Annemarie Galeucia & Boz Bowles: Create a portfolio and get a medal for it

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:05

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 with 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. My guests today are Dr Annemarie Galeucia and Boz Bowles from Louisiana State University in the United States. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Annemarie Galeucia: 0:38

Thanks for having us.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:39

Annemarie, may I please ask you to tell us a bit about yourself? What do you do at Louisiana State?

Annemarie Galeucia: 0:47

Sure thing. I'm the Associate Director for a programme here called'Communication across the Curriculum'. Our focus is entirely surrounding helping undergraduate students build their communication skills. That happens through work that we do directly with faculty cultivating communication skills development in their classes and then also through a variety of co-curricular activities. We oversee communication studios where students can come in and connect with mentors, connect with gear, just have time to tinker and practice different forms of communication with themselves or others. And then they will, you know, maybe ultimately, also participate in some of our recognition programmes, such as the Distinguished Communicator Medal Program, which I know we're going to chat about today. And then we also have a Communicator Certificate Program associated with that recognition. I've been doing teaching and learning for about 20 years now. And for about half of that, I've been focusing a lot on communication intensive forms of pedagogy, forms of student development. My formal academic training is as an anthropologist and a geographer.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:54

Which prepared you wonderfully for reflective practice [laughs].

Annemarie Galeucia: 1:57

Yes, very much so.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:58

Thank you, annemarie. Boz, what about you?

Boz Bowles: 2:00

I am what every engineering department needs. I

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:01

I'm definitely talking to the right have an MFA in Creative Writing[Kristina laughs], a bit outside of the norm for what you'll find in an engineering faculty or people today [laughs] because you have written an article, staff. I came through the CxC programme, but the College of Engineering at LSU is the location of the first which is the impetus for our chat today called 'Using communication studio associated with CxC. And so that opened in October of 2005. I was hired the following August. So I've literally been here, with the exception of the first few months, since the programme began, at least as far as you know, the implementation of the programme. There were, of course, budget meetings and things before I came around, but by the time that doors were opening and students were engaging, that's about the time I came on board. So that was 2006, and I've never looked back. ePortfolios to help students reframe, reflect, and integrate their learning', which was published on the very last day of 2023. in 'Across the Disciplines'. You look back at the history of using portfolios at LSU, which started in the programme that you just mentioned, Boz, so started 18 years ago, with your involvement now a little over 17 years. Why did LSU start using portfolios and looked into how they can support your students?

Boz Bowles: 3:21

First of all, CxC at LSU was started by a gift from a chemical engineering alum who wanted it to be an engineering programme, initially. The foundation folks said 'Can we make it campus wide?' His condition was yes, provided it begins in engineering. So that was really the beginning of the programme. This happened at the same time that our institutional accreditation with SACS came around. So CxC, the programme, was folded into the Quality Enhancement Plan for SACS accreditation at that time, and a lot of the things that we were doing early on, basically, were driven by the assessment needs of that programme. A lot of the things that we talked about being set up at the very beginning were so that we could get the data we needed to report to SACS. As an institution, LSU went with a little bit less labour intensive assessment methods, but the programme was established by that time, and so people saw the value and it's managed to survive, with some ups and downs over the years to be sure, but I think it came about for institutional needs, but caught on because it actually worked.

Annemarie Galeucia: 4:17

Yeah, and I'd say speaking specifically to the portfolio components as well, one of the very unique components of how our programme started is that we were taking all of these elements that were tried and true for 50-60 years beforehand associated with writing across the disciplines, and we were noticing, of course, writing will always be important, but more and more people are talking about speaking intensive activities. And when we started we were able to roll our development into a more multimodal capacity. Through this, we were able to initiate visually intensive focus areas and technologically intensive focus areas. The portfolio component was really an opportunity for us to think about how we can leverage all of these higher order components of communication, but really give us an excuse to explore student learning and experience as it manifests in multiple forms of communication. The portfolio really kind of gave us an experimental space to be able to do that, and we were very fortunate that we had the backing of institutional assessment and reaffirmation processes [laughs] to talk about how this was going to be something that could help us move the needle in that way, too, when we talk about student learning. That was kind of the impetus and then lots of lessons from there [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:29

Yeah, because of course, it is important that you get the support from the institution, not just to explore something, but then also keep going with it, and it's really a testament to the work that you have done, I think, because it's still here 18 years later. So before we go into the timeline then of your project, can you please share what the LSU Distinguished Communicator Medal Program is and why it was established then?

