E-Portfolios as a Professional Tool and Fluid Space for Evolving Early-Career Professional-Teacher Identities

• In Event: Portfolios and Reflection in Teaching and Teacher Education SIG

Abstract

Ethnographic field methods provided access and a means to document and consider the ways that teachers come to be teachers. In this paper we specifically explore teaching e-portfolios developed within the student teaching seminar as cultural sites of transformation where individuals come to identify themselves as teachers. This ethnography helps to illuminate the processes of identity formation within the e-portfolio enriched student teaching seminar by organizing and elucidating thematic elements of identity development across 24 e-portfolios. Critical and pivotal documents and events are described in order to consider the cultural and symbolic processes of identity development as teachers are coming to have a sense of who they wanted to be professionally and socially.

Authors

• Diane W. Gomez, Manhattanville College

• Diane E. Lang, Orange-Ulster BOCES