Amanda B. Wallace & Kylie Pugh: The portfolio as well-being tool

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. I look forward today to my chat with Amanda B. Wallace and Kylie Pugh. Amanda is an Assistant Professor at Tallahassee Community College and holds a Master's in English Language and Literature. Kylie is an Adjunct Faculty at the University of West Florida, and a Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Instructure. She also holds a Master's in English Language and Literature, but doesn't live in Florida any more, but on the other end of the United States in Wyoming. Welcome to the two of you.

Kylie Pugh: 0:57

Thank you.

Amanda B. Wallace: 0:58

Thank you so much for having us. We're really excited to be here.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:01

I invited you for a chat because at the end of 2023, your article 'ePortfolio composition: Fostering a pedagogy of well-being' that you wrote together with Dr Bre Garrett was published in the special issue on ePortfolios in the journal 'Across the Disciplines'. Now, before we delve into your research topic, can you please tell us about yourselves? What do you do? Amanda, do you want to get started?

Amanda B. Wallace: 1:29

Absolutely. I'm an Assistant Professor in a very large community college. We actually are in the process of transitioning from being a community college to a state college, and we service a very diverse population of students. We have students that are only with us for a very short time as they quickly transition to a four-year university, and we also have students who are with us all the way through a bachelor's programme in early childhood education or exceptional education. So we have a wide variety of students that we see, and that gives me the opportunity to work with a really amazing population of student learners and try to find ways to be as engaging as possible with them and create these really high impact practice moments that will become hopefully catalysts for them to really fostering a love of their educational career as they move through their academics.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:18

Fantastic. Thank you so much. And what about you, Kylie?

Kylie Pugh: 2:21

I am an Adjunct at the University of West Florida, and I have been for several years before I had my current role. Currently, I work for Instructure, which if you don't know, owns Canvas. I actually made the change. I was an instructional designer at the Center for Teaching Learning and Technology when I wrote the article and had been teaching for several years, but I opted to make the career change because I really wanted to make an even larger impact and felt like while I was doing a great job reaching the people that were at my institution or partners that I worked with that other neighbouring institutions, I wanted a little bit bigger of an impact. And so now I'm a CSM for Instructure. And I oversee the State of Florida.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:58

So still involved with everybody on the other end of the country.

Kylie Pugh: 3:02

Yes, very much so.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:04

How did the two of you actually become interested in working with portfolios?

Amanda B. Wallace: 3:09

Kylie, you go first.

Kylie Pugh: 3:10

I'll go first. Okay. So Amanda and I were in the same Master's programme, and Dr Bre Garrett is the director of that composition programme and was very much a mentor to me. Portfolios have long been a passion of hers. She's published lots of things on that. And she really started to bring the grad programme as well into the ePortfolios. At one point, right before the pandemic hit, we had a very large pilot that was getting ready to go involving hundreds of students and lots of faculty members. And that was the same semester that Amanda came into our programme, and her perspective is very different from mine [Amanda laughs]. Just because at that point, the pilot felt very much like my baby, we were going to do this, it was going to be great. There was lots of pieces involved, we put in for grants and things. And at that point, I had been teaching long enough in that particular department that I had maybe a little bit more agency than you would see in a traditional adjunct meaning that despite things that my director said to me at the time, which Bre laughs about all the time of saying, like, "I'm not really sure that I see your project working the way that I view ePortfolios," and I was like,"That's okay, I'm gonna do it anyways." And I was allowed to do that, which I know is very much a privilege because I was allowed to push those boundaries and do things that others weren't, I think it allowed us to really enter that pilot phase with no expectations, just a lot of open eyes. Amanda's perspective that she brought, I feel like tempered us a little bit in a good way [Amanda laughs] and was like, "Hold on, hold on. There's still standards we need to uphold." For me, that was how I got there, but Amanda's journey is a little bit different.

Amanda B. Wallace: 4:40

I actually started my Master's at Florida State University, and I transferred to the University of West Florida, and I was very fortunate. I was always a non-traditional students. I had had a career, I had a family. So going back into my education required finesse. When I transitioned to UWF, I was very honoured to be given the option to be a fully online research assistant for Dr Garrett's pilot on ePortfolios. It was a big honour to have set on me from moment one upon entering the institution. I feel as though I was just sort of the lucky kid who walked in and caught lightning in a bottle in this moment because when I stepped into these first meetings, where I was horribly intimidated by the brilliant Kylie Pugh, who seems to know everything, and this project was her baby right there along with Dr Garrett, I just sort of walked in, and they started talking about these portfolios and because of the digital nature in which I've interacted with my education throughout my academic career, it just sort of clicked. I sometimes tease that it's like reading the matrix. I could see it. I could feel it in my bones. I knew what they were talking about. As Kylie said, we were allowed to push boundaries and even more, so I feel as though I was encouraged to do so. When I went to Bre and said,"You know, I have this idea." She was like, "I mean, what's the worst that could happen?" So that I think is how I got so involved. It spoke to the ideals that I aligned myself with pedagogically, and then I had an administration who said, "You have the desire to make a dramatic impact on your students' lives. So let's run with that and see how it goes."

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:14

Had both of you have already created portfolios before yourselves?

Kylie Pugh: 6:18

Yes.

Amanda B. Wallace: 6:19

Yes, I had.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:21

Has that experience then helped you refine your vision of what the portfolio is that you wanted your students to create?