Annemarie Galeucia: 5:57

The Distinguished Communicator Medal Program at LSU is a combined programme that focuses on very specific iterative communication intensive practice at the classroom level, and it uses that as a springboard to then enable the student to move into a portfolio building process where they choose a faculty advisor that they'll work with. That's somebody who is, you know, hopefully familiar with the world that they're trying to go into, somebody who is committed to feedback and iterative practice with that student while they are asking all the big planning questions, and then also the final touches of executing really a comprehensive multimodal message. The student works with also a CxC representative. So Baz and I, as well as several of our colleagues, serve in that capacity for students in different colleges around campus. It all comes together really to make a space for the students to connect what they've been doing, not just in the classroom time, which is of course important, but also through experiences beyond the classroom, whether we're talking about leadership and team skills building or experiential learning that may or may not be paid, volunteer work, study abroad, things like that, maybe even a passion project they have, put that all together to put them in a space where they can really feel like they're developing a critical thinking toolkit to understand how everything that they have been doing in their life has some purpose for them in their longer term and holistic development, and then, of course, the necessary valuable translation process. If I know I want to go into X world, and I've got this pile of experience over here, the portfolio experience in the medal programme is where that student connects with a faculty advisor and a CxC rep to really have a play space to figure out how to connect all those dots and tell a really robust narrative about who they are. At the end of all of this, students can join the programme at various stages, some start in their first year. We do ask that students don't start any later than three semesters before they graduate because we are committed to that mentoring and iterative feedback experience for them in their portfolio build, but they can join, like I said, somewhere in those windows, right? When they finish in their final semester, assuming that they have done all of the class requirements, they've moved through a pretty comprehensive portfolio review, both with the advisor, but then also with a review panel who's familiar with the world they're trying to go into, of course, when those students pass that we celebrate them [laughs], and when they graduate in their final semester, in addition to graduating with their degree, they also receive a special notation on their college transcripts, as well as a special title of Distinguished Communicator. We always also like to talk about that they get an actual literal medal and a celebration that's just for them at the end of the year. So that's kind of the lifecycle of it as a student moves through it, and then also sort of the hopefully what we're successfully setting up for them in terms of their learning experiences [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:49

On average, how long are the students then participating in the programme because it sounds like they can probably even already start in their first semester all the way through the end?

Annemarie Galeucia: 8:57

It varies. So in recent years, as we have been seeing more and more communication intensive courses available to students in their first and second year, we are seeing some students join as early as their first year. And in that time, we're really coaching them through taking communication intensive courses, and we're trying to build some foundational framework for them to think strategically like,'Oh, I'm volunteering for a club right now, what are the skills I'm building through volunteering for this club? Or'I think I want to do this co-op or this internship next year, what are the things I'm doing right now that I can be reflective about in this moment?' So we'll kind of coach them through that process if they joined very early. We do also see - probably our biggest pool would be students who are completing their second year or entering their third year. That's probably our biggest pool for students who come in, and we have a four, five, and a six year track for students depending on what their degree path is. So a student might be with us for a couple of years or they might be with us for four years. But I think our highest number of recruitments usually happens in their like late second year, early third year. period.

Boz Bowles: 10:00

Sometimes in engineering, we don't have people graduating until their sixth year. So that's why it's not just by your sophomore year or whatever.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:07

How many students do you have on average graduating each year?

Annemarie Galeucia: 10:11

For 2025, we're about to hit 1,000 students, which is also our like, you know, 20 year anniversary. So we're very excited about that. On average, I would say we see between 80 and 110 students, and that includes our spring, summer, and fall graduates. And it sort of waxes and wanes. Last year, we had a very, very large class that was well over 100. This year, we're back in our normal range, and we'll probably wind up right around 100 by the end of the year.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:38

Oh, wonderful. Over the 18 years, and that's what I found really fascinating in your article, how you outlined the different phases that you have gone through, which also shows that you are iterating over your programme, that you're revising, that you yourself are reflecting on what you're doing. And of course, I'd like to encourage everybody to read that very detailed history and all the ins and outs in the article, but for our purpose today, can you please give us a brief overview of the timeline and what the focus was in each of those phases?

Annemarie Galeucia: 11:12

Boz, do you want me to take this and you can pop in? Or do you want to go for it?

