teachers to remember particular learning events and experiences fully and accurately (Richert, as cited in Borko, et al, 1997). Thus, constructing a learning portfolio is seen as a tool to enhance students' reflective practices as well as their professional sustainability.
A portfolio is a medium of communication. When entitled as a Learning Portfolio, it is a container of documentation that provides evidence of the knowledge, skills and disposition of a learner or a group of learners (Bird, as cited in Carroll, Potthoff, & Huber, 1996, p. 253). For teacher education students, it is a creation that emerges from their need to think about what they are doing while they are doing it in order to become effective teachers. Such reflective self-evaluation shows itself in the documentation of their attitudes, behaviours, achievements, improvements and thinking - all of which brings into view their personal growth and understanding of the profession for which they are preparing (Van Sickle, Bogan, Kamen, Butcher, 2005). However, students' portfolios in this setting have another dimension. They can tell almost as much about the teacher educator and the teaching as the taught. They speak a reality of the student teachers' experiences in the midst of their formal teacher education that must be heard and not be relegated to the subaltern status. Rather, these are voices of critique, affirmation, vision, disenchantment and energy that add invaluable evidence to the debate regarding the relevance of the students' education in terms of "fitting them for changing" themselves, their classrooms, their schools, their communities and, in the long run, the system(s) of education within Pakistan.
The Poster
The Poster is the combined effort of a group of current Bed, IGCE and MEd students and emerges from a process of "exfoliation" (Norton-Meier, 2005) of their individual and collective learning experiences in teacher education. The affirmations and challenges they offer will both confirm efforts of teacher educators and invite them to rethink aspect of their concepts, writings, practices and assessment of current and future teacher education students in the Pakistani context.
References
Borko, H., Michalec, P. Timmons, M. & Siddle, J. (1997). Student teaching portfolios: A tool for promoting reflective practice. Journal of Teacher Education, 48 (5), 345-357.
Carroll, J. A., Potthoff, D. & Huber, T. (1996). Learning from three year of portfolio use in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 47 (4), 253-262.
Krause, S. (1996). Portfolio in teacher education: Effects of instruction on pre-service teachers' early comprehension of the portfolio process. Journal of Teacher Education, 47 (2), 130-138.
Norton-Meier, L.A. (2003). To efoliate or not to efoliate? The rise of the electronic portfolio in teacher education. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 46 (6), 516 - 520.
Retallick, J. (n.d.). The portfolio guide. Karachi: AKU-IED.
Van Sickle, M., Bogan, M.B., Kamen, M. &; Butcher, C. (2005). Dilemmas faced establishing portfolio assessment of pre-service teachers in the Southeastern United States. College Teachers Journal , 39 (3), 497 - 510.
Wenzlaff, T.L. (1998). Dispositions and portfolio development: Is there a connection? Education, 118 (4) , 564 - 574.