Amanda B. Wallace: 6:28

Interestingly enough, I took an ePortfolio seminar at Florida State University and to speak no ill of that seminar that seminar does not connect in any way with what I do currently with ePortfolios. I actually think that I saw what was being done at a really large research institution with some absolutely brilliant professors, incredible minds that are there that I respect immensely, I mean, Dr Yancey, you know, but the system that they were using didn't match this vision that I had, and that I came to found out that Bre and Kylie also had. So I would say that my past experience with ePortfolio really informed me on things that I wanted to avoid. The work that I ended up doing and immersing myself in instead became really exploratory in a way that was - I have a small smidgen of an idea of what I don't want to do. I don't want it to be standardised in any way. I want this to be something that my students can really grow into for themselves. So I would almost say that my past experience of making a portfolio was like, 'Oh wow. No. This is not what I thought it was.' Okay[laughs].

Kylie Pugh: 7:33

I have a Certificate in Professional Technical and Workplace Writing. That was the first ePortfolio that I had to turn in that, to me, felt like a combo of what we would maybe call like a traditional folio, you know, if you think about, like the printed out binder that you kind of give, and there were a lot of requirements for that just to meet the needs and the demands of the certificate programme. I had been given agency and things like the design and the platform, but then there were a lot of required pieces that needed to go in, and while it was a helpful learning experience, I can't echo what Amanda says enough, like my personal experience taught me nothing compared to what my students have managed to teach me with the ePortfolios. The more I researched, the more I dig in and feel like I've really got a finger on the pulse of what's going on, my students continuously surprise me and challenge a lot of those notions. So yes, it was informative, but the same way that like maybe learning the alphabet [laughs], or like learning to write before you write a story would be. Amanda's got something to say.

Amanda B. Wallace: 8:33

I do. That's it [laughs]. I think it's important to note though here, you know, Kylie referenced earlier that I am often the one to say, "Wait a minute, there are standards, there are things that we need to keep in mind," and coming from the large institution where I am now, making sure that we're meeting institutional and departmental learning outcomes for our students is not something that we can ignore. We cannot just run away with this high impact practice that only looks at a creative aspect or an individual growth aspect of the student. We must keep these other things in mind as well. I will say that as Kylie came in with a little bit more of a technical background in some of the requirements that had to be added and her background with how we can check those boxes, but do so in a way that allows us to sort of step around the traditional or in a box nature of the folio allowed us to really say, "Okay, we can do what the school needs us to do while still meeting the needs of our students." So I will chime in as the person who again Kylie and I's views as we collaborate on this really tended to play well off of one another.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:36

I think you're demonstrating a couple of things really, really nicely. Namely, the first thing of being lifelong learners and also having that portfolio mindset that you have a learning experience, that you reflect on it, and then you change it around for next time and you prove on it and you find the way how would you like to learn what works best for you. The second thing I think that you are also really showing well is that there's not one way of doing a portfolio that there are so many different ways. In some study programmes, you really need that extremely structured, almost standardised, prescribed way in order to get through certain professional standards or for the external situation that is there because some people can't use audio or video or images in their portfolios. Whereas your portfolio that you're creating with the students, you give them a frame, but they can have more creativity because it is more of a learning portfolio. Yes, there are assessment components in it, but the goal is a completely different one. What we've just seen or heard in these last few minutes really is that the breaths and width of portfolio practice is so immense, which can also make it difficult for people to actually know 'Well, where are we at? What is this thing?'

Amanda B. Wallace: 10:50

Well, and I think that the point that you just made is so important to go ahead and acknowledge. When we start, especially people like Kylie and I, when we start talking about ePortfolios, it can be incredibly intimidating to somebody who has never worked with these before with their students because it sounds wonderful to hear you say there's no right or wrong way to do this. But to somebody who would like you know, a little bit of guidance with what is the way to do, it feels scary. So I think it's so important to say that as long as when you first start out working with ePortfolio with your students, as long as you do so in a way that is genuine to the needs of the students that you have in that moment and genuine to you as a teacher and a facilitator of that experience, it's raw data. You're gonna get it in, you're gonna go through it, you're going to create something beautiful out of it, and synthesise the most brilliant ideas that you can then turn around and do something a little bit different next time, and it will continue to grow. It is a living, breathing thing.

Kylie Pugh: 11:45

I would add that we also went into the pilot, and I will say too our pilot was crashed by the pandemic that happened right in the middle. But I do remember that I was able to hold summer session where everybody reviewed and brought findings, and I held a second kind of evaluation team where I brought in different volunteers, I assigned randomised pockets of ePortfolios for them to all evaluate. And I've distinctly remember one of the members on the team being incredibly frustrated because they were like, "The components are there. Why are you saying that this did not meet the criteria of an ePortfolio?" They were very new, and they were exceptionally frustrated because me, Amanda, and Bre, totally same wavelength, right, we could easily spot "Oh, this is this, this is this." And it was difficult. I consider myself pretty well spoken, and I know a lot of words, but it was so challenging to find the best way to explain this as a true ePortfolio, and this is simply a repository where students dumped items. It is so free and so open, and there is so much, that there are still standards, but the standards aren't standardised either [Amanda laughs]. And it's very, very difficult to pin down.

Amanda B. Wallace: 12:59

I do teach ePortfolio in an ENC 1101[College Composition] class. So these are fresh into the college experience and some of them, it can feel very overwhelming, right? Because suddenly I'm asking them to break so many of the expectations that they have become accustomed to especially[laughs], especially in the US K-12 educational system. One of the ways that I try to describe it to them, a true ePortfolio will often tell a story. There will be something really fluid about everything that you go through. And it's easy to spot an ePortfolio that is not working well if you have a disjointed story. If suddenly, I feel like if I were reading this as a paper, I would get confused here. I would not know what is happening. Something in layout, something in design, something the choices that you made has disrupted the conversation that you as the composer are having with me as the audience in this piece of work, it is the same thing. That small, little visual for my students has often helped them to go, "Okay. It has made them feel a little bit more at ease."

