How to Make an Academic Portfolio

For the first thirteen years of my life, I shared a room with my two younger sisters. The room wasn’t too big; we shared two closets, and there was just enough room for three twin beds. How that room contained three big personalities as we have, I will never know. What I do know is that despite the limited space that we had, I have always had a making space. 

First, it was my closet. As the oldest, I was the one that didn’t have to share, though my sister Steph was the one with the most clothes. In the closet I had the wall, the door for some privacy, some blankets, and my drawings stored on the floor. When I outgrew it, I offered Steph a trade: her window bed for my solo closet. I set up my studio between the twin bed covered with my great-grandma’s hand-made blue blanket and the window. It wasn’t much bigger, but I had more storage space under my bed, and room for a lap desk that I used as my working station. 

Today, I’m fully out of the closet (😉🏳️‍🌈) and I have my own room 1,597 miles away. What I have carried with me is my love for making, for art, and a determination to make space for it in everything I do. In many ways, those years are what shape my research the most today. They have allowed me to be resourceful, and to see value where others see expendability. I’m turning 26 this year, thirteen years from being thirteen years old, and now I’m able to share these perspectives with others via my research and other works. 

My portfolio primarily reflects the work I have done in my research life. These works are undoubtedly shaped by my education, my interests, my family, my friends, and my identity, yet are a small picture of each of these things. Through this statement, I aim to draw your attention to a few things, namely how what I have done 1) reflects the competencies expected by a PhD student about to progress to candidacy, 2) brings to light valuable ways of being and doing that are otherwise obscured or marginalized, and 3) pushes forward a justice-centered agenda that will impact how people think about what it means to learn, be, and become in an unjust world.

I’ve chosen an instructable as a way to present this work for a few reasons: my commitments as a maker, as someone who wants to make this PhD process easier for others, and as a public scholar all align to make something that fulfills my requirements while explaining to others how and why I did it. I hope anyone who encounters this will be able to think through how they want their work to speak to their commitments, dreams, and life-giving engagements, and then make it into a portfolio of their work. Admittedly, the instructable also fills a practical commitment: I haven’t made an instructable in a while despite it being something I really like to do. So, here we go!

• CV/Resume (optional): You’ll want to have one of these mainly as a reference for when you think about what you actually want to include in your portfolio. In this case, a CV might be more useful because it is essentially a list of every academic thing you have ever done, minus any explanations. If you don’t have a CV or resume, don’t worry about it. You can still think about your works with a trusted person, which I talk about below. 
• Class work: The work you do in class is important to what you do as a scholar! Classes are where you develop your thinking in conversation with others who are also interested in that general topic. Never underestimate what your class work can represent, even if you develop your thinking later on. 
• Products of ideas you have worked on that you like and want to share: The CV/Resume and classwork typically are written papers. That is not all that matters when it comes to your scholarship and you as a person! You may have done art, workshops, videos, websites, protests, or something else that also exemplifies your commitments as a scholar. Be sure to think of some of those! 
• Advisors/Trusted mentors: The most helpful thing you can do to put together a portfolio is be in conversation with the people who will ultimately be looking at it. For a PhD, this might be faculty members, especially your advisors. If you don’t have an advisor, think about a trusted mentor who knows your work (or at least a part of it). Not only will they be able to help you pick pieces, they will give you insight on how they think it could fit together!
• Commitments: I think this is the most important one, and key to organizing your portfolio. You have to think about what you ultimately want to show through your collection of work. For me, I am trying to make arguments around what is valuable in learning and making. I commit to seeing making and makers through non-deficit lenses. I am also committed to not perpetuating negative stereotypes about the people and communities I work with. These go hand in hand, which most of your commitments probably also will. 

It will be helpful to also know upfront what kind of competencies you need to demonstrate in your portfolio. For my program, they are:

• Deep and broad domain knowledge and knowledge of theory and philosophy
• Mindfulness of agency, oppression, power, and identity
• Ability to engage in problem definition, analysis, synthesis
• Ability to interpret and communicate across multiple genres 
• Knowledge of the scholarly community
• Understanding of contexts of use
• Facility with inquiry tools

I will arrange the steps around these competencies, in no particular order. If you know that you are going to need to do something different, I will also share some of my thoughts around what elements of work that I chose to highlight here to help with your thinking. As you can see, these are pretty broad, so you have to interpret them when you think about what pieces will fulfill the competency. 

