The reflective portfolio in Social Educators training - from strangeness to critical adoption

Abstract

This article focuses on the understanding of the reflective portfolio as a learning and evaluation tool in the training of social educators. It results from the work developed in the Curricular Unit of Design and Development of Projects, taught in the 2nd year of the Degree in Social Education, at Escola Superior de Educação do Politécnico do Porto, and allows us to interpret the way in which students see themselves in this method of learning and evaluation and understand the meanings they attribute to it.

Through the participation in the construction of knowledge, of knowing how to be and knowing how to do, the portfolio links facilitating conditions for learning in a more thoughtful and conscious way, enhancing critical capacity and self-learning. Students (re)discover new ways of learning, based on a critical and grounded view of theory and action, going beyond the mere reproduction of knowledge, becoming co-authors of their own development.

This analysis also allowed us to understand the diversity with which students have faced this way of working, initially expressing strangeness and, subsequently, revealing a gradual involvement and dedication, recognizing its formative character, crucial in the construction of a knowledge that is both experiential and transformative (Mezirow, 1990).