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:56

Kylie, you already just mentioned your paper and some of the things that we talked about while you were building the portfolios with the students at the side of the pandemic. So let's actually continue with that thought because that's why I really wanted to talk with you today. The two of you and Bre are bringing in the aspect of well-being into the portfolio conversation that I hadn't yet heard so much about before, and so it's really exciting to find out who or what is behind that paper because of course your paper tells the story and tells it really beautifully in 23 long PDF pages [Kylie laughs], lots of references that are extremely good to explore from, but like with a portfolio, I do want to get a bit more of that story that you might not have been able to share in the article because of course it's an academic article. It is in a peer reviewed journal. So there are certain standards that you needed to adhere to. Now we have the opportunity to do something slightly different to see a different perspective of your story there. How did this research come about for the two of you or actually also the three of you because of course, Bre has also been a big part of that research.

Amanda B. Wallace: 15:08

For my place in this paper, I think that it really started with me being with me specifically, just be a little bit crazy [laughs]. I am- I joined this pilot in the beginning of 2020, it was January of 2020. And of course, we did not know what was coming. I created a very, very well structured and scaffolded ePortfolio unit that was going to stretch across the vast majority of my semester, and I was carefully placing little things in there for my students to help them build exactly what I had envisioned, and I had a student, the one that we have referenced in our article, Andrea Morrell, who came to me in a checkpoint with a very different vision. She was going in a completely different way, but I quickly saw that that concept that we later termed and discovered was well-being where she was really changing the scope of what I had envisioned. I decided to take a huge risk as a graduate student who was teaching a class and working on this pilot to really say, "You know what? Let's do that. Let's see what what this would look like." It required a lot of keeping very close tabs on the work that she was doing, making sure that she was continuing to meet the learning outcomes that we had set, that we were meeting the standards that needed to be met, but also encouraging her to lean in reflectively to the work that she was doing as she began to take the requirement that I had set for the assignment, which was to bring in a piece of outside evidence, work that had been created for a different class that semester, that illustrated and really demonstrated the skills that we were attempting to master in the writing class. So what were you doing in another class that you had been practising and working on in my class? She brought in papers from her political science class where she was looking at things going on in the world around her and then reflecting on who she was as a person living in this moment, culturally, historically, politically, and what that meant for her as a young female, and how she fit into the world. Watching her take the skill sets that she had been learning as a writer, as a composer, and then use those and the reflective elements that we had been working on all semester as well, and use those to shape her understanding of herself, her understanding of how she interacts with the world around her. It was an incredible thing to watch. It was incredibly freeing for me as an instructor to see this beautiful moment unfold. She made it very clear, it was cathartic, it was therapeutic for her. It was really wonderful.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:42

Let me interrupt briefly with a content warning. If you're triggered by conversations about the pandemic in the first half of 2020 and hearing about difficult situations during that time, please skip ahead 15 minutes or jump to the next chapter if your podcast player allows for that. I'll give you a few seconds to stop the audio.

Kylie Pugh: 18:07

So for me, completely opposite side of the spectrum. I was already at this point doing whatever I wanted with the ePortfolios. I was doing a WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) ePortfolio. I was having a lot of students that were really struggling with like, "I want to be a lawyer because it requires very little writing." And I was like, "Oh friend, are you about to have just the worst [laughs] reality slap of your life." And so my ePortfolios were very much focused in the student experience. What is your time gonna be like here? What is that gonna look like, and do you actually know" Very self discovery driven, career driven in that regard. I was having them post things like reflections, artefacts, like what is writing in your field look like, if you were to hold something, what would it look like? A test tube, a coffee cup with writing on it? What was it going to be? Because of that, I pushed my students in a very what we would consider high impact practice way. A lot of students are creating the rubrics in the classroom together. Everything happened in a classroom. I had always, always taught in a classroom. I loved it. I loved seeing my students every day, I built really good relationships with them. I read a lot of body language, and that's how I had facilitated. The pandemic hit and I was like, "Oh no. I have put my students in a emotionally vulnerable but also academically vulnerable situation." The way I had set up and built the class was not conducive to an online situation. I was worried. It took less than two weeks for me to realise that a vast majority of my students, and I think I had two or three sections of the same class at that time, so 75-80 students were not well. I was not well, but they were definitely not well. I just did not know how to get through to them. I didn't, you know, the assignments and the portfolios and things were the last thing on my mind. I didn't know what to do. And so I created well checks. Because I teach a Gen Ed course, my courses have required attendance, and this was not an online class, and I had not yet taught one. And so I was not sure what they expected me to do. So I created a weekly test that consisted of five questions that were things like, "How are you doing? How are you coping? What's something you're really struggling with right now? What do you miss the most about school?" Each week was some variety of'How are you? Are you okay? Do you need to get anything off of your chest? Do you need any resources?' It allowed me to get my class back. The first couple of weeks because we went off for spring break and never returned, and so it was just like pandemonium. My first concern was their well-being. So once I got a really good pulse on certain people are not well, but they do still want to continue with the class, how do we do this? I was not sure. And so I went and told all of my students, "Okay, from here on out, we're swapping up and all of the ePortfolio stuff is going to be video. You just make a video of yourself walking through your ePortfolio, talking to me about it, submit it, and we'll just keep working back and forth with each other. I'll just keep giving you feedback until we hit the end of the semester. I did not set you up for success here [laughs]. A lot of this was going to be in class." By the time we finished the semester, I had really great videos and noticed that like Amanda that students had managed to sneak in bits of oh, especially like my medical students, their artefacts and things of examples of public writing in their field had vastly changed over the last month or two of the semester with the pandemic. Bre, being our fearless leader that she is, might only took one or two conversations with Amanda and one or two with me for her to be like "This is something." Amanda's ePortfolio is showing us that this is possible for students to have the work, to do the work, and the ePortfolio projects that I had been doing so far with the WAC enquiry and the well checks really showed us that students were receptive to that well-being component, not only receptive to it, they needed it to be able to engage, to be vulnerable enough, to engage in truly deep reflective work. I mean, we say this in the article, and it feels not great to say considering all the tragedy, but COVID was the catalyst for understanding the purpose and the need of well-being in the classroom and how ePortfolios can facilitate that in a way that still meets those learning objectives and all of those things. You don't have to have one or the other. So for me, that was where the well-being slid on in. Go ahead, Amanda.

