Portfolio

The section describes the different aspects and stages of my professional experiences and much more and that is why I called it portfolio.

There are two basic types of portfolio:

• summative portfolios created for the purpose of applying for an academic job or for promotion and tenure within a department.
• formative portfolios created for the purpose of personal and professional development.

Since professional experience changes as a career progresses, I thought it a good idea to create one, to periodically update in order to keep current with eventual progress, and to give myself a regular opportunity to reflect.

At this point in my career, I found I needed to keep a summative as well as a formative portfolio since they serve different purposes and, in addition, they have several materials in common.

Even if a teaching portfolio is generally seen as a place to summarize one's teaching accomplishments and gives examples of classroom material, others describe it as a space for reflection. In my opinion, it can be described as a space to do both and in any case the products provided do not focus on teaching only.

I hope the present section may be comprehensive and the documentation representative of the scope of my professional experience across courses and time.

Last but not least, being the present portfolio used for summative and formative purposes, selectivity was privileged and contents limited to results, artifacts and steps representative and significant for personal development and reflection. I hope it may serve multifaceted purposes. Some parts are descriptive, strictly narrative or reflective, while others consist of a set of abstracts, speciments or rationale explaining the different professional actions taken.

Of course, the portfolio lends itself to documenting a self-conscious process of discovery within the multifaceted paths of the teaching profession and therefore subject to continuous visions and revisions.