DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Invitation to Participate

 

In a Student-Faculty Research Project

 

Fall semester, 2012

 

 

Lewis Hyde refers to the trickster as “…the god of the threshold in all its forms.” 

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, 1998, p. 8.

 

 Welcome to the “Conflict Transformation: Theory & Practice (PAX 340) ePortfolio.

 

This semester you will have the opportunity to build an ePortfolio that reflects you and that documents your work in PAX 340. By the end of the semester, your ePortfolio may contain exploratory writing in the form of a journal or blog, polished pieces of writing, digital photographs, audio and/or video-recordings, original music and/or art-work, and a digital story.

 

At the end of the semester, I’ll ask you to offer a metaphor that illuminates your experience of the PAX 340 ePortfolio.

 

As I prepare to incorporate the ePortfolio into my first Naropa classes, I wonder whether the ePortfolio might function as a trickster in our boundary-crossing experiments in PAX 340.

 

Will there be twists and turns in the ePortfolio path?

 

Uh-huh.

 

How about a trap or two?

 

Most likely.

 

Will the ePortfolio disrupt the trajectory of the carefully articulated syllabus?

 

Uh-oh.

 

I see the ePortoflio as a space for experimentation, for finding and building a voice.

 

Most importantly, it’s a space for finding ways to authentically represent your own learning — a space for boundary-crossing and experimentation

 

I invite you as co-researchers and co-investigators to consider a four-part hypothesis.

 

The PAX 340 ePortfolio enhances or strengthens —

 

  • A sense of play, experimentation, and engagement with “what is” – your own insights, questions, and authentic wrestling with a range of approaches to conflict transformation.

 

  • Student agency and artistry (that means, fully showing up with  head and heart, taking responsibility for the substance, shape, sound, feel, and “look” of your learning and how you represent your learning)
  • Collaboration between students and students and faculty
  • Collaboration beyond the classroom – “being in conversation” with diverse individuals and communities, locally and/or globally

By the end of the semester, the metaphor of the ePortfolio as trickster will be supplanted by metaphors that emerge from our week-by-week engagement with this medium.

 

You will be invited to participate in a public, celebratory show-case of Naropa undergraduate ePortfolios, sponsored by the Naropa Center for Student Excellence and Engagement.

 

This much I can promise: Refreshments will be served, and you can dress-up, if you like, as your ePortfolio character.

 

Who will your ePortfolio become? What name will you give him/her/it? What is his/her culture? What music will be called forth?

 

Perhaps the trickster simply appeared this morning to get me out of bed or to get the conversation rolling.

 

Check back with my ePorfolio spring semester 2015 for the results of this research.  

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
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DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.