Amanda B. Wallace: 22:22

Unlike Kylie, because I was fully online, my class was already completely asynchronous. So I had designed and structured it with that in mind. I didn't get the opportunity to have that same aha moment that Kylie described. And so what I think is so important to note is when we talk about how there's no right way to do portfolio, it's so critical, in my opinion, though, to then have collaboration with other people who are also doing it because the fact that Kylie and I got to sit down and compare experiences, different modalities, same global catastrophe that happened, how our students responded, how our work with them changed, altered, and what we saw coming from them informed the choices that each of us made as we moved into the next semester and how we continue to try to grow this work that we were doing so that we could more deeply focus on the well-being of our students and what that could mean for them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:12

How did you then cope with that change that happened midway through the term and also for you now seeing completely different portfolios or having to work with different ways, dealing with the trauma that happened to your students, but also with the uncertainty, especially also in the health regard that you, of course, also experienced, that all of us experienced? How did that change your teaching and your interaction with the students?

Kylie Pugh: 23:38

I will say, I am notoriously known for having little to no tolerance for things like late work or any of that. And not that I don't ever accept it. I just require that if you want to have late work, you have to ask. You have to communicate. I have a very WAC ePortfolio, my class really focuses around that, and you would not not call into work, right? You wouldn't just like not show up. I am well known at my institution for being very adamant about those things. And so the first thing that I had to learn during the pandemic, which was easier because obviously everybody was struggling, was far more grace for my students in that regard. I would say that was the number one change for me and then trying to look at from Amanda's perspective who had always been online and for me who had only ever had face-to-face teaching, I wanted so badly to bring the same energy and experience to the online settings, and I just didn't know how. I think for me, all it really landed on was being human and having that humanised element for my students. When the pandemic hit, my daughter was only one and a half, my son was four. There was just no way that I was going to be able to take meetings with students or record videos without being like, "I'm sorry, guys. This is my life. My children live here. They're climbing on me. They're here for our meetings together." There's just no avoiding it. What I think I had been, even if subconsciously taught was that that was not very professional and it did not belong in higher ed, I found that my students loved me more for it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:12

Because they saw your human side.

Kylie Pugh: 25:13

Yes. It was so much more humane. And then even more throughout that those well checks that I was doing, their responses became longer. The more they got to really see who I was outside of the classroom, the more they wanted to do all of those things. And so I have adamantly maintained that. I still do well checks, even though we're not in the middle of a pandemic with my students even now, and it is still the number one thing that is marked on my teaching assessments and all of those things is "this professor cares. She cares. She cares about doing this." I find a lot of pride in that. I do have some people that still make comments about, "Oh, well, that touchy feely stuff with my students." And I'm like, "I don't know what you think I'm doing with my students, but I'm literally just asking them, are you okay? Are you good?" The reason it's so impactful is because the students regardless of their station, where they came from, if they're face-to-face, online student, I have students without fail, they're like, "You're the only person that's asked me that this week." That is not a teacher touchy feely thing. That is like a decent human being thing. For me, the humanising component, I would say, is the only way that I got through it because I needed my students to give me grace too because I was going stir crazy in my house[laughs] with my two young children, my husband is military, and so he was in and out depending, and it just was not a great time for any of us. We do talk about that in the article too that I want to be clear that doing the kind of in depth work that we have done does not come cost free. It's easier to do, the more you do it, for sure. But I also learned things about my students that were heartbreaking and were traumatising, and I do not have enough spoons, the skills to even begin to address that. I can redirect them to resources and things, but that was a hard realisation as well. Man, I can listen, I can lend an ear and I can validate, but gosh, it really sucks that I can't do more for students that eventually kind of start to feel kind of like your kids.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:07

Thank you for sharing.

