Bridging Personal, Sociological, and Pedagogical Knowledge for Social Justice: The Role of Preservice Teacher Portfolios

• In Event: The Transformative Potential of Reflection in Teacher Education

Abstract

The first semester of the teacher education program at the authors’ university focuses on the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of education using (e)portfolios for learning and assessment. This paper shares a subset of findings from a larger study on this course to explore how ungraded multimodal portfolios inform pre-service teachers’ learning and knowledge development. We analyzed the data through the lens of Goodwin and Darity’s knowledge domains for social justice teacher education (2019). Drawing on eight interviews following 65 surveys, the initial findings indicate: (1) portfolios make pre-service teachers aware of their positionality; (2) portfolios invite pre-service teachers to develop a stance on sociological issues; and (3) portfolios allow for the bridging of personal and sociological knowledge with pedagogical knowledge.

Authors

• Shaghayegh Bahrami, Simon Fraser University

• Pooja Dharamshi, Simon Fraser University

• Amrit Kaur Cojocaru, Simon Fraser University

• Anita Sidhu, Simon Fraser University