ePortfolios for Leadership Identity Development with OSP: Some Very Preliminary Findings

1. ePortfolios for Leadership Identity Development with OSP: Some Very Preliminary Findings Darren Cambridge George Mason University dcambrid@gmu.edu

2. Lives We Lead • Three-year project at George Mason University • Co-curricular leadership portfolio development using Open Source Portfolio • Research as part of the third cohort of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research

3. I/NCEPR • Institutional research teams examining the impact of electronic portfolio practice on learning • 46 institutions in four cohorts • Third cohort focuses on student affairs -academic affairs collaboration • US, Canada, England, Scotland, Netherlands • Book to be published by Stylus in 2008

4. Methodology • Design research • Intervention design informed by theory • Evaluated for effectiveness and contributes to further development of theory • Grounded theory • Collaborative coding of portfolio, video, and interview data by inter-disciplinary team • Theoretical sampling

5. Leadership theory • Leadership Identity Development • Based on research on undergraduate student leaders at the University of Maryland • From positional leadership to multi-dimensional perspective • Identity • Relationships • Community • Evidence in leadership portfolios • Leadership portfolios in Ohio high schools • Products, reproductions, attestations

6. Theories of Reflection • Kolb’s stages of reflection • Description • Analysis • Judgment • Planning • Yancey’s types of reflection • constructive reflection • reflection-in-presentation

7. Program Design • Semester-long, co-curricular portfolio keeping experience • Three face-to-face, day-long meetings • Faculty, staff, and peer mentors • Students who self-identify as leaders and students who don’t, first-year to graduate student • Sequenced use OSP tools with r-smart CLE • Hierarchical wizards • Matrixes • Portfolios

8. Beginning of Semester • Expanding thinking about evidence • Reflective writing in response to selections from a large number of prompts • Organized around identity, relationships, community • Hierarchical matrix

9. Mid-semester • Reconceptualizing as leadership • Organizing evidence and reflections in relationship to shared conceptual framework • Matrix thinking • Matrix

10. End of Semester • Presentation portfolio for an audience of their choice • Identity, relationships, community, future directions • Portfolio using template

11. Very Preliminary Findings • First iteration ended in May 2007 • Analyzed so far • Evaluation surveys • Selected final portfolios • Coding of additional portfolios, video data, and conducting interviews with students through December 2007 • Key themes in student leadership identity, rather than impact of portfolio process

12. Evidence, Audience, and Mentoring • Despite honorarium, significant lack of retention (From 33 to 16) • Broader conception of and new value placed in evidence in relationship to leadership-related activities • Strong sense of pride in final product • Peer mentoring invaluable • Mirrors research as LaGuardia and other I/NCEPR campuses

13. Strong Perceived Impact

14. From Position to Integration • Students see their identities to be inseparable from multiple kinds of relationships and community memberships • Family relationships, friendships, academic and professional community membership • Navigation between cultures and putting them into conversations • Portfolios as a sight of integration • Shift from positional definition of leadership to grounding in this integrated network • Mirrors findings of research in eFolio Minnesota and LaGuardia

15. Academics as Test of Self • We intended for curricular content to be an central source of evidence and ideas and strategies, but it didn’t show up this way • Class work functioned as • A demonstration of character virtues • An experience • A goal putting aspiration towards those virtues in action

16. Steadfastness • Consistency of commitment over time seen as a central leadership virtue • Tenacity, perseverance, patience, follow through • Standing up to opposition and peer pressure • Essential to ability to create change • Much more prominent than persuasiveness • Spirituality and family key arenas for demonstrating steadfastness

17. Change • While steadfastness is central, so is change • Leadership requires growth • Students universally embraced change as both a personally and societal goal • Local and global, but very little in between

18. Evidence • Primarily reproductions and attestations • Symbolic rather than persuasive • Heuristics for reflection

19. Buncencia Seabreeze’s Portfolio

20. Questions Moving Forward • How do students who self-identify leaders and those who don’t differ? • Why is course content not see as relevant, and how might we change that? • Do the ways students use evidence match the expectations of their intended audiences? • In terms of developing leadership competence, how important is self-identification? Does it matter when we call it leadership? • How well do the different OSP tools support the development process?