(Kurita) Hello, everyone. (Students) Hello. (Kurita) Welcome to “Interactive Teaching” WEEK 7. This week’s topic is “Let’s think about career paths PART 1: Reflection as a professor. In this session, we are going to learn how to create an image
of the ideal faculty member. Before starting the main topic, let me clarify that this week’s goals are to “comprehend what is required of faculty members today, and be able to think about what they should be. Today’s objective is the third one: “Be able to explain the characteristics of a portfolio as a tool that presents a general overview of your present activity and what future measures need to be taken. Here is the table of contents: how to become an ideal faculty member, portfolios as a tool to think about career paths, and the wrap-up. This is the agenda. Let’s begin with how to become an ideal faculty member. Suppose this (i.e., puppet in the front) is you and this (i.e., the other puppet) is the faculty member you would like to become in the future. How do you become an ideal faculty member? As you can see the path in front of this puppet, the first thing you should do is to review, overview, and structure your activities to date. You must identify where you stand right now. The second thing you should do is to clarify your ideal image. Clarify what kind of faculty member or future self you wish to become. These two steps enable you to fix the images of what you were, what you are, and what you want to be. Then the third thing you should do is to set long-term and short-term goals. Let’s think about how to become an ideal faculty member through these three steps. Before moving on to the next topic, we would like to review what we have learned in the last session about the four types of faculty duties. Do you remember what they are? Kaneko-san? (Student) Yes. They are education, research, social contribution, and administration. (Kurita) Yes, thank you. Perfect. The four types of faculty duties are education, research, social contribution, and administration. I gave you the image of an ideal faculty member as a puppet around here, but there is a wide variety of components that could be used to describe the image. You must consider what those components are when you envision
what kind of faculty member you wish to become. You need to consider it from various angles by overviewing your present situation and envisioning your future, instead of just relying on a hazy idea. Therefore, we would like to discuss how portfolios can be used as a tool to consider how to become an ideal faculty member. A portfolio is not the only tool, so I would like to introduce them to you as one of many tools. In particular, I would like to focus on portfolios for thinking about career paths, that is, the routes that need to be taken to become what you wish to be in the future. The word “portfolio” appeared as “a portfolio evaluation” in WEEK 6’s session about evaluation where I explained that a portfolio evaluation was the combination of several evaluation methods. If you are uncertain about the topic, please refer to the previous session’s slides. As I explained in the evaluation session, the strong advantage of using portfolios is that it allows you to gain a general overview of an activity from various angles. Another characteristic of portfolios is that they are described based on evidence. Although I am calling them just “portfolios” for now, portfolios used in higher education have a wide variety of types according to who creates them and whom it focuses on. Portfolios are used for conducting a multi-faceted evaluation, but they are subdivided into types determined by who creates them and what they are for. The different creators of portfolios include students, instructors, staff, and institutions. I think you will hear about these four types when you start to work for universities. Portfolios created by students, for example, are for internalizing what they have learned or visualizing learning outcomes, and they are called “learning portfolios." Have you ever heard of this phrase? One person. Thank you. The second type are portfolios created by instructors. They are for improvement, evaluation of their performance from various angles, or sharing information, and these are called “teaching portfolios. They are called “teaching portfolios” when they are for visualizing and multilaterally evaluating instructors’ performance regarding education. If they are for overviewing the four types of faculty duties, they are called “academic portfolios." Have you ever heard of this phrase? Yes, I explained them in my class. The third type are the portfolios created by staff and they are for improvement and deployment of human resources. They are called “staff portfolios” and they are adopted in Ehime University. The last type are portfolios created by institutions. They are for achieving accountability or receiving evaluations. There is no name for such portfolios, but you might be able to call them “institutional portfolios." Self-assessment and evaluation reports issued by universities are virtually institutional portfolios. These are the types of portfolios. Our focus is on the portfolios used as a tool to become a faculty member, so today we would like to delve into academic portfolios created by instructors. Here are the characteristics of portfolios as a tool for reflection. Portfolios have specific structures and methods to enhance reflection. It means that they have functions to not only list an individual’s performance, but for overviewing and structuring one’s present activities. The other characteristic is that they enable us to not only think of the activities we engage with in our head, but to visualize them in forms like text or a chart, which is an important function. I referred to teaching portfolios, but want to note that it is actually quite difficult to visualize one’s educational activities. Even if you are able to count the number of units and courses you conduct, it is very difficult to visualize their quality. One of the characteristics of teaching portfolios is to describe those things. Here are the reasons why you can use portfolios as a tool for thinking about one’s career path. The first reason is that they enable you to organize, value, structure, and visualize your present activities. The second reason is that they enable you to clarify one’s ideal state by describing your ideal image of being a faculty member. The third reason is that they enable you to set long-term and short-term goals by clarifying the paths that need to be taken between one’s present and ideal state. Overviewing one’s present activities leads to various kinds of recognition and thus, portfolios allow you to be aware of how to improve yourself toward this ideal state, which is the fourth reason. It means that by creating a portfolio, you can recognize what you should improve. These are the reasons why you can use portfolios as a tool. Now, let’s wrap up. What we have learned in this session is that you can use portfolios as a tool for thinking about specific career paths to become an ideal faculty member. That’s all for this session.
