We must chart learning as it is: a winding pathway that can lead us to unknown lands. I took this picture at Asilomar State Beach near Monterey, CA.
For many years, I supported students in writing and editing their college application essays. I worked primarily with students transitioning immediately from high school to college, and when they would write about developing their “personal brand,” I often cringed at the idea. (Little did I know that the concept of “branding” would come back to haunt me many pre-professional, “alt-ac” conversations later). My immediate impulse to recoil at the idea of a teenager having a “brand” stemmed from my fundamental belief that a teenager simply could not know what really mattered to them. In the height of my college application editing years, I was only a few years older than they were, and, goodness knows, I certainly didn’t know who I really was or how I would define my own “brand!” I just couldn’t imagine a teenager setting their identities in stone and moving through their college admissions process with staunch adherence to the concept of the “brand.”
What I can appreciate more about students eager to “brand” themselves in high school is that they may want to try and tell a clear and unified story about themselves. Given the apparatus of college admissions (as aggressive and as overwhelming as it is), students have to get really good at writing about themselves, a task that throws basically anyone into existential tailspin (I seriously would love to see more adults write their own “personal statements” as professionals and see how it feels for them!). Coming up with just one “brand” to replicate across the many essays students is really just an approach born out of a need for greater efficiency in a cumbersome application process.
With all of that said, in a world where everyone can easily be “Googled” and discovered, it is no wonder that students are eager to find ways to tell their own stories for themselves. The idea of “branding” might still make me feel a little uncomfortable in terms of the corporatization of the self, but I’ve become increasingly convinced of the value of self-storytelling, and of being able to communicate who you are and what you believe in (at least as that self evolves). Whether this should start in high school or after high school is not something I can reasonably tackle in the space of this particular blog post (though perhaps it’s a topic for another time!), but a KQED article from 2016 by education reporter Holly Korbey on “What Will Digital Portfolios Mean for College-Bound Students” showed up in my Twitter feed today, and it reminded me of the continued need for ongoing conversations about ePortfolios and what value they offer.
Korbey’s article focuses on the ways in which students might use digital portfolios (or “digital lockers”) for keeping track of high school projects, artwork, or writing to include or mention in their college application essays. This idea idea of giving students a space to keep track of their ideas is one that has a lot of relevance for students in higher education. Indeed, I’ve learned a lot from my Stanford colleague Helen L. Chen to this end, as much of her scholarship and research has focused on the ways in which ePortfolios can help document what students learn throughout college and help them to be more reflective about their college journeys as they transition into the next stage of their lives (Her book Documenting Learning with ePortfolios, co-authored with Tracy Penny Light and John Ittelson is really useful for understanding this concept in even greater depth). Indeed, something that college does not necessarily invite students to do is integrate what they do in their classes with what they enjoy outside of their classes. This ability to connect in-class and out-of-class experiences actually has a name, developed out of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U): integrative learning.
A lot of universities are exploring integrative learning in a variety of ways, from extracurricular courses students can take, to partnered programming with nonprofits, to internships with local businesses. But I think that we may want to return to digital portfolios as a way of helping students achieve integrative learning all while keeping track of the documents that show their learning across their college careers. That is, what if we took what Korbey describes happening in the college admissions process – i.e. a space for students to store their projects and documents – and combined that with reflective writing or reflective video creation to help students both keep track of what they’ve created across their classes and their extracurricular activities, while also explaining in some form WHY they made those choices and what was meaningful to them about those choices?
I’m not proposing anything altogether new here, but I am proposing something rarely offered to a lot of students in higher education: a space that students can claim as their own to make sense of, keep track of, and reflect upon what they’ve learned and how that learning will transfer to whatever contexts interest them next.
To me, then, digital portfolios matter in higher education an awful lot because they could provide a space to teach students a number of valuable things:
- Metacognition, or the ability to explain and reflect upon what they’v’e learned
- Storytelling, or the ability to narrativize their experiences and make them visible to an outside audience (an outcome of metacognition perhaps)
- Integrative learning, or the ability to integrate an understanding of what they learn in-class with the kinds of pursuits they are exploring outside of class
- Digital literacy, or the ability to understand how to share their work in online spaces for the multiple audiences that may encounter their identities online
This is really just scratching the surface of a much longer conversation. Indeed, professional organizations like the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEBL) are committed to developing institutional interest in digital portfolios. But I think a lot of college instructors and perhaps even administrators might envision digital portfolios as a fad of the early 2000s, a byproduct of a moment when “blogging” suddenly became ubiquitous and instructors started to play around with giving students their own webspaces. To define ePortfolios simply as a “blog” space, however, is to define rather narrowly what a portfolio is even capable of doing.
I think digital portfolios are perhaps now more important than ever because they do not only give students the agency to create their own spaces, but also allow for students to re-write their own learning narratives, and use evidence from their college experiences to develop those narratives.
Today’s students will already have had some practice with that in their college admissions process, but making college a space where students can simply observe and reflect on what they’re doing – rather than trying to “package” themselves” into a “brand” of things they’ve already done – could be even more powerful. Indeed, as we help students move through college and into spaces beyond universities, the best thing that we can do is to give them the tools to understand what they are capable of and the space to reflect on why those tools have mattered to them. And then let them fly, develop their “brands” as they see fit and, hopefully, derive meaning from the full enterprise!