The following is an adaptation from the Randy Wong’s article “Portfolio Documentation in Context,” to be published in the upcoming issue of The Journal for Music-in-Education. Reprinted by permission.

Through the creation of a specialized MIE Guided Internship, students with research interests in assessment methods can undertake positions in the MIE Research Center as MIE Portfolio Archivist-Analysts. Guided interns who choose this persona undertake the responsibility of acquainting themselves with our MIE Portfolio Library (which includes individual student, class, and cumulative Concentration portfolios from the inception of the MIE program in the late 1990s) and the portfolio process.

Portfolio Archivist-Analysts are also familiarized with similar portfolio work done in other Research Center and National Consortium projects; for example, that of the LLSN School Portfolio System. Portfolio Archivist-Analysts work hand-in-hand with Documentation Specialists to ensure that the appropriate types of documentation are being collected, and both roles help to inform their class peers, guided internship mentors, and teaching faculty of particular issues, concerns, or successes that the portfolio program may need to address.

At the end of the semester, MIE Documentation Specialists and Portfolio Archivist-Analysts meet to assemble class portfolios that will serve as an additional record of a particular course. Portfolio Archivist-Analysts collect incoming student class and internship portfolios and digitize them in accordance with the MIE Digital Portfolio System. Once students’ portfolios are digitized, MIE faculty members electronically annotate them with reflections, questions, feedback, and scores. And when students receive their hard-copy portfolios back, they also receive a copy of the digital, annotated version. At the same time, students can opt-in to our MIE Portfolio Showcase Program, which serves as the repository for student work that we can use for publication on our website or in this Journal. Likewise, those portfolios are made available for other Conservatory students who are interested in learning from their peers’ work. Thus, all students who participate in the MIE Concentration program (and by default, the MIE portfolio process) become active members of the “wider gamut of individuals” that educational philosopher Howard Gardner suggests is necessary for a system like this to function. Additionally, Gardner’s own views on the regularity of reflection can help us to better understand how and why the MIE portfolio process is important to those that are active in it:

By asking students to keep and review process-folios regularly, we hope to involve them in constant reflection on their activities and to allow them the opportunity to monitor and to learn from their own growth and even their own setbacks. Ultimately, we hope that these process-folios can become rewards in themselves as well as a tangible record of an artistic apprenticeship.

With the creation of an ecosystem (affectionately referred to as the “M-i-Ecosystem”) the centerpiece of which is the student/guided intern and his/her portfolio, we are hoping that students may start to recognize that the partnership of teaching and learning is a lifelong endeavor, and that the skills that they hone while creating their portfolios are applicable whether or not they eventually choose to become teaching artists, researchers, or professional musicians.

Please note: We respect our students’ privacy and will not publish links to their portfolios on our website unless the student has chosen to opt-in to our MIE Portfolio Showcase program.

The MIE Portfolio Showcase program posts excerpts of your portfolio (chosen at our discretion) on the MIE@NEC Website, and helps to make visible the terrific work that our students do. Participants in the MIE Portfolio Showcase receive no compensation for their participation, and we will conceal the identity of all portfolio authors before publishing portfolio excerpts. Participants may also opt-out of the MIE Portfolio Showcase at any future time. To opt-in to the Portfolio Showcase, please contact MIE Program Coordinator Randy Wong (617-585-1299) or email randy@mieatnec.org.

–Randy Wong

Randy Wong is Program Coordinator for the Center for Music-in-Education and Information Architect for the Music-in-Education National Consortium

| This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Guided Internships, MIE Research, Portfolios. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.