Rethinking the Purposes and Processes for Designing Digital Portfolios

As digital portfolios become more prevalent in teacher education, the purposes and processes for creating them have become contested. Originally meant to be critical and reflective spaces for learning about multimedia and conceived as contributing to professional growth, research shows that digital portfolios are now increasingly being used to provide evidence that a set of teacher education standards have been met for a course. In this article, the authors describe how they designed their digital portfolios as part of an inquiry‐based teacher research project and represented their own work—as well as that of their students—in these online spaces. They discuss a number of personal and professional concerns that they encountered while engaged in this process, from the ethics of editing students' work to the online personas the teachers themselves chose to adopt. Issues of audience, purpose, format, and content are framed in discussions of teacher research and portfolio design. Finally, the authors argue that keeping design‐based decisions about how and why to construct a digital portfolio in teachers' hands can contribute to lasting professional growth and change.