Misty Kirby: Supporting eProfessionalism through portfolios

Kristina Hoeppner 00:05

Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios into their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner, and I look forward to speaking with Dr. Misty Kirby today. 

Misty earned her PhD at the College of William and Mary in Virginia in the area of Education Policy, Planning, and Leadership with emphasis in Curriculum Leadership and is a Senior Fellow of the HEA. I met Misty in 2014 when she attended the first Mahara Hui in Aotearoa New Zealand as academic at the University of Canberra, across the Tasman in Australia. Her experiences back then influenced her thinking around portfolios, which we are going to explore today. It is great to have this time today to talk with you, Misty.

Misty Kirby 01:05

Thank you for having me.

Kristina Hoeppner 01:07

Can you, to start us off, please tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are beyond your academic accolades, of which I have mentioned just a couple. 

Misty Kirby 01:15

Oh thank you. Obviously, from my accent, I am from the U.S. I was an English teacher in New York City where I started teaching in the last century, as I now say, which makes my students laugh. And I wanted to really do more, and I got a bit tired of people who've never actually been in the classroom telling me what I had to do. I had a taste of policy, education policy classes and urban policy, while I was doing my Master's at Teachers College in New York, and just decided that I needed to go and be one of those PhDs who you know, helped sort of organise school systems and help things get better and help, you know, improve student experiences and learning experiences for students. So you know, that all sort of didn't quite pan out. 

I actually went to D.C. and did not like the capital [laughter], the whole spiel around being in D.C. and being a policy adviser [laughter]. So yeah, here I am, back in the U.S. after COVID made us sort of depart Australia much earlier than we wanted. We're living in upstate New York, and I am currently back in middle school to get to know the city in which I live a bit better. And that pretty much I think, brings us to 2022.

Kristina Hoeppner 02:32

Thank you for sharing your journey, especially the one after Australia then. When you were at Uni of Canberra, you were involved in a project around early career academic portfolios. What was the aim of this project, Misty?

Misty Kirby 02:46

I had Dr Anita Collins and Dr Stephen Isbel, as well as Dr Iain (Hay) really worked with us to - or we were working on an early career academic research project around early career professional identity development, and what was it that actually made us scholars because we had all been successful previously in our careers in schools. We had, you know, gone in, done the PhD, done the research, done the work, and, you know, affected our areas in which we had done our research, and then we were put into a university environment and treated like first year teachers again. And so we all sort of had this moment of 'Wait a second, you know, I was a department chair. I was this, I was that, why am I being treated like this?' And so just as a way to sort of cope with the demands of being an early career academic and as a way to sort of help frame who we are and what we did, despite sort of the feedback we were getting, we decided that we needed a way to actually record that, and that we wanted to do it over time to see how we grew. 

And then we had this idea of putting it with these annual expectations that we were given once those became more formalised, and working with our ePortfolios that way. But initially, it was it was to capture the work that we were doing, and a lot of it now, that was, you know, 2012, 2013, 2014 when we were having these conversations, now that work is actually acknowledged, as you know, this sort of mental work as the time sort of out of the office, but that you're expected to work. Although we were salaried, sort of that unpaid labour. And we wanted to make our labour completely visible and transparent and show the value that 'Yes, we'd served on these committees, we worked with these schools and the students,' and so we did offer value to our faculty.

Kristina Hoeppner 04:48

Recently, I think you've also participated in an article on eProfessionalism with a number of Australian academics.

Misty Kirby 04:56

When you find a great group of people with whom to work, you try to find as many projects as possible. It makes me a bit sad to be on this side of the world and not in universities because they're all just clicking on and it's so good to see the work. But yes, Dr Christine Slade, Dr Terry Downer, Dr Chris, oh my gosh, so many, Stephen Isbel. So many of us worked across five, six years on a project that looks at several different Australian universities' education and health faculties and how they were using the portfolios.

