NCHC and ePortfolio Research

Manette's ePortfolio

Asia's ePortfolio

And you are currently navigated to Zach's ePortfolio!

ePortfolio

The Presentation above is a general information for Honors Program students I put together in an effort to consolidate information. The more we can make the honors program transparent, the more it will succeed in providing a Transformative, Engaging and and Personalized experience to all students.

The presentation below is the presentation from the 2022 National Collegiate Honors Conference by myself (Zach Johnson), Manette Perez, Michael Davis, Asia Rondoni, Kathy Tran-Peters, and Michael Young.

My pages below are 33-54.

Last Updated: Nov 6th, 2022

Verbal portion of presentation - pertinent slides above

are p. 33 - 54 (there are a lot of transitions).

I used to work in film. I was an indie assistant director and production coordinator: mostly I decided where to park the porta-potties. During the radical re-shifting of our collective consciousness, now referrred to as initial COVID lockdown, I had an existential crisis and decided that I was quitting film forever and going back to school.

I'm going to today talk about reflection in the ePortfolio and how, to quote the thesis today, "it is an empowering tool for sharing [our] stories." As well as looking at "personal ownership of [our] educational journeys."

Challenging a common Misconception: "Honors programs are exclusive and elitist."

My colleagues, previously in the presentation:

Manette: great responsibility.

Michael: Really describes the way enrichment experiences allow for us to invest in ourselves by creating positive actions out there in the real world.

I want to add on to my colleagues here and say that reflective practices, an essential component of ePortfolios, act as critiques and challenges to our own behaviors in the real world. When addressing our responsibility to be active in the shaping of our own identity and its relation to others' identities, critique and self-examination of behavior is important (Mitchell, Thomas, Smith, 2018).

When I decided to quit pursuing filmmaking, it came on the heels of years of journaling and exercises in self-reflective practices. The reflective practices I've had the oppotunity to pursue in the Honors Program have significantly deepened my understanding of my motivations and the desire to shift my pre-occupation.

Imaginative Constraints: Because of these constraints, it is in our best interest to reflect in our eportfolio about ACTUAL LEARNING OUTCOMES.

These come from intersections of our lived experience and what happens formally in the educational setting.

I'm looking at my COMM 1080 Gen Ed communications requirement. The idea of gen ed requirements is often met with distaste or outright disgust at having to be present for the class. It is seen as a chore, as something to slog through.

Through effective reflection pieces, perhaps it won't feel like a slog.

[On the slide are some things to keep in mind about gen ed requirements, including: Do these constraints encourage us to select personal topics?]

This class on Conflict Management and Diversity gave me the opportunity to not only research negotiation and communication between secular and religous individuals; it also let me explore power dynamics in my life that led to me quitting my job and getting a new one. I was able to discover myself and how I interacted with the economy through reflection on communication.

Expressing vulnerability and relating it to knowledge is healthy, especially knowledge of the self. Becoming a learner of yourself is mandatory to success and well-being. Learning all your intricacies, documenting the social experiments and tests of your limits that have occurred while in college gives some idea of the path one has traced and perhaps gives the reader an idea of where to set their own heading.

So why maintain the ePortfolio and what goes in it.

The WHY in the situation is A SPECIFIC GOAL.

The WHAT here is the ACTUAL CONTENT.

The specific goal is necessary.

Learning through the ePortfolio needs a nudge in the right direction (Perkins 2021). Roco & Barbéra note that simply handing a student a learning tool will not make the best use of that tool. The students need instruction and direction: the WHY.

This can be:

- Institutional Requirements

- Market Yourself

- Grant Apps

- Resume Building

- More!

The WHAT has more to do with specific content. This includes learning outside the classroom. This portion of the ePortfolio is also a requirement for all SLCC Honors students. It is integral because it takes us beyond even the Enrichment Experiences, and asks us to apply what we have learned in the real world. I often find that I'm applying things without realizing it. And when I do realize, its a great hit of dopamine. Yes! I made a connection.

When I pursued filmmaking, I had written numerous scripts that contained a lot of thought-work on the topics I was interested in. I've made this website called Please Steal This, where I've got scripts posted up with a creative commons attribute license, and I'm inviting anyone to come have a piece of the stories I'm telling. No one may look at them, but that's okay, I don't have any control over that. The content, specific to each individual, IS THE CONTEXT of the ePortfolio (Seldin & Miller 2008).

Helen Chen from McMaster University: an ePortfolio will do for your education life what LinkedIn does for your professional, and Facebook may do for your social life.

I disagree in that the ePortfolio itself is not social -- it isn't something your fellow studens are going to be accessing and debating. It serves a specific function and ENCOURAGES social interaction.

Reflection is nothing without social interaction.

A conversation that is coming up more and more is the conversation of Decolonization. This isn't a one-and-done process. As a Settler person, I have to realize that I will never be Decolonized, but I can work with Indigenous people to depower my privilege and create a more equitable future. The ePortfolio is a tool by which I can CRITICALLY QUESTION the way I think, behave and engage in my relationships with others. Especially behind the paywalls of this institution we are all here representing: higher education (Mitchell, Thomas, Smith, 2018).

So when I consider the stories I was helping to tell as a production coordinator and assistant director, I think of the ways we were not advancing the dialogue of any one particular conversation. I want to interact with the world and have conversations. Film only presented, what seemed to me, a static way to do that.

Self-Reflection has also let me challange whether or not my trajectory is building toward an accessible future -- can I enter my new field confidently?

I'll leave you with this quote from writer Jamaica Kincaid:

“And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead … people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship?”

Thanks!

Zach

See My Reflection Piece Below

If you are to read this, it is a bit overwhelming, which the whole experience was as well. Traveling has always been something I'm not privileged to and do not prioritize, so much of the itinerary was overwhelming. I really dove into as many sessions as I could, and that was also overwhelming. It's 12 pages long, so don't get too worried about trying to read it right now, its mostly for myself! 

My main takeaway from the conference when we presented, and through the research my teammates and I conducted on ePortfolio use, is that the practice of blogging, journaling and yes, (e)portfolio construction, is a personal endeavor. Whether or not the goal is to show it to someone, what I ultimately need to most represent is the person who took the time to scrapbook it together: myself. The process also needs to "center community"-- and this isn't the online or virtual community, because again, there is not a guarantee anyone but the student will ever see the portfolio or the reflection --that exists in the direct sphere of my life. Who are those in their life with whom I interact with on a day-to-day? Regardless of proximity. It is not a social media, but rather a pro-social media.

Whatever you do today, take some time to think about how you intentionally structure the learning that takes place throughout your life.

Best,

ZJ