Portfolio Basics

Do you have a place in your home or elsewhere where you keep important documents, pictures or other items that are of significance to you personally, scholastically and/or professionally? If so, you have a portfolio, at least at its most basic level. For some people it's a shoe box, for others it's a filing cabinet, for others it's a binder, and for others it may well be a stack of stuff in the corner of a closet! The gist is that most people do in fact have a storage area for important "stuff" so that they can review and re-organize it from time to time. Further, often times people refer to particular elements of their collections of stuff when describing themselves to other people, either for recreation or for personal gain (e.g., college admissions, scholarship applications, job interviews). In sum, three ideas characterize portfolios, at least insofar as we'll use them in the FIG program:

1. When looking at a person's portfolio it describes who s/he is at a particular point in time; a portfolio is a person's personal history and its contents can be observed (by its owner or other people) and analyzed to provide clues regarding the person's experiences, values and perspectives.

2. Portfolios can be used for personal development as well as for presentation to selected audiences for any number of purposes.

3. The three steps for portfolio-building include a continuous, fluid process of "collection," "reflection," and "action." The third step - action - may be an actual presentation to other people or it may be any other sort of action (e.g., particular decisions, dedication to a particular project, development of particular aspirations/goals) that a person takes as a result of having engaged in reflection about his/her life as represented by the collection of things in his/her portfolio.