One of the lessons that we learned out of that research was that students and academics alike need more support displaying their online identity and deciding what can, what should, maybe not what can but what should be published online, and thinking about in terms of who you are as a professional, Dr Slade likes to say, you know, we used to call it netiquette, and we did. I do remember that. But eProfessionalism we just thought had a certain ring to it, especially since there are a lot of researchers where we got a lot, but there are some researchers in medicine who have been looking at the construct quite a bit.

Kristina Hoeppner 06:10

This also ties in with what you mentioned earlier, as far as that invisibility of labour and making it visible goes. That is also part of what the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force has been working on. One of the principles is actually called 'Visibility of Labor'. Just recently, we had a workshop for Australia where it was then also turned into 'Sustainable ePortfolio Practices' because if you're always just doing everything on the side then that is not really sustainable because it is just one of these extra things. A survey is available that is for the North American continent to fill out on visibility of labour at the university level. So I will definitely make sure that we link to that as well as any of the links that you mentioned and publications in our show notes so that people can follow up with that.

I also note, Misty, that you've been working besides the eProfessionalism in the wider digital ethics landscape, and you've also again published, I think it was with Christine Slade as well, on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how portfolios can help with that. It was a literature review that you had done in Australia. Do you have anything that you'd like to share from that, that still sticks in your mind because I think that was now at least a couple of years ago, maybe even three or four years ago, right?

Misty Kirby 07:43

Back in 2018, several of us worked on a scoping review of the literature around digital ethics and the use of ePortfolio, and we published that in the open access journal, International Journal of ePortfolio or IJeP. What we wanted to do was to see how people were using their ePortfolios. And because my sort of initial foray into ePortfolio was as a teacher educator, as you know, an assistant professor in education who had 700 students, and it was all of a sudden, you know, deemed by the faculty that each of our students had to have an ePortfolio. Okay, great. Do you want to come help [laughter]? 

So, initially, it was more about trying to mark all of these portfolios and to see all these pieces of evidence lead, you know, laying against these specific teaching standards, but then it actually quite quickly became about recording our growth as teachers as we start out in those early days, where, you know, we're not even paying attention to the students, honestly. 

Brand new teachers, you know, you get through a lesson and you look up and it's like, 'Oh, did you guys get that [laughter]?' And it's, but it's actually wanting to capture that growth from 'This is how you were when you were in my class as a first year student, when you went on your two week observation, and you only had to work with one small group of children for two days, and look at how you've grown here, you're at the end.' You know, and I think it's important to see that. Back in my teacher ed days, we still did the paper portfolios, and it was nowhere near what it should have been. I think about how much growth I could have had if I would have actually stopped and done it every two to three days instead of the end of the week, like I did [laughter], like 19-year old Misty did.

I think that ePortfolio has many roles. But for me at the time it was really trying to, you know, sitting on the teacher side of the desk, trying to bring some sense and order to having 15 minutes per student per assessment or something absolutely that we could not live by [laughter] and then once students started, I was seeing what kind of stuff they were putting up and then really reflecting on that and going 'This would actually be really valuable for them seeing themselves grow as a teacher' because one of my areas of research is around self efficacy, and it's how we feel about a specific task. So it's very task specific, 'I'm a good baker or a terrible fisher person [laughter], you know. And teaching is very specific. So I looked at the literature in concert with my research and knowing that that's a way that we can build teacher self efficacy because so often our student teachers come out of the service teaching programmes, and they're still very afraid. And I wanted them to be able to see their growth so that they could be a bit more fearless when they entered the classroom.

Kristina Hoeppner 10:43

Mhh and moving from that student perspective to the other side of the instructor and from the portfolio creator to the ePortfolio assessor or viewer in general. 

Misty, how have your portfolio practices changed from those times back when you created a paper based portfolio to when you started your early academic career portfolio to what you're doing now with your own students?

Misty Kirby 11:11

I will be doing ePortfolios with my students for the first time, with seventh graders. So you know, sprinkle all the fairy dust you can [laughter]. It's gonna be interesting, we're going to be using Google because it's not really something that's done in the district in which I'm working. But sort of that same principle. I want the students to be able to see their growth. I mean, I have students who came in last year in the, at the same grade level, who, you know, they just come off of a year and a half out of school, so they couldn't even like they would write a sentence and they'd be exhausted, or they would write a word, and they would be exhausted, you know. 

