Student Teacher E-portfolios: The emergence of student agency through structured dialogue and critical engagement

Enabling agency has been a central aim in the creation of an e-portfolio for teaching students on a one year professional graduate programme. Agency is situated in the changing ways in which people perceive their world. Their relationship to the past, present and future are enacted in the present (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Working from this theoretical positioning the development of the PGDE e-portfolio has scaffolded (Bruner, 1996) students to present actions through engagement with their past experiences and future orientations. The e-portfolio centres around activities which facilitate students’ trajectory into the community of practice (Wenger, 1998) in which they will work as a professional. Applying the framework for ecological agency, which Priestly, Biesta and Robinson (2015) have used to reflect on teacher agency, this paper explores the emergence of student agency across the lifespan of their PGDE year.
The research was carried out in a Federated Institution with a dispersed student group, taught through a blended learning approach. Students on this programme complete an eportfolio to evidence the Standard for Provisional Registration (GTCS, 2012). The aim of this task is to provide a relevant framework to record and reflect the development of the students’ professional identity as teachers. This connects to the structure of career long professional learning in Scotland and the professional update (GTCS 2012) process.
The tutor team carried out a scoping exercise to inform this research in 2014 – 15, and changes were made to develop the use of a dialogic approach to support the development of student agency.