Amanda B. Wallace: 27:08

When we locked down, my family locked down real, real hard. My youngest child was three at the time, and he has a chronic breathing condition. So when COVID hit, and we didn't know yet what that was going to mean for him, how that was going to impact him, when I say that we basically went into a bubble in my home, I mean, we locked down very hard. I had three online seminars that I was attempting to keep up with as the instructor shifted to an online modality because while I was online, my classes weren't as a student, it was a really unique experience. I would be on a Zoom screen in a seminar room where the seminar was taking place with all the face-to-face students, and I would just interact digitally with them and Zoom in as it were. Those teachers were attempting to shift things, and some of them clearly were struggling as well, just with what this meant for themselves and their families. So it was absolutely atrocious. On a regular basis, very regular basis, I was terrified that I would watch my son struggle to breathe and die if I'm just being brutally honest. It was mentally the most exhausting experience of my life. One of my tattoos actually comes from COVID and speaks to that experience for my family because it was so impactful on us. Now that being said, I will also say that I needed my students in that moment to give me the same grace and compassion that I was desperate to get from my professors in that moment. We were all just desperately trying to keep our heads above water. Similarly, I started really talking to my students in the emails and announcements. I record lecture videos is how I give my students through information in online class. And so there was always a lot of'why don't you make sure that you're drinking plenty of water. Please take a nap, I'm sure you have not slept enough.' It became something that I would get continuously on the professor evaluations at the end of semester, I still. I just had a student say like "She always wants to make sure that we're taking care of ourselves and did we eat something recently," and I'm like, "I just think let's just check on these things. I want to check on people." That became so important because I had incredible professors, but I will be honest, I do not believe any of them asked me how I was. I don't believe any of them touched in to find out, even those who knew that I had a child with a severe medical condition. I don't blame them for it. We were all so consumed by what was going on and trying to just keep our individual worlds running that it was hard. Kylie really demonstrated beautifully how one could extend out that grace, that kindness and that love with her students that she did those well checks and really helped to encourage me to offer my own version of that to my students, even when I felt like I needed more of it myself as a student in that moment. So sort of the duality of that experience as a student who was also teaching during this historical, horrific event that we all went through, right? It really spoke to what am I not getting in this moment as a student that I really need? And then how can I give that to my students? How can I make sure that they know that I don't really care if you get it done this week? As a general rule I do, I'm exactly like Kylie. We don't not call into work and then expect to have a job. But today, are you okay [laughs]? Let's get through now, and then we can continue to build. I will say that while I'm still incredibly strict on late work, I still require students to have some sort of a documented reason for an excuse, absence before they're allowed to submit anything late, I'm also really well known for that. I will say that I waive that policy so frequently because my students have learned that they can come to me and just say, like, "Hey," I don't ask them to share more than they want to be like, "Hey, I've had something come up, I've got a work situation, I've got a kid who's sick." And I'm always saying, "I get it, don't worry about it. Get it to me by this date, we assign a new date," we move on because life happens. And I think that the biggest takeaway from the pandemic experience for me was, I was able to perform better knowing that people cared about me and were checking on me. Feeling that concern for my wellness and my well-being, so I want to try to pour that back out into my students. It has labelled me as that touchy feely professor. I have been shunned [laughs] by some of my colleagues, especially for my deep love of reflective work in my classes, and I'm okay with that. I mean, if that's what I'm hated for by my faculty colleagues, that's OK. There are worst things that they can hate me for [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:27

Yeah. On the other hand, I think also, sometimes, as Kylie said, sometimes people just don't have the spoons or the tools themselves. So who knows what is going on in the heads of the professors that are not doing the things that you were doing the pandemic, maybe they were struggling themselves...

Amanda B. Wallace: 31:43

Exactly.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:44

... and just did not know how to ask for that help or that support in order to get them through this, in order to support their students better. And maybe, of course, some, some people also did not really care, and so that you never really know, because yeah, some people are more open to sharing personal things than others, and there's also the generational aspect to take into consideration as well.

Amanda B. Wallace: 32:06

That's why I said I don't blame any of them for not having reached out, but man, listening especially to the way that Kylie had leaned into that moment to reach out to all of her students and in such a individual way, you know, the well checks that she created were something that she could mass distribute, but nobody saw everybody else's comments. They were just coming to her. So she was able to have basically individual asynchronous digital conversations with each student. Seeing that, hearing about that as we worked together, I just was like, "Oh, man, I want that. I want Professor Pugh." And so trying to mirror that in what I was doing, for sure, yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:43

You have already shared a number of things of how you have continued changing your teaching and especially checking in with your students and making sure that you see them as humans, and they see you as humans as well. And really bringing in that whole person and not just the academic person or the public person, but also sharing things about yourself so that your students can understand you better. Going back a bit to your portfolio practice where you've had these wonderful portfolios created by your students that were not just the artefacts or summaries of the experiences, but really go very deeply into what the students were feeling or how that influenced their future, how did you manage to then manifest that at your institution? Was that a struggle? Or I mean because all three of you were really on board with this type of portfolio and changing things, was that an easier process? Do you continue in that vein? Or have you made any changes to how you teach with portfolios?

Amanda B. Wallace: 33:46

No, no, no, I think we follow the trend up, but I want Kylie to go first because I think mine is the bigger change, and so I want Kylie, I want you to speak on this first.

