Shape shifting: educational, social service, and sports experiences and achievements that can be arranged and rearranged in order to define and redefine oneself as a certain kind of competent person.
This blog is focused on the article from Young, Dillon, and Moje entitled "Shape-Shifting Portfolios: Millennial Youth, Literacies, and the Game of Life." These portfolios can come from a variety of things, like school subjects, sports clubs, academic clubs, internships, or they can explore how "family income, race and ethnicity, native language, social class, gender, popular culture, digital technologies, globalization, and/or geographic and social space" because these elements influence students' lives (115).
Imagine the amount of material we all have to include in our shape-shifting portfolios from this semester alone. The blog we're writing on right now could be included in our portfolios. I have had some passionate blogs and revelations on my blog, which act as pieces that I could include in my portfolio, or more specifically, my ENG307 portfolio.
My ENG307 portfolio would mainly consist of my blogs, but it would also include the projects I have worked on. I would include the pages I worked on for social bookmarking, the pages for bookmaking, and now the media literacy lesson that Staci and I are working on right now.
Portfolios are important though--especially those that come from our education classes for when we eventually apply for jobs. We'll want these materials anyway to refer back to when we're in the profession, and to add to once we're there. A student named Katie wrote that "Learning how to put together the portfolio and market yourself is the most important thing that I learned" (118). Marketing ourselves... I think that's what it comes to at this point in the game for us here.
One could have multiple portfolios for the amount of talents and skills he/she possesses. Honestly, I could see myself putting forth a lot of portfolios if I dedicated the time. Students could put together theirs before college, in order to market themselves and promote their talents. Our role as teachers is to assign meaningful and relevant projects that students can produce to put in those portfolios. If we allow students choice and range to work on projects that they can produce to the best of their abilities, then we are doing them a great service in regards to adding to portfolios.
What's in your portfolio?
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2 comments:
Hey Jami, thanks for your Brady Bunch idea on the media literacy project! How is yours and Staci's project coming along?
Jami, yes, your shape-shifting portfolio is not just that which is tangible of course but that which "makes you up" as Friedman's "untouchable" in the current and future market!
It's who you are in the process of becoming and are....neat concept.
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