Boz Bowles: 11:15

How about that I can tell you a little bit about phase one. When I came to LSU, multimodality was not being... and also quite expensive at the time. So those flip cameras, talked about by many people. People were being told 'We need to improve writing. We need to improve speaking.' And those were the two big ones. If you had a really, you know, progressive programme, maybe you mentioned visual communications. Technological communications, that's a complicated topic that nobody wanted to get into too much back then. The other thing to remember is that in 2006 the web was a very different place. Most websites were very static. There were no smartphones. I remember when Flip cameras came along. If you remember those, they were really fantastic because you could actually give they were single button cameras that had a USB plug, and we thought they were a miracle. Even digital cameras back then were 12 megapixels; they were not giving you any kind of detail... them to students, or they could purchase them themselves. I remember we bought something like 20 of them for the engineering communication studio, and they were the most popular thing for about a year and a half. Then iPhones came out and nobody had any use for it [laughs]. It was amazing how quickly they were out of circulation and useless. But there was a lot of things like that. You know, the early days, we used to have to go into engineering graphics courses where people were learning CAD/CAM software, as they called it back then, and interrupt them and say, 'Okay, this is file transfer protocol. This is Dreamweaver. Here's your 20-page manual on building the most basic website you've ever seen.' And as you can imagine, that was a tough sell, considering the amount of coverage and everything in traditional courses anyway. So you know, initially it was very much about getting all four modes, and then being multimodal, when it was practical, but there wasn't a lot of push from above for those skills at that time. And so it really kind of met with addressing those skills discreetly. And as I said, at that time, there was an assessment portion that had to do with accreditation, so we were looking at when students would join, we tried to get some of their communications as part of the application process. So we had some baseline information about their communication skills that we could then compare at graduation. There were a lot of purposes to the portfolios that really were not our goals with them at this point. You know, there were a lot of things that developed as technology developed, and as the pressures from above developed. When people started thinking a little bit more about how communications is an avenue for critical thinking or things like that those kinds of tended to fold new things onto our mission. So that for example, the engineering communication studio over the years, we started being asked to look at teamwork and leadership because those were a different accreditation concern with the accreditation board for engineering and technology. It's really been kind of a mix between what is possible with technology, what the administration's been calling for, and then, and this is probably the most important thing, the things that the CxC team wanted to accomplish with our pedagogy, with our programme, with the teaching and learning because no matter what else has been the case that has been one thing I'm very proud of is no matter who's been the director, who's been on the team, we've had a real dedication to that alongside other goals we've been given.

Annemarie Galeucia: 14:10

To Boz's point about the way that technology was so different, in this early stage, we were really working with the leading edge of technology. But you know, now in 2024, we're like, 'Oh, man, that was kind of clunky.' But at the time, we were using our file sharing programmes for internal documents that students would share in a more traditional sort of internal assessment portfolio way. And then we were doing actual button pushing workshops to help students understand how to use Dreamweaver because at the time, that was really, you know, what people were using or what we had opted into as what we thought could be the most useful thing, right [laughs]?

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:42

Yeah, that was so advanced because you didn't have to write every single HTML tag yourself any more.

Annemarie Galeucia: 14:48

Yes.

Boz Bowles: 14:48

I remember seeing the guidance for how to build a website in Word [Annemarie laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:55

You did what you had to do at the time and I mean, at that time, that was really advanced the tool we had available...

Annemarie Galeucia: 15:01

Yes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 15:01

Now looking back, we can laugh about it, but at the time, we did some pretty amazing stuff.

Annemarie Galeucia: 15:07

Absolutely, and I, you know, and I'm joking about it now, but I think part of what really worked for us at that time period is that we were in the thick of trying to understand the utility of that technology. There's no replacement for having to actually play around with it yourself, then to be doing it, and then also translating that into knowledge for students. We started in engineering, but really early on in our programme, we had already begun to expand into humanities and social science, into other art design fields, into science fields. So we had students, for example, from English. So the notion that we were like, 'We're going to help you use Dreamweaver to build a portfolio,' I mean, this was kind of like mind blowing for some folks, right? And I do think another thing that really this programme hinged on, Boz talked about the staff that we have, but our faculty drove this. I think one of the reasons we were able to do this in these early stages is because we had really creative, really competent faculty members who specifically were confident in recognising that exploring the unknown is worth it. And that's a particular kind of confidence, right? Faculty who were willing to say, 'I don't know - yet - but I'm interested in exploring, and I want to set this up to see how much time we have, and I'm comfortable doing this as a co-conspirator with my students.' That component of our phase one has been really, really vital. That is something that we have held on to throughout the entirety of our programme is the faculty who were willing to do that, the faculty who drive that are the reason this programme is successful, and that's carried through all of the phases that we've had. Though, I will say when we moved into phase two, I think everybody was relieved when we were like maybe no more Dreamweaver, just use a Weebly or Wix or something [Annemarie and Kristina laugh].

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:41

That way you went away from focusing on the technology, getting those technology, digital skills out and focusing more on the content. So can you please tell a little bit about phase two then?

