Repertoires of practice: Re-framing teaching portfolios

Teaching portfolios have been widely used in pre-service teacher education programs for approximately two decades and often constitute exit requirements and/or function as a requirement for entry to the teaching profession. Yet much has been written about teacher candidate confusion as to whether the portfolio's purpose is to document their learning and their identity formation as teachers or to serve as evidence of their teaching competence. This paper applies a sociocultural historical lens to this issue, exploring the possible role of teaching portfolios as an effective tool both for the negotiation of identity and for the demonstration of teaching competence. Through examining the perceptions of teachers who are in their first five years of teaching, we seek to re-frame the above issues in relation to repertoires of practice, a sociocultural historical phrase referring to shared competencies within a given community. We conclude that this re-framing enables novice teachers to understand competencies as the repertoires of the teaching profession and that they can enact these repertoires, or competencies, through a range of different practices. Through this re-framing, the purposes of the teaching portfolio may be more apparent and less contradictory.