The Portfolio Group

When we chose to center our presentation on students who, in our estimation, were falling through the cracks, little did I know that the case study of particular students would open up issues that I never imagined existed. Not only did I discover what was happening to students, I also came to know the institutional context within which students could fall out of synch with their peers and the program. Centering on single students allowed me to see phenomena and behaviors that I would not have noticed before. It also caused me to spend more time listening to the students (and their versions of what was happening to them) and to take up a new role, one of advocacy within the system. When hard questions were asked, I think I surprised others by how much knowledge I had of the students and the situations. That would not have been the case if the particular students were not the ones on whom I was focusing attention.

Recently, CEEE, the center I work for at Rice University, hosted a group of educators from Great Britain who were interested in finding out more about the American educational system and how it works. I knew I needed to give a presentation to them in the morning, but they were all science teachers, which is not my field, so I was at a loss for a while, trying to decide on a topic.

I noticed in their bios that most of them were interested in professional development, so I settled on a presentation about the self-generated professional development system we developed at the middle school I taught at before I began working at Rice.

Ron and I were asked to present this past weekend on Visual Literacy. Last year in one of my university classes; I developed, along with the rest of my group, a PowerPoint presentation on the various kinds of literacy. During the research for this class assignment, I began the development of my case study and the beginnings of my current research in visual literacy. This work lead to the first year's findings that were presented at the annual American Educational Research Association Conference in Montreal.

Photo from American Educational Research Association Presentation.

After that presentation, a new opportunity occcured which was local. The regional school reform funding organization was sponsoring a workshop on literacy and the work that Ron and I are doing fits right into the workshop. See Ron's blog entry.

Ron and I are planning on continuing the work and integrating more of the four big content areas into the visual arts curriculum. The big change I have seen in my practice over the past years has been no longer am I just adding on English, writing, and math to my art lessons; I am incorporating the objectives into my student's artwork.

I was excited to have had the opportunity to present at the Visual Literacy Workshop at the University of Houston on Saturday, May 14, 2005. The presentation focused on Literacy and the Visual Arts concentrating on special populations in our classrooms. The response from people attending the workshop was only positive.

I had the opportunity to hear and meet with the Key Note speaker who just so happens to work in the same district as I do. It was the first time we meet. She was great and I was so motivated by her lecture and her book
Unplugged. See Michaelann's blog entry.

I spent about an hour last night decluttering the room that serves as my home office. At the bottom of a large stack of materials were two orange milk crates full of souvenirs from my career as a classroom teacher. I've been hanging on to this collection of student work, lesson plans, professional development certificates, and awards for three years with the idea that someday I would arrange it all into a beautiful portfolio.

Now I'm wondering if that makes sense. How helpful is it to reflect about the (distant) past? What would the purpose be?--impressing future employers? I guess that I'll just hang on to my milk crates until I decide what the purpose and audience of my portfolio might be.

For the third year I am looking forward to participating in this summer's FRSSI at the University of Houston. This year I hope to see more of my colleagues attending the workshop. In the past years it seems only the same three or four teachers out of a faculty of 160 attend this type of workshop or seminar. There has only been one department chair out of eight and no administrators out of 17 ever participating. I am wondering why the school's attendance is so low and why the formal "leaders" of the school are not participating. It is a great opportunity to collaborate with other peers and professionals facing the same dilemmas, look at best practices, and explore new avenues to meet the ever changing needs of students at risk ofr failure in the high stakes accountabily climate in the state.

I have been keeping a journal with one of my students from last year and she just gave it back to me yesterday. Her last entry had her goals in it for the next year, her senior year, she then asked me to put my goals down for nest year and the summer. I was thinking this morning as I drove to work...what are my goals for this summer? I thought about committing to commenting on the blog once a week and making a new entry once a week. As I contemplated this goal...I wondered what if I don't have anything to write about. Do I just write for the sake of meeting the goal? Is that being truly reflective and will that have any meaning? I was then thinking about the movie "Finding Forrester," Sean Connery tells the young writer to just start typing -- he even gives him one of his essays to copy initially to get him started. Maybe that is how I need to think about it -- just start typing and the introspection will come or to quote a famous tag line -- "Just Do It!"