Annemarie Galeucia: 16:51

For phase two, at that time, we had finished our institutional requirements associated with very specific protocols for assessment. We had been successful, which is wonderful. We were able to demonstrate that we were a high impact program that we were really, you know, fostering deep learning skills for students. With the end of that connection to institutional assessment requirements, we were able to take some time to reflect on what was a must have versus a nice to have for the programming, and really, again, take into account the different technologies that we had available to us, what was evolving in that capacity, and also the questions that were evolving associated with things like leadership and teamwork, and developing critical reflection around transferable skills. So in phase two, which was right around, I think, we sort of officially shed the private document component of the portfolio right around 2014-2015, which is where we start to designate phase two. We phased out the pre and post test components from phase one and began to target the portfolio as really the primary focus area. At the time, we were seeing some developments with things like Wix and Weebly, so we were able to reduce the button pushing prep that we were doing. But we'd also from phase one developed a lot of, I think, really valuable sort of conceptual toolkit questions where we were like, how do we manipulate a tool, right? We're given a piece of technology that is much more user friendly, but we still know that they're all of these higher order concerns associated with it. So how can we focus our energies on helping the students demonstrate their transfer, and essentially flip the mental switch away from thinking of themselves, as you know, just a student experiencing a thing into the mindset and the articulation that they're an emerging professional. One of the ways that we did that for phase two was to shed the notion of private doc[ument]s almost entirely and really had the students focus energies on just the portfolio. The one exception to the shedding of the private documents is that at the time, and we can talk about technological bandwidth, we can talk about our concern for making sure that we were promoting equitable opportunity for our students, we had opted to keep a spoken sample as an optional included on your website or send it to us as a private link. Like I said, some of the tech, we weren't totally sure it was going to be able to transfer as effectively as we wanted it to, it still felt a little bit clunky. We'd had a lot of questions among our team about whether asking a student to incorporate a spoken sample would expose them to linguistic discrimination, depending on their background, their accent, or their effect. We had had a lot of conversations [laughs] with contemporaries and folks around that and because we didn't feel like we had had enough information yet to feel confident about where to land on it, that combined with the technology, really made us feel confident that if we kept the spoken sample as an option, we still needed a spoken sample because we are a four-mode programme, and we really want to put students in a position to stretch that but if we keep it optional on the website, or in a private link that you send us, we're doing our best service to the students. That really served us as an effective transition point for us. Boz, do you want to add on to that?

Boz Bowles: 20:04

The only thing that I'll say is I don't think if you go back, you're gonna see a lot of people that did a public spoken option back then with their portfolios, just because of the technological lift involved in putting it there. It was very difficult and very time consuming. And for, you know, college students who are nearing graduation, if it wasn't absolutely looming, you know, within a semester or so it's still right on the horizon. So it was an awful lot to ask them to take on the technological lift of posting it, in addition to finding an opportunity to record yourself giving a presentation. Keep in mind, you know, these phones were not quite ubiquitous yet. So back then we still about half the time had people getting little six inch tripods with a flip camera on it. A very different world technologically, it's stunning to me to think how quickly those things evolved and are still evolving because just a few years later, it was very easy to just drop a video right into your whatever template website you've chosen. But it went from a time consuming and technologically oppressive lift to drag and drop in just a couple of years. Programmatic review is not something you do as quickly as you notice that, oh, that's an easier button to push. So you know, it takes a while for us to catch up with our policies to those technologies as they're introduced. And honestly, I remember the first time we saw a template driven website, we were all just flummoxed. What does this do to our pedagogical moments? How are we going to teach if all they're doing is dropping things... You know, we didn't really know what it was going to look like teaching without all of the other stuff because it's all we had done. So to be able to trim away all of that extra button pushing stuff and really start getting at skills development, I think that was probably the best part of phase two because as the technology caught up to us, it wasn't us saying this is what we'd like to see you doing now students, it was students coming to us going, 'Why do I have to do it this old difficult way, why can't I just do this?' And eventually, we caught up with them, basically, I think it's fair to say. Students are always going to lead the way on letting us know what - not just what technology is out there, but possibly more importantly, what technology connects with them. And at this time, it was the beginning of Web 2.0. You know, you were just beginning to get something more than three minutes on YouTube. You know, Netflix was just becoming something that didn't happen through your mail. As the technology advanced, possibilities advanced, and we've tried to keep up but students are what's really driving that.

