is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she also serves as co-Director of the VT Engineering Communication Center (VTECC). Her research interests include interdisciplinary collaboration, design education, communication studies, identity theory and reflective practice. Projects supported by the National Science Foundation include exploring disciplines as cultures, interdisciplinary pedagogy for pervasive computing design; writing across the curriculum in Statics courses; as well as a CAREER award to explore the use of e-portfolios to promote professional identity and reflective practice.
AbstractGraduate teaching assistants (GTAs) play important instructional roles in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. However, current practices within graduate education do not reflect the importance of this teaching role. This missing support for developing professional identities that include teaching roles within graduate students is a driving factor for this paper. To this effect, we review recent literature related to graduate student development, provide background on ePortfolios, and suggest tips for utilizing ePortfolios as a reflective space for graduate students to track and monitor their own development as teachers and researchers.To that end, this paper presents a brief literature review of the current reflective practices used to develop professional identities of graduate students as teachers, researchers, and learners. The literature search focuses on two key themes -first, the typical professional practice of valuing research over teaching is explored and second, the creation of electronic portfolios is examined to determine their potential applications for teacher identity development in the face of this adversity. An electronic portfolio, or ePortfolio, is a digital archive or collection of artifacts (audio/video clips, text, and graphics are typical examples of the types of media incorporated) that represent its creator. Personal reflection on one's own work and the process of selecting the artifacts for inclusion are key elements in many ePortfolios.Findings from this review show that portfolios have previously been used in educational settings for a wide variety of purposes -among these are assessment, learning development, and professional presentation. Portfolio creation has also been used extensively for assessment purposes within student-teacher training programs, but only modest work has been done within a research-based framework for identity development for graduate students. Within engineering settings, portfolio research and practice has been mainly focused on the undergraduate population, not on graduate students. Therefore, our tricks of the trade focus on the use of ePortfolios specifically within the graduate student population, using it as a reflective space for development within professional roles.We argue that the potential uses of ePortfolios as a method for graduate students to develop integrative professiona...