Possibilities for patchwork eportfolios? Critical dialogues and reflexivity as strategic acts of interruption

Abstract

As a stratified social space Higher Education’s linguistic ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1991) or ‘everyday use’ of literacy valorises and legitimates essayist literacy and its monologic addressivity, a discursive arena where, “it is the tutor’s voice that predominates, determining what the task is and how it should be done” (Lillis 2001, p.75) with an emphasis upon evaluation of text as finished product. Writing within dialogic practices of addressivity, where tutor and student writers, “engage in the construction of text as meaning making in progress” (Lillis 2001, p.44) illustrates the fabrication of literacies and of reflective stories where teacher identity may be seen “as a gradual ‘coming to know’” (Winter 2003, p.120) dependent in part upon social assembly and conversations.Such infidelity to monologicism demands a dynamic dialogic forum such as that supported by an electronic portfolio as a strategic act of interruption of essayist norms. The eportfolio system, pebblePAD, was piloted with a group of 15 PGCE (PCE) students in 2004-5. The system was used for teaching, learning and assessment and as a data collection tool. The data was generated from individual and shared artefacts: audits, journals, critical incident sharing, online questionnaires and from summative reflective assignments. The reflective writing within the emergent community of practice provide evidence of Lave and Wenger’s (1991, p.53) model which urges us to remember that, “learning involves the construction of identities” and that the conceptual bridge that peripheral participation in a community offers has the potential to allow us to take “a decentred view of master-apprenticeship relations.” The nurturing and enabling of such a community of practice within a professional course such as the PGCE has the potential to create politicised and engaged reflective writers and practitioners who view risk and uncertainty as positive factors who “take a decentred view of the master-apprentice…(leading) to an understanding that mastery resides not in the master but in the organization of the community of practice of which the master is part” (Lave & Wenger 1991, p.94)