I want them to be able to record their sort of learning journey in a more formal way than what we did this past year, and for them to be able to see. I just see that there's a huge urgency, I think, with teenagers, especially in this country, to get them to sort of not necessarily find themselves, but just to see what they're all about, as we would say in Australia, to figure out what's important. And I think they have to start doing that really by the end of seventh grade, and so one of my hopes is that will be one of the realisations toward the end of the year that they will finally have something to say that they're passionate about.

Kristina Hoeppner 12:22

That will be good to see that journey and see what they are making out of it, whether they're taking you up on that invitation to record things in a more formal way and then look back at it and reflect on it and actually see what they've accomplished.

Misty Kirby 12:42

Yeah, I think making time for that is crucial because I know, as an adult, it was hard for me. When I was at Uni Canberra, I had to force myself on Friday for an hour to update every week. Now as things come up, I go in and put it on my website. It's a bit easier, but those initial things, and it's making the time and the space to support that work and to support the thinking and the reflection on the back of it.

Kristina Hoeppner 13:08

Speaking also of a number of formal ways to record your reflections, you and Shane Nuessler from the University of Canberra were involved in finding a way of how to incorporate competencies more easily into Portfolio software, what you termed SmartEvidence at the time. And we of course in Mahara now have the possibility to record competencies in a more formal way. How did you come up with that idea? Do you still remember it because of course, it's been now [chuckle] a number of years that we've discussed the proposal. 

Misty Kirby 13:42

It's one of the most interesting projects I've ever worked on. As an education academic, if you would have told me that I was going to be working with web developers, and we were going to be creating this great overlay that helps teachers and students alike, I would laugh actually because while I always have been an early adopter of most technologies, I actually was very anti portfolio the first time that I encountered it in 2010. And the only way that I got into it was because we were forced to [laughter]. So I always like to start conversations off like that, like you know, yes, I'm you know, I'm good with technology. I can live in both the PC and the Mac world. Although for the Mac world, and you know, I'm good, like there really hasn't been a programme I haven't spent a few minutes with that I can't sort of figure out. But the old Mahara, how ever many versions ago that was in 2010, I just wasn't having it. 

Thankfully, we've moved up to now and seeing that initial spark came from having these conversations with Shane and having 660 something students and going you know, how am I going to manage all this marking? Got a team of tutors who are working with me, but still how are we going to do the marking? How are we going to do the moderation? And really, what's the point here? Because for me even as an English teacher, I was not one of those English teachers who just gave out senseless, pointless homework. It has to have meaning. And so I'm not just going to ask you to do something for the sake of doing it. And obviously, we have, well, Australia still has national standards for teachers. There are different levels of the standards. So it made sense to connect the learning to the standards; makes it really nice and neat, and here they are on standards. 

I think standards are great, but it's how we implement them. It's how we evaluate them. So I wanted to be sure that students had a fair opportunity to express in what way they demonstrated that they met that particular standard, whether it was a video clip or just a sound clip or a work sample, pretty much any sort of artefact, I wanted them to actually be thinking about all of these little bits that I now do as 24-year teacher, kind of without thinking because it's part of my tacit knowledge. But you know, they're still constructing, you know, trying to figure out exactly who they are, I'm still working on my teacher identity, too, I think we always are. But in the beginning, you really are, you're just trying to create the whole thing so that you show up and kids can take you seriously [laughter], or students can take you seriously. 

And so it really had to do with the students trying to understand who they are, sort of where they come from, how they're presenting themselves outwards, and then getting them to understand that professionalism aspect to teaching that we need to be inclusive, and we need to consider all learning styles and all cultures and things like that. So it was really a way to make students more intentional in their interactions with the classrooms in which they were, and with the group students with whom they were working.

