Community-making through ePortfolios: Leaning into beautiful risk

Community-making through ePortfolios: Leaning into beautiful risk  
20 Slides x no more than 50 words per slide  

 
Anna Farago, Sarah Healy & Kathryn Coleman,   
University of Melbourne  

ABSTRACT  

Community-making through ePortfolios: Leaning into beautiful risk  

How do ePortfolios open threshold concepts of beautiful risk for community-making? And, how does community-making open threshold concepts of beautiful risk for ePortfolios? In the wake of online learning that characterised much of the pandemic university, a conscious effort was made to teach in ways that connect, evolve and nurture a community of students via the studio pedagogy of an undergraduate breadth subject ‘Drawing, Painting and Sensory Knowing.’  Working across a variety of sites, using various configurations of bodies and artworks in orbit of each other, explorations of materials and ways of knowing were set up. In this presentation we show how these explorations were configured with/in the subject’s sensory encounters, walking sessions, exhibition visits and the use of digital platforms - including Padlet and Pebblepad - creating the conditions for rhythms of learning that fostered unity and a sense of collectiveness amongst students.  We discuss how sharing ways of thinking, making and wondering, in both physical and virtual sites, the students’ uncertainty associated with creative thinking and understandings of self in relation to the other evolved into ‘beautiful risk taking’ (Henricksen & Mishra, 2018). We argue that beautiful risk taking was encouraged by students’ ongoing documentation of creative practice and participation in care-fully facilitated discussion, practices that further enhanced a community located in shared experience and shaped both teaching and learning.