Kylie Pugh: 33:56

So I will say at an institutional level, I'm sure it comes as no shock to anybody that higher ed historically moves very slow. Change is hard to come by and all of those things. The easy part of the ePortfolios is being able to take those really wonderful, beautiful, those top 5% and going to things like a Chairs meeting and saying 'These are the elements that have been presented. This is the potential that is possible.' And everybody loves the possible potential, right? Everyone's like, 'I want that. I want my students to have that.' That's not the struggle, getting that kind of early, 'Oh, I'm excited' that's not the struggle. The struggle is understanding, and I think that even me, Amanda, and Bre had a moment of this while we were writing this article, which was you were like, 'Oh, it's 23 pages.' It was initially so much longer because there was so much background and storytelling that we were trying to include, but we realised that everybody loves the top 5% portfolios, but the reality is that most students fall below the 5%, right? Like Amanda's, Andrea Morrell is the possibility. The potential is there, but you are not going to get 75 Andrea Morrell's. That's where I feel like we lose some of the buy-in because people see this beautiful finished product that we have laboured over and revised over many semesters and years, years[sings the word] of our lives, to this kind of research and all these things and pedagogical conferences instead of writing and rhetoric conferences and high impact practice conferences instead of traditional composition, you know, all of these things. They see these beautiful products, and they're like, 'Well, we want that,' and they don't quite understand all the fundamentals that go into that. It takes us all semester. It takes a whole semester to even get close. You have to be willing to push your students to be uncomfortable. I have the same bit, the same chunks of writing that students revise up to four to five times to make sure they're analysing themselves, and then when they analyse themselves, they have to be like, 'Oh, no,' you know, I went from analysing their workplace to analysing the portfolio of themselves and seeing if that matches what they want to go.'Hey, is this how you want other people to see you? And objectively, are you portraying what you think you're portraying?' That's been the biggest change for me, getting students to see themselves in different lights, in different ways, and how do I want to evaluate. That has been, to me a better push and easier to align for other instructors who are struggling with the initial composition of what an ePortfolio is. When I think about what changes have come and gone? Yes, at this point, from the start of inception, from that very first pilot, now the entire College of Health at our institution implements ePortfolios. Our education programme for their Masters and their PhD, they now have ePortfolios. Our Honours programme now has ePortfolios. That being said, are they the same type of ePortfolios that we're talking about right now? No, but I'm hopeful that with time it gets there. The biggest change for me has been to require students to do that self reflective work. And man, do they hate it. They hate analysing their own ePortfolios and having to be like, "Well, this is what I want it to say. This is what I want it to do." And I'm like, "Okay, then why isn't it?" And they're like, "I don't know!" You know, they get very [laughs]... That has been the biggest change for me. But I also pair that very much with,"Hey, this week, your revised work is due, the next week is reflect on how this week went. Reflect on how your writing process changed. What did you have to re-evaluate about your process?" Like Amanda, I'm deeply entrenched in reflective work for the students. So they do the work, immediately reflect, do the work, immediately reflect, and I repeat that pattern over and over and over all semester, and it is a lot of work. It's a heavy lift. Yes, we're making change. Is everybody doing well-being and reflective ePortfolios? No, but maybe a few more people than were three years ago, four years ago. So small steps.

Amanda B. Wallace: 37:56

Small steps. Well, and it's interesting because, and I still will take the occasional class over at UWF, but of course, as a full time faculty member at TCC, where I am, I don't get to do that often. So I get to stay current on how things are developing and growing at UWF through Bre and through Kylie. But when I transitioned, when I took my position at TCC, I was so excited because when I stood before a provost and I did my presentation to sell myself as the best professor for this job, I showcased ePortfolio work that I had my students doing. I remember I'm doing my little presentation, and you've only just a few minutes of her time, right, and she stopped me, which my heart stopped when she did it, but it was a good thing. She wanted me to tell her more about those ePortfolios and about what my students had been creating and how I was building that. It was so exciting because I knew in that moment that this really incredible work that I had had the opportunity to begin at UWF was going to get me that job. I believe genuinely that it was a large component to why I was selected. So when I started that first semester, I rolled out ePortfolio the exact same way at TCC that I had been running it at UWF. Oh, it crashed, it crashed and burned so badly[laughs]. Oh my word. I can't tell you the number of times Kylie heard from me going like"This is not working. This is not working! I don't know what's happening." But the students were so different. As the faculty member, I had to have this moment where I just sort of watched everything crumble around me. I knew that it worked. As she said, I knew the potential was there. I knew that I had seen it repeatedly create amazing work of varying levels, beautiful and each one beautiful in its own way. But once I moved to TCC and I had a different demographic of students and a different faculty and administrative support team, what I was doing just didn't work any more. So I had to completely redesign the way that I was using ePortfolio. So for me there's been a dramatic shift. The element of well-being is still there. We do a lot of reflective work, but we focus a lot lot in the ePortfolio work on ways that it can be used either academically or professionally. So we're hitting those institutional sort of requirements that are there, but instead, what I've ended up leaning into is using the ePortfolio as an authentic assessment of mastery of skill. Technically, I have had to do everything that the college is asking me to have them do. They have written about this, they have talked about this, they've brought in this component to show that they know how to do it, I checked every box. But maybe they do have videos included, there are lots of images. Maybe I'm allowing there, you know, the way that they put together their menu across the screen or their choice on fonts to speak to their understanding of visual rhetoric, and I'm assessing their mastery of those skills based on that ePortfolio because it is a true illustration of what they have learned and how they can communicate effectively with an audience, with the skills that they have been practising all semester. So I like to use ePortfolio now as a capstone to the class, and I like to use it as my final because we can work on it slowly all semester and build to it, and when we put together this final product that's beautiful, I make them present them in class, but for their classmates to be able to give them that last minute feedback. "Are you actually coming across the way that you think you are? Are you telling the story that you think you are? We have a captive audience here who will tell you." They don't love it in that moment, but then the work that they put together, it's just absolutely incredible. And I'm able to go to my administration and say, "Well, it's true, I did not have them write the final essay that you might have seen other faculty members do, but we do have a final composition. And that meets all requirements, and here they are, and they're beautiful." And like Kylie said, they get very excited about that. But the faculty that I work with, we do not have access to some of the resources that we would need to really support our faculty in buying into this kind of a thing fully. Again, these are baby steps, we are hoping to continue to build to that, especially with the real world applications of an ePortfolio. The number of skills that we are learning when we create ePortfolios that can be translated into a variety of different workplace skills, it's vital that our students get that experience in our classes. The college sees that and slowly but surely, hopefully, yeah, little baby steps in that direction.

Kristina Hoeppner: 42:15

Some students might only realise that in hindsight, after your class, and once they start their career,"Oh, what I've done in that class with Amanda or with Kylie, actually, I'm going to use that right now" because they are then making sense of it.

Amanda B. Wallace: 42:28

Yes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 42:29

In your varied views of portfolios and the different things you have tried and the freedom that you give your students, but also having the structure in there, is there anything that you still can't really do with portfolios that you just love to do?

