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Rethink the Audience
Rethink the Audience
Learning portfolios will help our students shift away from the “is this good enough for the teacher” mentality. When we ask students to use their digital portfolio to demonstrate their learning, we should stress that making their understanding public means broadening their audience. Digital portfolios allow students to share their understanding with teachers, future teachers, parents, college admissions officials, future employers, their future selves, and their personal learning network. Students should understand that their learning enables them to join a wider conversation, to participate more broadly in the discussions that shape our world. With digital portfolios, students can learn to connect to to a wider audience.
Target Audience
Target Audience
Who is the audience for a student Learning Portfolio? The answer to this question might seem straightforward: it’s the teacher, or an evaluator, or a potential employer, or the student herself. But a moment’s reflection reveals that the audience for student Learning Portfolio is usually, perhaps always, multiple. If a student composes an Learning Portfolio in a classroom, her teacher is obviously a primary audience. But since reflection and learning are key goals of Learning Portfolio pedagogy, the student is also a crucial audience for her own work. Teachers should encourage students to identify an external audience for their Portfolios, such as classmates, friends, parents, and more.
Every final draft my students complete is done for an outside audience. It may be for a small audience of Kindergarten children or a national audience on educational television. Either way, my role as teacher is not as the sole judge of their work but rather similar to that of a sports coach or a play director: I am helping them to get their work ready for the public eye. There is a reason to do the work well, and it’s not just because the teacher wants it that way.
-- Ron Berger, An Ethic of Excellence (2003)
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