My interpretation: Show that you have read deeply and broadly across disciplines and genres. You should be able to say what it is that you have read, and how it shapes your work and the field broadly. 

My example: My most recent work draws from a few concepts, mainly from the field of education but also from information, computer science, and STEAM. In the first few iterations of this work, I drew on the concept of “slowing down,” which mainly references how people and institutions can take the pressure off of doing things “in a timely manner,” and care more about the quality of work and life that people can have. I’ve since added to this idea by saying that “slowing down” is actually one of many things that we can do to make the future better for more people.   

Perez, M., Calabrese Barton, A., Turner, C., Greenberg, D., & Riter, D.  (2022, Apr 20- 24) Youth’s ‘Slowed Down’ Pedagogy & Politicized Care Towards New Relationalities in STEM Learning Environments [Roundtable Session]. AERA Annual Meeting 2022.  San Diego, CA 

Perez, M., Calabrese Barton, A., Greenberg, D., Turner, C., & Riter, D.  (2022). Towards a “Slowed Down” Pedagogy: An Emergent Youth-Led Practice of Politicized Care.  Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) 2022 (ISLS 2022)

My interpretation: Show that you have paid attention to any or all of the concepts of “agency, oppression, power, and identity in your work.” This could be in your research questions, the effects of your research, the people/communities you work with, or any combination of these. This should be clear in your work, meaning that you aren’t trying to stretch too much, there is some direct application in one or more of those areas. 

My example: This was the easiest to think about, for me, because most of my work deals with these concepts head on. However, I am cautious to say that it always deals with it well or completely. Therefore for this competency, I have chosen to highlight my classwork that deals with a particular community in which I am invested: the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas (home to my first makerspace). This pieces deal directly with power, oppression, and identity by naming how STEM learning is taking place in a predominantly Latinx area, and how it interacts with racial capitalism via a discussion of the promises and pitfalls of SpaceX moving into the area. 

Computing Education & Racial Capitalism in the Rio Grande Valley

My interpretation: Show that you can define a problem that is based on things you have read or observed (this could also refer to being able to form a research question). In this case, “analysis and synthesis” could apply to how you bring together works to come up with your research questions, and/or the analysis of data that you have collected. 

My example: Since I want to interpret this competency broadly, for this step I choose to highlight a piece that I have done from start to finish. In this work I have not only defined my own research questions, but I brought together literature across domains to make an argument about how youth in a STEAM oriented makerspace organize their work to bring about a better future for themselves and their communities. This is the culmination of the work that I did in Step 1. 

Perez, M. (in preparation) Youth Critical Collective Futuring. 

My interpretation: Show that you can communicate outside of an academic context. Your academic writing/publishing is a small part of the communication that you have to do as a researcher. 

My example: I’d like to highlight a curriculum website that I worked on with one of my advisors for a project we worked on during my first two years of grad school. The website was a site for librarians who were going to implement a computing and making program for girls of color. It is broken down into four segments, of which I worked primarily on the Arduino and breadboard lessons. I worked on this in a team of masters and undergraduate students, but I took on roles across the design of the curriculum. 

CompuGirls Website

My interpretation: Show that you have engaged with your community in some way. This could be through conference presentations or work with your peers. Also, being able to identify what it is that your “scholarly community” does. 

My example: I have been involved in the Learning Sciences as a discipline since undergrad, where I had an opportunity to do research on teams that included faculty, masters, and doctoral students. These were some of the more formative experiences of my life, even outside of my research. So for this competency, I highlight my submissions to the Learning Sciences Graduate Student Conference (LSGSC), which I have attended every year since 2018. I share my PhD level submissions (only 500 words each) and point out that these demonstrate both that I am involved in my “scholarly community” and that I understand that the learning sciences deals with learning broadly: the spaces in which it occurs, the people involved, and the processes through which we can understand and measure it. My work tends to fall under the “spaces in which learning occurs” category.

