One purpose of this course is to assist students in reflecting on and building from their experiences teaching English language arts during their practicum (field) placement.

An important enterprise in this course is creating and publishing an electronic portfolio on a WWW site. Creating an electronic portfolio of various teaching and learning artifacts can assist in that reflection. It can also help students to represent themselves as teachers to potential employers. This reflective self-representation can also contribute to the construction of the self as a teacher.

This page will provide links to the various Web pages created by the students in the course and will outline other assignments and activities in which the students engaged during the semester.

An early activity in the course was to represent identity in poster form. Students represented their various subjectivities or subject positions in a variety of ways. Such "identity webs" can provide insight into the perspectives we bring to texts we 'read' and can function as a pre-writing activity as students' write about their lived experiences, identity conflicts, changing and emerging subjectivities, and so on. Education theorists such as Freire (The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, 1985) and Giroux (Language Arts 64, February 1987, 175-181) suggest that all education begin with the students' own lives, experiences, questions, and perspectives.

A constructivist learning activity in which students engaged was creating a meaning web. As a response to reading the introduction to their course text, students created three cards--one with a question, one with a comment about the reading, and one with a question about the reading. They arranged these cards on a bulletin board, placing the cards in proximity to one another to show connections and construct meaning in a very graphic way.
 

Students also participated in writers' conferences and workshops as they prepared manuscripts to submit to the English Journal, which invited submissions from interns and pre-service teachers about their experiences. (See Insights for Interns, English Journal 78(1), January 1998, page 7.)
 

Students composed their Web sites, working collaboratively in a computer lab in the G. A. Hickman Building (the education building) at Memorial University. They were assisted by lab instructor Sandra Hiscock and course professor Dr. Roberta Hammett. Computer technician Anthony Dawe filmed and digitized the following video as the students worked.
 

To view students' individual Web sites and electronic portfolios, click on their pictures in the following table. Sorry for the unavoidable distortion in some of the pictures.
 

Gizelle Gaudon	Stacey MacDonald	Brent Northcott	Dale Lambe
David Locke	David Joy	Chris Combden	Lisa Holbert
Jamie Rowsell	Todd Janes	Peter Power	Nancy Ruelland