Digital Portfolios and Music-In-Education Guided Internships
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As training programs embrace music-in-education constructs, curriculum practices, and assessments, documentation will become more central to the study, analysis, and dissemination of music-in-education practices for reasons we’ve noticed over the past FIPSE grants including:
- Music-in-education practices are still considered innovations and need to be recorded
- Sharing is necessary so others needn’t reinvent similar practices
- Critical analysis for self-growth (artist-teacher-scholar) requires a common platform where to store evidence and artifacts
- Eventual design of a certificate program will demand high standards, practical only though a careful review of documented practices and artifacts
The MIENC Online Digital Portfolio System is an Internet-based technology designed for the creation, display, and storage of user-designed “mini websites” that function as school and student portfolios. The System has two installations: one on the MIENC webserver (http://digitalportfolios.music-in-education.org) used for school portfolios from Learning Laboratory School Network projects; and one on the Center for Music in Education (CMIE) webserver (http://portfolios.mieatnec.org/digital/), used for course, Guided Internship, and cumulative portfolios by New England Conservatory Music-In-Education Concentration candidate students. Each system installation has a uniquely coded and proprietary database from which portfolios are generated dynamically.
The portfolio creator must decide who the intended audience might be—a teacher, an individual, a school, an arts organization—each might want to see something different. Regardless, the primary audience now is Consortium members, some of whom are educational researchers, program evaluators, and administrators, but many of whom are classroom teachers, teaching artists, and guided interns whose first exposure to research and reflective practice has been through the Consortium.