This symposium presents fresh and cutting-edge research on the use of e-portfolios in teacher education, integrating perspectives from several European countries (Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Luxemburg). From a European perspective, establishing “deep learning” in teacher education is a key goal for if teachers are going to cope with the challenges of education in the 21. century. By deep learning, we understand the willingness and ability of learners to go beyond rote memorisation of information and actively interact with the teaching material, thereby thinking critically, applying the information to concrete situations or making difficulties explicit (Atherton, 2010).

While the laws and settings governing teacher education in European countries differ from case to case, the underlying concerns of e-portfolios are similar: how to make students become reflective practitioners (Korthagen & Vasalos, 2010)? How to develop their ability to self-evaluate? How to teach students to make choices, encourage them to better understand themselves and focus on their strengths? How to allow students to reflect on their procedures, strategies, and accomplishments so that they can improve and correct them and ultimately succeed? How to promote feedback during the learning process, particularly among peers and involving different stakeholders in their education? How to use new media, such as hypertexts or podcasts, for all these concerns and aims successfully?

The three papers in this symposium address these issues from an empirical as well as conceptual point of view. Paper 1 discusses how teacher-students can become reflective practitioners by collaborating on an annotation platform for video analysis, and present the results in an e-portfolio. Theses tools and task-structures were developed in the project PREPARE, financed by the European Union and integrating teacher educators from Austria, Italy, Germany and Luxemburg. Paper 2 presents podcasts as a tool for fostering reflective practice as used at Kassel University, Germany. In a two-step procedure, teacher-students first record their spontaneous reflections on a pedagogical topic, and then record their thoughts again once this topic has been covered in the seminar. Comparing and contrasting these podcasts allows students to reflect on their own progress and their conceptual change. It also provides researchers with a window into students’ thought processes as they grapple with key pedagogical concepts. Paper 3 presents an empirical analysis of tasks in e-portfolios as used in the education of English teacher students in Basle, Switzerland. The tasks were analysed with a newly developed assessment rubric and the analysis triangulated with results from student questionnaires to investigate which types of tasks are conductive to deep learning in an e-portfolio setting.

Taken together, the three papers reflect on the use of new media for learning in e-portfolios (video annotation in paper 1, podcasts in paper 2); on task design and its influence on student learning (paper 3); and on scientific methods of investigating the effects of such interventions (video analysis in paper 1, pre-post designs in paper 2, task-analysis in paper 3). The papers will be discussed by Dr. Caroline Theurer, who is a seasoned expert on teacher education research. In addition, there will be ample time to discuss the concepts, tools and materials presented in the individual papers. 

Atherton, J. S. (2011). Learning and Teaching; Deep and Surface learning [Online: UK] Korthagen, F. A. & Vasalos, A. (2010). Going to the Core: Deepening Reflection by Connecting the Person to the Profession. In N. Lyons (Ed.), Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry (pp.529–552). New York: Springer.