Abstract:

The ePortfolio is a multimodal learning tool for students to create ‘future career self’ narratives through scaffolded, well-structured reflective practice. This paper outlines a process of training students to produce reflective writing on experiences of meaningful work experiences within a formalised Work Integrated Learning program (or internship) designed for tertiary music students in Sydney, Australia. The internship was targeted at developing identity and work inside the creative arts industry, and thus the initiative was scaffolded around structured readings and workshops, housing problem-solving activities and student-led inquiry (Whitney, Rowley, & Bennett, 2021). The internship program saw participants prepare and perform an opera in a professional venue over a five-day period of intense creative studio work.

Using the examples of scaffolded assessment tasks including an ePortfolio and a multi-media presentation to an audience of peers about their on-the-job learning in preparing an opera for performance, the paper highlights students’ reflections on how the internship and associated ePortfolio process serves to curate and prioritise future career thinking. Students gained new understanding in the development of professional and musical identity through reflection on their sense of future ‘self’ as a work-ready graduate (Reid, Rowley & Bennett 2019).

Through narrative inquiry methodology, the researchers sought to understand how an internship could potentially engage active career thinking for aspiring musicians. Additionally, the ePortfolio process facilitates students in the curation their own individual career-path planning. Students were encouraged to use PebblePad software and were provided with a template for the reflective ePortfolio. The design of the template is analogous to blogging or basic website design tools, using a point-and-click interface to add text or artifacts such as images or video. Tabs were provided to assist and guide student priorities through the ePortfolio.

In addition, the paper presents a circular mentoring framework that extends Kolb’s experiential learning model, where professional, pre-professional and young artists work side-by side, collaboratively, in a goal driven artistic practice (Yeo, 2020). Analysis of submitted ePortfolios reveals relationships inside professional practice are more complex than two-way, or master-student mentoring. This circular mentoring model emerged to capture the complexities of learning, mentoring/being mentored, competency and self-efficacy development during the internship (Yeo & Rowley, 2022).

The ePortfolio tool allows autonomy and evaluation of learning (Munday, Rowley & Polly 2017). Employing ePortfolios for narrative enquiry is an effective means of consolidating learned skills through self-reflection on experiential learning. As researchers, we consider how the findings might be transferred to other contexts and further developed and implemented as a career preparation initiative with other cohorts, alongside predominantly undergraduate music students.

Keywords:

ePortfolio, experiential learning, mentoring, music learning and teaching, non-placement work-integrated learning, reflective practice, student agency.