Annemarie Galeucia: 22:11

Yeah. I think, too, within that, you know, phase two and phase three, because we're in an era where students, most of the students that we're seeing are digital natives, just based on the common age group for the students we're seeing, there's this assumption with digital natives, that they have a comprehensive intellectual understanding of what's available to them and what the uses are. But the reality is that they're enculturated, to the button pushing, and they still need help with the concept work and the planning work. And to Boz's point, this is kind of where all of these components of communication skills development, all of these higher order concerns, all of those conceptual training things really got to be, I think, moved even more to the forefront for us because we didn't have to stress out as much about teaching button pushing, we could focus instead on training students through the manipulation of this. Why are we doing it this way? What is the difference between just dumping a bunch of stuff as a repository and actually building a comprehensive narrative? And to Boz's point, even just within phase two, where we started with tech and where we ended up with tech was light years apart. There was so much growth in that period, and the students drove so much of that with great questions, with 'Why do we do it this way? What is the difference between a LinkedIn or a GitHub and a website that I'm going to be building for you? What is the utility of these two different things that I might be building? How do they interact?' Those kinds of questions, I think really became vital for us. And they remain really important for us today because we know we have all of these different platforms, depending on the fields that we're working in. Still, we know what's the point of a portfolio, if I have a GitHub or LinkedIn or something, right? I think, you know, moving into the phase three component, that was a big part of the conversation that we had. The technology had caught up, smartphone utility had caught up. We were developing a more robust model to help students figure out what to prioritise in spoken communication. It wasn't just 'Here's a speech about how to make pizza.' It's 'Here's me doing a voiceover for something that was part of a 3D modeling unit that I did for a lab. Here's me doing an elevator pitch talking about the event work that I have been volunteering for forever, that's going to be really useful for me in this future,' right? We had done a lot of movement in that way. Particularly, as it relates to the spoken sample, the tech and The gamut of spoken samples that we see and the degree to which the conceptual support that we were building, I think really we are coaching students through, you know, 'if you have tipped the needles, and in 2019, we launched our phase three, which shed the private spoken sample option. And that was the this sample, do you put it on because you have it or do you biggest difference for the 2019 adjustment in terms of what the student output was, was we transitioned into having a put it on because this sample is the most appropriate sample for spoken sample as a required part of the public facing website. We're still growing in that, right? And that's the thing that we get a significant number of questions on from the students because it's the part where they struggle the most to separate the notion of backstracking from the notion of like really representing myself in my narrative. you to include to connect with your audience so that you can really demonstrate skill sets so that you can move the needle for why somebody would want to be connecting with you when you finish?' I think that's one of the biggest areas we've been looking at, but we also know from national surveys and also from our own campus based surveys, oral communication is significantly one of the top three things that employers are looking for that students are asking for help with. We're in an interesting period right now because 20 years ago, when I thought about oral communication, I thought about a speech that I had to do for a class. But now we're having so many more conversations. What is the art of a dialogue, and how do I represent that I could do that? What is the process of an interview? What is the process of doing an effective voiceover for something that has some visual component added to it? Or how do I build an oral narrative all by itself in a podcast? There's all these other ways that that's been manifesting, then that's been an interesting movement for us because I feel like so much of the other stuff we have is kind of unlocked, right, Boz? We feel like we really got the audience discussions unlocked, there's so much we can speak to revolving around visual design and navigation and organisation and that customised build, but we're moving through these notions of the spoken in ways that you know, are sort of like ironic, because we talk about digital enhancements being really the most leading edge stuff, but they're facilitating so many great conversations around what oral communication is shaped like today.

Boz Bowles: 26:38

You know, we moved a lot from 'What do you have? What can you do?' to 'Why do you have this? What do you hope to accomplish?' You know, it was a lot more useful discussion around the elements of portfolios in more recent years. And I think a lot of that was just that as an institution, as a campus by programme, CxC, we got our feet under us a little better with understanding the technologies that were possible, and we've been around for a while about that time, so we had people that were pretty well situated in their home colleges. So you know, it wasn't like an English professor trying to figure out what goes on over here in science or whatever, we actually have a virocologist over there now, you know? So we've got, I guess, a more attuned staff, and that has made it a lot easier for us to make the portfolio something that is impactful to the student rather than just boxes they check on the thing they've done. And that, of course, makes it more useful to the employers, too, which are the other part of this. You know, employers and graduate programmes that are going to be looking at these portfolios, they get a much better idea of what real return they can expect on their investment in that student if there's something more meaningful on the portfolio. It's been much better. And part of it's been a natural evolution, but not the easy parts, the you know, the rest of the stuff we really struggled with, and that has been the best part of the journey, I'd say. It's iterative, it's messy, it's people. It's the fun stuff.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:47

Speaking of evolution, are you still in phase three or do you think you have entered phase four? Because of course, your article ends at the end of 2020/23 due to the publication process.

Boz Bowles: 27:59

If we say phase four, do we have to write another paper [all laugh]?

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:04

Or make it a more multimodal one.

Annemarie Galeucia: 28:06

This, I think, is the future. There's a certain attitude that has to be in place if you're

Boz Bowles: 28:07

I'm not sure we know we're going into a phase until going to work with us, I think. You know, it's not always clean we have the ability to look back at it. Because you know, I'm part of it is just the busyness of being busy, right? You know, who knows what we're doing while we're doing it, we're just doing it. But when we have a little time to slow down and go, 'Okay, where are we having problems and where did they come from?' that's where we start to see, oh, we've changed the way we do that. Or the world has changed around us, and we need to change the way we do that [laughs]. And that second one is probably more common, honestly, being not just willing to take up something new and change, but to kind of embrace it, that's always been our way. or messy, or whatever. I mean, like, we bump into each other all the time, but it's because we're all dedicated to whatever we're doing. And we all have different roles. So you know, we'll see in a few years what phase we're in, I think.

