Portfolio Development in a Secondary Teaching Credential Art Programme

This paper describes portfolio development by pre-service art teachers in a secondary teaching programme at California State University, Los Angeles, USA. A portfolio reflects knowledge, skills, and beliefs about teaching in general and teaching art specifically. It displays one’s learning experiences as they are collected, organized, and refined to provide a critical framework and rich portrayal of one’s best work. The article addresses the questions of what a portfolio in art education is, what its goals are, how one creates a portfolio, how one assesses portfolios once they are developed, what the issues and challenges surrounding the use of portfolios as assessment tools are, and finally, some likely future developments of portfolio assessment in teacher education.