Kristina Hoeppner 16:55

Misty, you've been working with portfolios for a very long time now, and you have been using them in academia with students, you have been creating your own portfolio as an academic, continue to work on your portfolio, continue to update it, and now you're also going to use it with middle school students in the United States. What trends have you observed in the portfolio work that you might want to share?

Misty Kirby 17:21

One of the things that I'm seeing more and more of I sort of thought we had it down when we had to do 140 characters on Twitter and then you know, Instagram came out, and now it's TikTok. And so I'm seeing a lot of really interesting ways to present evidence [laughter]. I'm seeing great TikTok videos of teachers doing this or students doing that. One of the things I think, that I don't want to see lost in the ePortfolio is our sort of openness to be creative, to be able to say that, whether it's a video or a piece of art or a photograph or just anything that's what I really appreciate about Dr Kathryn Coleman's work at the University of Melbourne. And it's that sort of push to keep that openness that makes ePortfolio such a perfect tool to use in so many different instances. I think besides that, honestly, the trend that I would like to see that I haven't seen yet outside of a few sort of small fields, physics, for some reason seems to use ePortfolio a lot. I have two friends who are astrophysicists in the UK. 

I would like to actually see employers use it. I know in my job search and trying to see where I wanted to sort of fit back into this country when we returned, I track all of my visits. And I would say that I got maybe a six to seven percent rate of people who visited my website. And I think that's a, you know, it's a great disservice because it's such a good resource and just with the touch of a few buttons, you'll get a great sense of who I am versus reading the two page cover letter that you asked me to write. I would like to see more people engaging with them. The students work really hard on these a lot of times and especially university students, when they're, you know, when we say that this is how people are going to use them, you know, let's be sure that people are actually using them that way. 

If I had to say one thing, I'm definitely helping to bring that sort of ePortfolio mindset to this area in which I am. I think it could be super valuable for high school students, especially New York State, like many of the states, but not all, have really strict graduation requirements. It's not quite the HSC (High School Certificate) at the end of the year in Australia, but it's very much a process that students really start in the ninth grade. I think it would just be absolutely invaluable. So we're trying it, and we'll sort of get it out there because I think that ePortfolios in universities are quite common here. As I talk to people who either work in schools or who are academics who are active in schools, it's not something that's really done a lot. Maybe we're gonna bring that trend.

Kristina Hoeppner20:20

That would be great, I think, because that way you can start them early, they continue during university, and they have a very good start into the eProfessionalism and stay that reflective practitioner then throughout their career.

This leads nicely into the question of what you would like to be able to do with portfolios that you can't just yet fully do. 

Misty Kirby 20:43

One of my great career regrets so far is that I have not gotten to play with SmartEvidence more, because I just think it should be the most [laughter, inaudible]. Like, why are we all using this? And working with other ePortfolio systems, it's like, you know, there's this portfolio system that's got this great thing called SmartEvidence [laughter]. 

But I think being able to very easily tag things with multiple tags. I mean, I feel like I've been having that literally, I've been saying that for a dozen years. I mean, Mahara does it. I know that there are a lot of affordances that I think speak across platforms. So I guess if you've got the right platform, I'm always about the UX about making the user experience as easy as possible and making it sort of enjoyable and seamless. And I think the closer we can get to that because I'm not there yet on my website, which I use as my ePortfolio, mostly because I'm still working on some of the tech skills or getting people to help me with that. But yeah, I think keeping that idea open. I mean, one of the things that's always sort of thrilled me about like Mahara, particularly, is that open access, and that I think, is super important for people to be able to have that and also to be able to carry that around so that they can continue that reflection. 

So my students this year will do it on Google. And you know, they'll have that for as long as they've got their Google school account. Hopefully, they'll export it when they're in 12th grade because they will remember having Dr. Kirby, that awesome English teacher [laughter]. I think that's the importance really, of just making sure that we don't lose these things, and making sure that we're keeping up with it. I never had a MySpace page because that was my students at the time. But you know, I actually remember them sort of proclaiming, you know, saw that they had lost all this stuff. So I think it's important that we make sure that students are aware of how to keep this because, you know, I know when I left Uni Canberra, I continued to get access to Maura for a while, but you want to be able to keep that so that you can continue that reflection because I am one of those people who thinks that, you know, we're all lifelong learners.

