To organize my teaching materials, I’ve created a teaching portfolio. My version of this document is not designed to prove my teaching excellence or to be used to get a teaching job, which are two of the main goals of a traditional teaching portfolio, but to reflect on and trouble—unsettle, shift, question, imagine otherwise—my life as a teacher and the academic values and practices that have shaped, influenced, inhibited, and fostered that life.
Items Typically Included in a Teaching Portfolio
- Statement of Teaching Philosophy
- Description of Teaching Roles, Responsibilities and Experiences
- Teaching Methods and Approaches
- Student and Self Evaluations
- Future Teaching Goals
- Steps for Improving Teaching
- Evidence of Teaching Excellence
- Sample Assignments and Syllabi
My version also does not strictly follow the structure of an academic teaching portfolio. While I include many of the standard elements listed above, I play with them in order to tell a story in three parts about my teaching life.
Part one, I Am a Teacher!, documents my past life in “formal”/disciplined teaching, especially my growing enthusiasm for pedagogies that encouraged getting into trouble and that resulted in the mutating of my methods, approaches and assignments. Part two, I Was a Teacher., documents my recent past life (2012-2015) and my taking a break from the academy and making a break from the standard/disciplined/expected ways of being a scholar and educator. And part three, Am I (still) a teacher?, documents my present and future experiments in teaching beside and besides the academy, focusing specifically on the syllabus, as story, path, contract and/or invitation, and including several imagined (and im/possible) course syllabi that may or may not ever be taught or taken.
Continue Reading: Teaching Statement