Annemarie Galeucia: 28:52

I would agree with that. When I reflect on the work we're doing now compared to what we did in 2019, it is less about shifting requirements for what the portfolio contains, and much more about how as a programme, we're leaning into opportunities to provide more asynchronous resources to students while they're going through this process. And that I think, is a really valuable part of the learning journey for the students. Certainly, we can talk about pre COVID, and now that we're, you know, hopefully past what we all think of as peak COVID, right? Some of the best lessons we had as educators out of that was the value of asynchronous content, and not just the value of asynchronous content, but the responsibility we have to make sure that we are making it available. I think for a portfolio, in particular, there's a lot of stuff that we can package for students that they can look at on demand at three o'clock in the morning while I'm asleep[laughs], while their advisor is asleep to help them reflect on what they are doing. And so if I were to claim a phase right now, I would suggest that we're really focusing energy on just doubling down on the support resources that we have in an asynchronous capacity so that the students have that to supplement the human time that they have. And the human time isn't going anywhere. But we've learned, we know that when students have helpful materials like that to refer back to, it positions them to ask the right questions, it positions them to prepare themselves to be in a live space with somebody for interaction or to manipulate and see how it's going with the actual website build. For me, that's really an area where I'm excited to see a shift into it. I'm excited for us to continue to build that out. And I think to Boz's point, we're a constantly evolving programme, which means that it's inevitable, we're going to cycle back in and reflect on, are we meeting every moment we can with the students for this portfolio? And if the answer's no, how do we want to refine it? If the answer is yes, how do we want to continue to innovate that and continue to push it, right? What do we keep? What do we experiment with?

Boz Bowles: 30:56

There's so many student experiences that lend themselves to being shared through a portfolio and a lot of those track with the new mandates coming down from above. In other words, if you're involved in a leadership programme or if you're involved in a series of workshops affiliated with a scholarship that focuses on teamwork or something like that, a lot of those are very in demand skills. I mean, over here in engineering, those are the A bet skills that I mentioned earlier. The portfolio as a way to demonstrate your potential as a leader, as an entrepreneur, as a team worker, or something like that, we're getting more pressure from above to facilitate that kind of thing. It's not just the portfolio programme, but the way the portfolio programme overlaps with our other programmes, you know, our workshops, our leadership programme, all the things that I mentioned, student organisations, professional orgs, involvement with the student, no matter what they do, finds its way into our portfolios. And so as we are being asked to develop more programming in those areas, we're finding new ways that the portfolio can feed that and that the students can use the portfolio to demonstrate those skills. And more importantly, and I think this is a lot of what has been most effective about our most recent phases, it's more empowering the students to understand these things about themselves, rather than just here's an assessment for the institution, and you can read your reflections one day, when you're looking back, it's a lot more immediately meaningful in the things that they're doing it for getting a job, figuring out the next career step, if they don't know. You know, 'Am I going to grad school or work?' All of these things that can be a lot more integral part of that decision making and the growth around those areas.

Annemarie Galeucia: 32:21

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:22

Do you then think that your students, all students at LSU, will graduate with a portfolio at some point?

Annemarie Galeucia: 32:27

Ouff. We have 37,000 students at LSU this year, and we've got about 100 that are probably going to graduate through the Distinguished Communicator Medal Program. That isn't to say that there aren't other spaces on the campus where students are doing portfolio building. We do work actually with a lot of faculty who start students their first year of college building a website to sort of introduce them to the notion of the portfolio. We talked about this in our article, but the structure of our programming is such that I think it's just mathematically impossible to provide the amount of contact hours and not just contact but focused, iterative, vivid, customised time with students to be able to build that. These are conversations that we've had internally as a unit, you know, what's the biggest value add that we can provide through this portfolio programme? We feel really strongly that it is that toolkit of heavy reflection, that highly customised time for a student to have a supportive space, to be able to really define what they want, and how they want to articulate it on their own terms. I don't know right now, how we could expand that because of the culture that we're living in, and there are so many other amazing programs out there. I know that Megan Mize has been on your programme. I think she's doing such incredible work with portfolios. She has an article also in this special issue that we are featured in. And she's really I think, doing incredible work to try to make portfolios a more comprehensive institutional programme. I mean, when I'm looking at how other people are getting it done at a larger scale, I'm really curious about how Megan is continuing to move that needle, right? And I think that her work and her university is really one to watch in that capacity. That all hinges on robust training for mentors at the peer mentor level, and then also at the faculty level. For us, we're just not there yet. I don't know what our future will hold in that framing.

Boz Bowles: 34:16

It certainly wouldn't be possible to do it like we're doing it now at that scale. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some assessment tool that was you know, gathering work from students behind the scenes or something, maybe through Moodle or something like that. But I don't see any chance of building what we've got out to the full student body.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:32

I'm definitely watching Old Dominion University Megan's university, quite closely because she and I are on the Digital Task Force from AAEEBL. So it's always fantastic to catch up with her and everybody else who is involved, and I'll also make sure to link to the article that you mentioned because that is looking also at the visibility of labour. Now, is there something that you would like to be able to do with portfolios that you can just yet fully do?