Kristina Hoeppner 22:57

I've definitely seen it a lot over the years, that people who create portfolios at the university level, and then come back three years, five years into their job and say, 'I've created a portfolio at university XYZ back in the day, can I still get access to my data? They seem to be coming back because then at some point, it is required by a job if you are a teacher or if you are a nurse or any other healthcare professional. So if we can make that clear to students from the start, that it would be a good idea to continue updating that portfolio and keeping it that would be great. 

Now, Misty, we are coming to the end of our session today. So I'd like to ask you three questions that I'm asking everybody. Which words do you use to describe portfolio work?

Misty Kirby 23:47

Ah, container, curate, place to store stuff, and place to showcase stuff.

Kristina Hoeppner 23:55

Onto a tip that you have for learning designers and instructors who create portfolio activities. What do you want them to know?

Misty Kirby 24:03

Keep your own. If you're showing students, if you're a learning designer, and you're showing an academic, walk the walk. That's the best thing, and it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be great. I go by 'Is it good enough?' then there we go. You know, I'm not a graphic designer. And if someone can't understand that, then you know, I'm sorry. We use, you know, UDL concepts in our design, but you know, if we don't get something quite right, it's okay. I think that's the biggest tip because that teaches you everything that you'll ever need to know, and if you don't know the answer, you can find it together.

Kristina Hoeppner 24:40

And it also goes well with ePortfolios Australia, an organisation that you're quite extensively, I think still involved in that there is the PARE sessions. I think they are now done on an almost monthly basis so that people do get together online and just ePortfolio and create their own portfolios, work on it in a very supportive environment and to making that time to update their professional portfolio. 

So we've had the tip for learning designers and instructors. Now, let's flip over to the other side. What advice do you have for portfolio creators or portfolio authors? 

Misty Kirby 25:23

Don't beat yourself up. It's not going to look like the Apple website ever; never going to look like that unless you are, you know, independently wealthy and want to invest a lot of money in that. I think for ePortfolio creators, it's to have grace with yourself. And also, if you are doing it as part of either a professional or a personal journey of some sort of recording, is to take those moments and sit back and actually look at all of the stuff that you've done. And, you know, no one can sort of take that away from you. Put in everything that you think you will need because you can always remove things. You can always hide things. Not everyone has to see everything. 

As you mentioned earlier with the teacher who's a few years out, or the nurse, you never know when you're going to need it. So hold on to everything. I think, you know, as a person who's lived on a couple of continents, you know, as paperless as we can go is a good thing. Put absolutely everything in there. There are so many things in my ePortfolio that there's no way I would have a copy of it anywhere else. There are things that I even forgot that I had done when I was at UC and went back and looked at my old ePortfolios and thought, oh my gosh, you know, how does one person do all that? I know that that's two, Kristina, and I'm sorry [laughter].

Kristina Hoeppner 26:47

That is perfectly fine. I mean, you've explained why you had to container, three words at the start. And those digital containers are definitely more easily shipped from one continent to another.

Misty, thank you very much for sharing your work and thoughts around portfolios in the academic sector today.

Misty Kirby 27:07

Thank you, Kristina, for having me.

Kristina Hoeppner 27:09

I think it is important to shine the light onto people who create portfolios as part of their professional journey as they can be quite different from the portfolios that students create just to pass a class and so it's fascinating to have academics in the dual role as portfolio creators and then also assessors for students because as you say, create your own portfolio, and then you have a better understanding of what you also want your students to do. 

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Misty Kirby today. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find links to resources she shared and the transcript for this episode. 

This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT, and I'm your host Kristina Hoeppner, Project Lead and Product Manager of the ePortfolio platform Mahara. Our next episode will air in two weeks. I hope you'll listen again and tell a colleague about our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.