It’s also important to get the students involved in populating and maintaining their own portfolios, Weigand adds. Currently, Weigand takes all the photos that populate her students’ portfolios herself. You could call her Hope Arts’ one-woman e-portfolio show. “This is a pretty big job for one person,” she says. “You’ll definitely want to get the kids involved. It’s more practical, logistically, but it’s also part of giving them a more active role in their own education.”
The British arts educator was an early adopter of e-portfolios, seeing their potential to enhance teaching and learning.
Sproll is the head of RISD’s Department of Art and Design Education. A native of Bath, England, he taught for two decades in high schools in England and Wales. He came to the United States for the first time to teach high school in Maine as part of a yearlong Fulbright Teacher Exchange. He later returned to the United States to accept a teaching associateship from Ohio State University, and to pursue advanced studies in arts education. Sproll’s life’s work has been dedicated to his belief in the value of arts education, specifically the study of design in elementary and secondary schools. In 1992, he founded RISD’s Center for the Advancement of Art and Design Education, which established an institutional infrastructure to support the professional development of K-12 teachers and, more recently, programming for high school students.
In 2003, Sproll facilitated a formal partnership between RISD and Hope Arts. Later, he worked with the school’s administrators and arts teachers to articulate a clear vision for an arts-based public high school, and he helped to develop the curriculum.
“We’ve been sending student teachers [to Hope High] since 1990,” he says. “After the restructuring, it was only natural to say, let’s become more engaged with Hope Arts.”
Sproll has long been interested in the role of technology in teacher education, so when two of his own instructors developed an e-portfolio program for their own use at RISD a few years ago, he became an enthusiastic early adopter.
“I guess you could say that I became a beta tester,” Sproll says. “We were new to digital technology back then, but we felt that it had great potential. And it was clear to me right away that this technology could create opportunities for teaching and learning that were not available before.”
Sproll says that e-portfolio technology has emerged as a critical piece of his work at RISD. He believes it is imperative that anyone training to be a teacher, but especially an arts and design instructor, understands how to use this technology to enhance student learning.
“The e-portfolio allows you to archive a wide variety of materials, and then to disseminate those materials to a larger community,” he says. “The fact is, those materials can be incredibly valuable. The electronic portfolios allow us to reuse them.We are able to delve into a portfolio and draw out examples of previous work so that they become part of our instructional content, rather than just being archived on a shelf somewhere under the label, ‘Last Year’s Work.’ When students see other students’ work, it accelerates the learning curve enormously. It actually starts to make the teaching more authentic.”
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