Boz Bowles: 34:59

Holograms [all laugh]. I will say that I remember back when I was in graduate school in 91, I took a little time off, I started working as an intern for an online literary journal. The beautiful thing about it was, we realised, wait a minute, we're not limited to words. We started having videos and things like that. So the possibilities then were just unreal to us. I can see maybe in the future where it's a little bit more like a digital portfolio as a hub of connections of all of your digital footprints out in the world or something, and maybe something you build. How do you connect your LinkedIn to your GitHub, to your personal website, to your digital portfolio? You know, there's so many different things out there, and I don't see that reducing in the future. I see it, you know, becoming more scattered and I kind of feel like maybe that's something that we're going to chaotic. see in the future is maybe a little less completely curated top to bottom websites, and a little bit more of linking out to what we need and filling in the gaps. One of the strengths I think of the way we're doing portfolios here is the personal narrative, the fact that the student isn't just uploading documents, but I tell very often our students, once you've made the case that you can do the job, then you need to make the case that it wouldn't be terrible to have you in the same office, right, and show that you have personality in three dimensions, and you like travel or art or whatever, but none of that is gonna matter if you can't do the work. I feel like maybe down the road, there's going to be more ways to connect more stuff in a central location.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:20

Annemarie, anything for you?

Annemarie Galeucia: 36:22

I mean, for me, I've got a couple of things in mind, right? Again, going back to this notion of, and this really transcends the portfolio, I think the portfolio is the learning tool, but where I hope we can take the learning and move it elsewhere, is this notion of really being critically engaged with what the tech can do for you. For me, when I have our programme hat on, we have already this wonderful team of students who work out of our communications studios, and we train them in different forms of communication and different specialties. Some folks are really equipped with very, very specific tech troubleshooting. Some folks are equipped with working as a generalist in writing support. I think for us as a programme, something I would really love to see us be able to expand even further into is how we can equip our studio team members to sit with any student coming in the door and help them ask these bigger higher order questions about the tech that they're engaging. You know, and sometimes a student needs to print their poster, we just need to help them push a button, and I know that. But so many folks are coming in with these bigger questions, or they're coming in just box checking, when in reality, if they stepped back for a second and asked the bigger questions, the opportunity just abound for them to be able to be successful, whether it's in that assignment in particular or in this long term skill set that they have. I think one of the advantages for Boz and I given the generations that we grew up in, you know, we've seen a profound amount of digital change. We went from periods of time that had incredibly low quantities of personal tech use to overwhelmingly high quantities of personal tech use. That transition, I think equips us with those kinds of higher order skill set questions that we didn't necessarily feel like we had when we were angry [laughs], when we were learning new tools, right? If we can help foster that for students who are just more over sensitised with the sheer volume of things being thrown at them, I think it's going to help them basically develop a superpower where they have all this innate tech ability, but they understand how to be critically engaged with it. For me, I think if we can continue to move the needle that way with the students, and we start with the portfolio build, but we also use the portfolio as an excuse to continue to help our studio team members build those kinds of consultative skills with students, we're able to take what we're doing with the portfolios and manifest that much more broadly. So this is sort of my like, idealistic this is where we could hopefully go for it, but also from a scaling perspective, in terms of providing good support for students, I think it's really important for us to put this energy into training our studio team members on the top to bottom, the higher order to the button pushing so that our students who are going through these programs, whether it's the Distinguished Communicator Medal Program or they're building a website for their class can know that when they're going in there, our team is going to be able to help them really just build something that they're going to feel really excited about. We've made good progress in that area, but our studio team members are temporary labour, by design. We want them to quit [laughs] so they can move on with their degree when they leave. So we're still figuring out that timing and the cadence of training and support that we can do for them.

Boz Bowles: 39:43

Yeah, you mentioned posters, Annemarie. I can think of four places in this building where a student can print a poster, but I can only think of one where they can get feedback on how to compose that poster, how to talk about that poster, and then also how to share what they learned from building and talking about that poster on a digital portfolio later. That's what CxC brings. It's not just about how to do it, but why would you do it? Why does it mean anything? What are you going to do in the future as a result of all of this?

Annemarie Galeucia: 40:07

Yes, absolutely.

Boz Bowles: 40:08

We consistently push the students forward to make them, you know, take on the uncomfortable challenges, whatever they may be. For example, right now we're having tours coming through the engineering studio. I could give them, but I'm not gonna. I'm gonna get a 20-year old to stand up and talk about what we have because they need the interpersonal communication skills, they need the experience of leading a tour, they need the idea of composing a brief chat, they have to plan that in the moment, things like that. It's not just that we can do it, but that we can help the students, I like Annemarie's, we can make them superheroes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:37

To finish our interview off now, the last three questions for each of you. Annemarie, let's start with you for the first one. Which words do you use to describe portfolio work?

