Recording Your Excellent Adventure: Archiving for Transparency & Transfer in Faculty Development

ePortfolio scholarship does not typically emphasize continued faculty support or assessment of faculty support and implementation. Scholars recognize that faculty training to teach with technology must be ongoing—one time training would not suffice. Morgan (2003) argued that faculty needed to be trained for both “initial adoption” and “expanded use” (p. 10). Having faculty use ePortfolios to document their own professional development activities is one method for both promoting continued learning and transfer of learning while simultaneously making transparent the return on investment of difficult to assess professional develop initiatives.

Much of the scholarship about eportfolios collects data from students upon completion of an eportfolio assignment (for example: Fink, 2001; Corbett, LaFrance, Giacomini, and Fournier, 2013). Such scholarship often focuses on the final, presentation portfolio. Before there is a final portfolio, portfolio producers require a larger collection, or archive, of multimodal materials from which to pull when they present and reflect. Helping students, as well as faculty professional development participants, to systematically archive materials so that they might later reflect and engage helps foster various habits of mind: persistence, curiosity, and openness (Framework, 2011), as well as problem solving, data collection, and continuous learning (Costa, 2008). Our various faculty professional development activities help faculty to develop their own archival habits of mind; helping to change faculty attention and archival “patterns and values that [they] have come to see as so natural that [they] really don’t even see them anymore” (Davidson, 2011, p. 29).

In this session, presenters will share a variety of professional development activities, both those related to promoting the use of ePortfolios in teaching as well as those for writing instructors, that foster an archival habit of mind. Beyond just sharing “what is happening at these institutions,” presenters will connect activities to ePortfolio scholarship and learning theories as well as share some assessment data results. We will also open and close the session with activities that demonstrate archiving, transfer, and transparency.

By asking faculty participating in professional development activities to develop multimodal archival habits of mind, we emphasize the formative, scaffolding activities that they must engage in to make connections between their professional development learning and their curricular revisions. Once these archives exist, they become ground zero for both transparency and transfer of professional development learning.

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