Amanda B. Wallace: 42:45

I have not yet had the opportunity to really lean in to the emerging self, right? This was the part of the ePortfolio pilot programme in the beginning of this research that really caught my personal attention was the way that each of my students as they sort of designed their portfolio to look slightly different than everyone else's, and they really leaned into certain aspects more than the other, you were watching that individual student learn who they were, as a student, as a budding scholar as a, you know, a future veterinarian, as they chose how they displayed themselves, communicated their ideas, interacted with the world around them through this digital text, this digital composition that we're creating, you got to see them, each little piece of their identity really blooming. We have several portfolios that we found that where we said,"Oh, gosh, look at this, it's so amazing." But that focus on individual growth and identity is not considered something that is a measurable skill, really, at this moment that we can translate to workplace knowledge. So it has not yet been something that we've been able to lean into. But I will say that it is still one of my personal biggest buy-ins to the ePortfolio process is watching students learn who they are as they create these beautiful masterpieces.

Kylie Pugh: 44:06

The type of students since the pandemic has changed. And I feel like it has changed at a faster pace than in previous years. So I would say I've been teaching maybe six years ish, and the first kind of change that I noticed started to see little incremental changes in my students happened maybe at the year and a half, two year mark, like I've been teaching two years. I'm like, "Oh, students are kinda a little different than the ones that I had previously." I feel like the pandemic facilitated a much faster turnover. My favourite thing about the ePortfolio is everything that Amanda just said. The emerging self, the self reflective practices, the wow moments that you really get to be a part of that give teachers those warm fuzzies, and I have more and more students that I feel like are looking at the class as like a stepping stone, a checkbox, and they're trying to power through, they just want to be done because they want to get going on their degree programme, and I'm noticing an urgency there that I have not necessarily seen in previous years of teaching. It is making it more difficult to make those human connections with my students, and I feel like I've ever had before. I'm still reaching it, but it feels like a little bit less as time goes on. I'm sure that some of that is just the need to adapt. How do I adapt that model to fit this new student so that I'm still getting that, but I have not unlocked what that is. In addition to the well checks, I'm so into wellness for students. I do a form at the beginning of the semester, it says who I am now. And students will say like, "the reason this motivates me, this is my goal for the semester, this is this," and then they do an additional one at the end of the semester, who I am now, you know, after the semester is over, what did I wish I had done differently? And maybe four to five years ago, a lot of the students were like,"My parents sacrificed a lot for me to be here, and I really want to do well for them." Or, you know, "My little sister's looking up to me," or, you know, kind of more heartfelt answers. And I've noticed in the last year or so that has become "I really want to start making money. I really want to graduate and get a job." I'm seeing a lot of changes in person to just like the student and what that experience is. Being in the career that I'm in now where I'm dealing with 70 universities in the State of Florida and hearing about what their QEP's [Quality Enhancement Plans] are and what their goals are and what they're leaning towards, and oh, there's a big push for professional development. I'm seeing that we're losing some of that softness. That vulnerability piece is not as valued in the workplace and then therefore it is not as valued in higher ed now. That trickle effect is slow, but I have not yet figured out how to bridge that. My well checks are still really well received and things like that, but I'm having fewer really impactful in the moment semester moments with students. Now I will say I'm also getting more reflective ones. So like you said, like years down the road, I am now to the point in my teaching where I have students that have graduated and gone off and come back. Gabe's opening statement, "It resulted in the entire redesign of my life," he was my student a year and a half before the pandemic even hit. And we interviewed him during the pandemic, and he was like, "Man, now that you're asking me these questions, I'm really thinking about it. You're so right, this is so wonderful." I feel like maybe that instant gratification that I'm used to getting is maybe a little slower, and I'm getting it more in later years than I am in the moment like I would like.

Kristina Hoeppner: 47:18

Let's see how the portfolio can still help you have some of those elements in there so that you do get to know your students through those deep reflections, through them engaging in letting you know about what they are doing, about the feedback that they give each other and therefore that overall well-being. Yeah, hearing you're being so enthusiastic about the work is showing me that you are behind it, that you care immensely for your students and that you want to make things work for them, that you want the portfolio be an expression of themselves through them telling his story and seeing how that can also then be honoured at your institutions so that it is not just this, 'Oh, by the way, they've also done a portfolio,' but it's actually an integral part of the programme. Is there anything else you'd like to share?

Amanda B. Wallace: 48:06

I think it's important to take a second and genuinely acknowledge Dr Garrett. Bre took a huge chance on you and I, Kylie, and on so many of the other instructors and graduate students that she worked with to really trust us and to work with us. The amount of time that she spent with us individually and in professional development as groups to make us feel as though we were complete equals in this research that we were doing, that we had a voice and we mattered in the experience that we were having and how we wanted to grow and evolve the ePortfolio assignment for our students, That's not what you're gonna get from every administrator that you work with. There's no amount of saying thank you to Bre that would really convey to her just how fortunate I feel that I had that opportunity to work under her. As someone who was new to this field in higher education, I'd only been in higher ed for about three years by the time I got to her, the amount of confidence that it gave me to have had an administrator work so closely with me and to validate all of my ideas and to encourage me to push boundaries and break down walls that were there. It's just absolutely amazing to me that she was willing to do that work with us.

Kylie Pugh: 49:13

That is not a universal experience. I did spend a lot of my grad degree going to a lot of the CCCC's, all kinds of writers conferences and things like that. And it became abundantly clear that administration was not like that across the board. I do also want to say though, that Bre was amazing, but if you have people that you feel like you know you can take a chance or that it might be worth it to be brave and let them take a chance.

Amanda B. Wallace: 49:41

100% agree.

Kylie Pugh: 49:42

Bre was willing to. She's a free spirit. So she's like,

Amanda B. Wallace: 49:45

"Yeah, let's do it."