Annemarie Galeucia: 40:49

Customised, iterative, and intensive.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:52

Thank you. And what about you, Boz?

Boz Bowles: 40:54

I'm gonna go with messy. I'll also speak to the comprehensive, the reflective nature of it than making sense of what you've been doing for the past 4, 5, 6 years, but I kind of like the messiness. My whole philosophy is kind of embrace the chaos. The idea of students coming in going, 'I don't know what I'm supposed to do, but I'm really excited to do it.' I can't think of a better thing.

Kristina Hoeppner: 41:12

Boz, let's continue with you then. What tips do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities? What have you learned in your 18 years of doing that?

Boz Bowles: 41:23

Do it yourself so you know what you're asking because the lift changes sometimes very quickly. A lot of times people assume that this generation of students because they've you know, grown up videotaping their skateboard tricks that somehow they're all cinematographers, or whatever. And they're not. I still meet people that are baffled by email. Some of them are in technical fields. The assumptions that people make are not good ones. So I would say if you're going to assign something, anything technological in nature, put your hands on it first, if that's a video assignment or blog, or whatever, it may be a podcast even, right? They're deceptively complicated actions. So do it yourself before you assign it to others.

Annemarie Galeucia: 41:59

I would say heavy ditto on the do it yourself. Heavy ditto on that. The other thing I would add is, there is no such thing as a one size fits all situation for portfolios. There's no way around it. You can have a toolkit as a consultant, as somebody who's trying to help folks, but they are going to find a weird tick in a system or more importantly, there's no two people in the world. So if you're really having them build a portfolio that is about them, and about their goals, and about their audience, they're going to have something that is all entirely their own. You can guide them, you can coach them, but if our job is to empower students to build their own narratives on their own terms, we cannot expect them to all crank out the same template.

Kristina Hoeppner: 42:43

What advice do you have for people creating portfolios? Annemarie, if you want to go first?

Annemarie Galeucia: 42:50

Sure, yeah. Advice I would have for people creating their own portfolios is that they are going to put probably 10 times more energy into it than they think they will need if they are doing it right. In my experience, over the years, I see so many folks struggle flipping the mental switch from, 'I got to do this stuff, or I had to do this stuff, and it worked out' into'I did this stuff. This is what I can do with it, and this is why I want you to call me so that I can do more of it because this is what I can do with you.' That mental hurdle., I see it from people of all ages. It's not a youth thing. I see it all the time. So if you're building a portfolio, flip that switch as quickly as you can, and then get a friend to bring you back if you're overreaching on your claims.

Kristina Hoeppner: 43:42

Boz, what's your advice?

Boz Bowles: 43:44

I mean, I have a lot of things spinning around in my mind right now. You know, one of them is about being flexible. One is about embracing some chaos. But I think the biggest thing I would tell somebody building their own portfolio is don't be afraid of the technical lift. The technological lift is not a heavy one. You can build a portfolio in an hour or two. Building one you're going to be happy with next week, that's a heavier lift. And so I would say get in touch with what you're trying to accomplish with your portfolio. Give yourself some time to do it because it's not going to be quick. I guess that's the big one. Be real about your expectations. The technological is not the hard part. Building something you mean to say and the way you mean to say it that's the hard part. The rhetoric of it is a lot harder to me than the technology of it. Lean into that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 44:26

Thank you so much to the two of you, Annemarie and Boz, for this awesome conversation today with you sharing all the things that you have learned over the years in your Distinguished Medal Program, and I hope we'll hear of many, many more years that your programme continues.

Annemarie Galeucia: 44:42

Thank you so much for having us. This has been a blast. Boz and I love talking about this stuff any day, but it has been especially enjoyable getting to spend this time with you talking through it.

Boz Bowles: 44:51

We love talking about this stuff. I don't know if it's coming through, I think it is, but as a unit we're a fairly small unit on campus. We spend a lot of time together so we bump heads a lot. But we really enjoy working together at the end of the day. I think everybody on the team has real investment in what we do, not just for job security and all of that, but we really feel like we're contributing to society in a positive way. And I think we support each other a lot in doing that because we all see it. This conversation was really just a little flavour of what this job is kind of like really. I enjoy working with Annemarie, but our whole team is a hoot.

Kristina Hoeppner: 45:21

That's fantastic to hear, and also with the podcast now we are exploring that multimodal element and not just sharing your research in a written, traditional format, but also exploring that new space of how we can make things available.

Annemarie Galeucia: 45:34

I think that's fabulous.

Kristina Hoeppner: 45:36

Thank you so much. Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Annemarie Galeucia and Boz Bowles. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find resources 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 portfolio platform Mahara. Our next episode will air in two weeks. I hope you'll listen again and tell a colleague about it so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.