LSGSC 2020: Understanding Students’ Perceptions of Computing Following Participation in Informal Computing Education Programs

LSGSC 2021: A Review of Racial Capitalism in Computing Education & Implications for Learning

My interpretation: Show that you know how to use appropriate and creative methods for answering research questions. You should be able to justify your methods and say how they answer the questions you are interested in. 

My example: In one of my first research projects as a PhD student, I undertook photo elicitation interviews to understand how people who were in informal computing education programs as youth thought about those experiences later on in life. I was interested in the types of outcomes that can come from these programs that do not center on getting people into a “computing pipeline.” Put another way, what else do people get out of participating in something like Girls Who Code, besides an interest or ability in computing? These interviews were with people who were years removed from participating in their programs, so I was dealing with something very intangible. I thought photo elicitation interviews would be a good way to connect about their experiences, because they had the opportunity to think about the questions beforehand. Additionally, the photos themselves were launching points for our discussions, instead of memories that may be unreliable. I wrote about this work a few times, which will serve as my portfolio submissions. 

Perez, M. (2020). Understanding Students’ Perceptions of Computing through Photo Elicitation. International Computing Education Research Conference 2020 (ICER 2020, Doctoral Consortium, 2 pages)

Perez, M., Garcia, P., & Ericson, B., (2021). Former Students’ Perspectives on the Value of Computing Education Programs.  Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) 2021 (ISLS 2021, Short Paper, 4 pages)

Perez, M.,  Garcia, P. (under revision). Beyond Computing Careers: Women’s Perceptions of Participation in Computing After Broadening Participation in Computing Programs. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE, Journal)

My interpretation: Show that you are able to get information out of the tools that you have chosen. Put another way, can you organize the analysis of data that you have gathered? 

My example: I wanted to have two examples here, mainly because qualitative research is broad and the analytic tools needed to begin to understand qualitative data are therefore varied and unique. I first highlight an analytic memo that I wrote to break down a moment from field notes and video recordings, to begin to understand what was happening from a theoretical perspective. This data came from my work in a youth makerspace, and has been de-identified for sharing. My second work is from my analysis of a body of interviews that were done with girls who participated in a one-week computing education program. This is a thematic analysis that I did after our team coded the interviews. In that analysis I broke down the quotes related to how the girls were thinking about their “computing identity,” or the ways that they think of themselves in relation to computing. 

1. Analytic Memo - Youth makerspace
2. Thematic analysis - Computing Identity

At this point, you (the person putting together a portfolio), and I (the person showing you how I did it) have demonstrated the competencies you need to. So, what now? The final part of your portfolio should have a reflection on what all this work has led up to. 

Some questions that might be helpful to think about are: 

• How do the pieces in your portfolio come together?
• How do the pieces in your portfolio show that you are deepening your understanding of the problem/concept in multiple ways? 
• What is the main interest/research direction you are working up to?

My next step is a dissertation proposal, meaning that the work that I have done, especially the work that I highlighted here, should build me up to that step. I tried to emphasize how it has throughout, but I will end here with a final reflection for emphasis. 

Through my work, I aim to develop lenses through which we can see and value a broad spectrum of being and doing. The context in which I typically do this is STEAM and computing education, with particular attention to how Black and Latinx students choose to be themselves and be together in those spaces. I consider this to be a departure from the ways the field broadly frames Black and Latinx learners' participation in STEAM/computing. That is, typically we position STEAM/computing as the central site we want people to be a part of, and we need to figure out ways to integrate Black and Latinx people into its existing models. The value here is placed on STEAM/computing, which is something Black and Latinx people can acquire to make them more “valuable.” I’d like to see it the other way around, with the value on the educational well being of Black and Latinx people, particularly within STEM contexts. In this view, I see their ways of being, doing, and knowing as valuable to how we can think about STEAM/computing. However, I would not say that STEAM/computing should “acquire” Black and Latinx culture(s) for a profit driven model, but that we should make space for them. More than make space, we should fully reimagine STEAM/computing  so that there is not one dominant group or ideology that can be the arbiter of what is and isn’t meaningful knowledge  to begin with. The works that I have curated here come together to form this argument, and serve as the basis for which my dissertation will be.