Kylie Pugh: 49:46

But if you're not like Bre, which no one in the world is, but if you have a potential Amanda or potential Kylie or anybody that has an idea, you know, be brave, because the outcome could be really, you know, Andrea Morrell was the only one in that class who did that. Amanda was brave to take that chance.

Kristina Hoeppner: 50:03

That's how innovation comes about that as well in any field by giving that space, allowing people to push the boundary, and see what comes out of it.

Amanda B. Wallace: 50:12

Yeah, and as an administrator Bre was willing to set aside her personal ego of"This is my programme. This is my pilot and the things that I'm doing," and she really made it collaborative with all of us. Her willingness to share that is what created this amazing experience that we've all had in this spectacular research that has come out of it. So I would agree with Kylie and say, be brave and share that with them because what you get back out of it will likely be so much more than you could have otherwise.

Kristina Hoeppner: 50:39

Mhh. So quick answers, and I'd love to hear from both of you. Which words do you use to describe portfolio work? Kylie, do you want to start?

Kylie Pugh: 50:50

Yes. Reflection, metacognitive work, and WAC would be my three.

Kristina Hoeppner: 50:57

WAC stands for?

Kylie Pugh: 50:58

Writing Across the Curriculum.

Kristina Hoeppner: 50:59

Thank you. Amanda?

Amanda B. Wallace: 51:01

Engaging, exploratory, and I mean, I would go with multimodal.

Kylie Pugh: 51:07

Mhh that was a good one, too. Yeah.

Amanda B. Wallace: 51:09

I feel like that's one that we don't really when we talk about it, we don't use that term enough to describe an ePortfolio. I think that it's really important that we start keying that phrase and at least in the people that I speak to, they always are like, "Oh, I guess it is multimodal, isn't it?" And I'm like "It really is."

Kylie Pugh: 51:23

It really is. It's always implicit for me. So I never think to say it, but you're not wrong.

Amanda B. Wallace: 51:28

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 51:29

Yeah, and sometimes you just need to call it out again, so that it's front of mind. What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Kylie Pugh: 51:40

Oh, man. Don't be afraid to fail. It's okay if it sucks. One semester of pour teaching evaluations or even not your best, I would hope would not be enough to get you fired, but take the risk and learn from it because it could be like Amanda said, her student demographic was just way different. The pedagogy was solid, it was the students that were different. And then me almost the same, my student is changing so I need to adapt. Not being afraid to fail, being transparent with your administration if you're going to try to do that, so that they know that you're not failing just because.

Amanda B. Wallace: 52:13

I would say something very, very similar. When I speak to people about whether they want to get on this crazy bandwagon with me and run with ePortfolios, I usually tell them, "Go ahead, and yes, I'm a big high impact practice person, but maybe start small, maybe create a miniature unit for yourself where you put in some of the key elements to what an ePortfolio might look like." You do a mini version of this so you get your feet wet, and you see what kind of works, what you could build on and what fails miserably. And that way, as you know, as a faculty member who those success rates terrify me, you know, those are something that are important that we keep an eye on, I don't worry that you know, everything would crash and burn, as Kylie said, that I would fail. I can do this in a miniature version and really see what is going to work and what is not going to work with my students and then build on it from there. That is a slightly longer perspective. Look at it, it might take me say three semesters to really get to the point where I'm using a high impact practice of ePortfolio all throughout my semester, but hopefully when I get there, then this, as I said before, living, breathing ePortfolio experience will be really tailored to you as an instructor and your student body.

Kristina Hoeppner: 53:18

That's really important to start small and then grow from there.

Amanda B. Wallace: 53:21

Yes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 53:22

Last question for both of you. What advice do you have for the portfolio authors, for the students that are creating portfolios?

Amanda B. Wallace: 53:31

You're not doing it wrong. My advice to you is you are not doing it wrong. It might not mirror the example that I put up on the board. It might not mirror that, as Kylie said earlier, that top 5%, yet, and that's okay. It's that 'not yet' mindset. You are building something that is going to grow and evolve as you grow and evolve. This idea with ePortfolio that it's a yes or no, that I got it right or I got it wrong, we have to throw that out. That's got to go away. You haven't done anything wrong, you're doing beautifully. If it's not where you want it to be, then you're not done yet.

Kristina Hoeppner: 54:08

Kylie?

Kylie Pugh: 54:09

My advice would be if you are looking at your ePortfolio objectively, meaning that if you were looking at it, ask yourself if I was not me what I understand the message? If that was not me, and I didn't know everything about me what I really understand what's trying to be portrayed here? Because chances are, the answer's 'No.' Don't feel bad. Like Amanda said, if the answer's 'No,' like that's fine, just fix it, but also don't be afraid to ask for help or for reviews or any of those things. You are in charge of what that ePortfolio looks like and the story that it puts out, and so if it doesn't look like you want it to look or how you think it should, it's okay, just change it. Don't be afraid to scrap it and start over.

Kristina Hoeppner: 54:48

Thank you so much, Kylie and Amanda for this chat, for bringing the element of well-being into our portfolio conversations and also for pointing out why that reflection is so important and why it is also so important then to share the portfolios with others in order to validate what you've written can be understood or can't be and then change things and be okay with that failure, be okay with starting over or making changes in order to come to a better end product. So thank you so much for sharing that with us, and I look forward to the webinar that you are going to have just the day after the podcast episode goes live.

Kylie Pugh: 55:28

Thank you for having us.

Amanda B. Wallace: 55:30

Yes, we're very excited for the webinar, but in this moment, I'm just still thrilled that we got the opportunity to chat with you. So thank you so much.

Kristina Hoeppner: 55:39

Thank you. Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was'Create. Share. Engage.' with Amanda Wallace and Kylie Pugh. 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 our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.