The teaching portfolio: The relationship between text and practice

Initially, the paper examines the concept of the teaching portfolio. Specifically, it asks the question: how is the teaching portfolio supposed to work? What is the process by which it is anticipated that teaching portfolios will contribute to improving the quality of teaching in higher education? In answering this question, I am looking at portfolios across a spectrum where they are, at one end, very fully developmental in purpose and at the other, very summative. In each of these cases, I am interrogating the relationship between the text produced, the teaching practice of the writer and the broader institutional conditions.

The paper suggests that different kinds of teaching portfolios operate with somewhat different dynamics. The portfolio produced as part of a development program may have aspiration as its driving force, and the actual constructing of the account may function to enable the writer to gear his or her practice differently in order to instantiate a claim to a qualitatively higher conception of teaching. The effect of this may be to embed a new standard in the writer's practice - to give them something to live up to and to judge themselves by.

On the other hand, the portfolio produced as part of a summative process, for example, an application for promotion, will have a very different impulse as its driving force. The function of the portfolio is to persuade a committee that the writer is an excellent teacher. The claims made need to be factual and well-evidenced, predominantly oriented towards outcomes rather than processes. The dynamic by which the constructing of these claims might make the writer's practice better is less directly visible. Obviously there is a retrospective element: in order to position yourself to make certain claims, you need to have done certain things, both by way of achievement and by way of evaluation, and the complex process of accomplishing this agenda over some years may have improved practice. But perhaps one of the crucial questions is whether there is also a prospective effect: are there ways in which the representation of achievement can itself generate qualitatively better understandings of teaching and impel better practice? Is it possible to guide the production of a summative portfolio in order to produce these outcomes?

The exploration of these kinds of questions draws on current experience of portfolios as reported in the research literature. It is broadly contextualised by the experience at Griffith University where, currently, it is possible to distinguish three kinds of teaching portfolios - a wholly summative version, a wholly developmental version and a hybrid version.

These different portfolios are the subject of a small-scale empirical study. The aim of the analysis is to examine the portfolios for indications of the extent and nature of the efficacy or 'activeness' of the relationship between the text and the writer's practice. This work is based on the analysis of text alone, thus taking up the challenge faced by numerous committees of understanding and evaluating practice from the portfolio (understood as both account and evidence) alone.