Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) play important instructional roles in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. However, current practices within graduate education do not reflect the importance of this teaching role. This missing support for developing professional identities that include teaching roles within graduate students is a driving factor for this paper. To this effect, we review recent literature related to graduate student development, provide background on ePortfolios, and suggest tips for utilizing ePortfolios as a reflective space for graduate students to track and monitor their own development as teachers and researchers. To that end, this paper presents a brief literature review of the current reflective practices used to develop professional identities of graduate students as teachers, researchers, and learners. The literature search focuses on two key themes - first, the typical professional practice of valuing research over teaching is explored and second, the creation of electronic portfolios is examined to determine their potential applications for teacher identity development in the face of this adversity. An electronic portfolio, or ePortfolio, is a digital archive or collection of artifacts (audio/video clips, text, and graphics are typical examples of the types of media incorporated) that represent its creator. Personal reflection on one's own work and the process of selecting the artifacts for inclusion are key elements in many ePortfolios. Findings from this review show that portfolios have previously been used in educational settings for a wide variety of purposes - among these are assessment, learning development, and professional presentation. Portfolio creation has also been used extensively for assessment purposes within student-teacher training programs, but only modest work has been done within a research-based framework for identity development for graduate students. Within engineering settings, portfolio research and practice has been mainly focused on the undergraduate population, not on graduate students. Therefore, our tricks of the trade focus on the use of ePortfolios specifically within the graduate student population, using it as a reflective space for development within professional roles. We argue that the potential uses of ePortfolios as a method for graduate students to develop integrative professional identities through the use of a narrative process would combine the theories and practices of teacher education programs with students in engineering disciplines; as these students are the future of the STEM professoriate, it is important that they develop as reflective practitioners who are able to use their multiple professional identities (in this case, focusing on being both a researcher and a teacher) together in order to accomplish the performance of professional tasks. Furthermore, the practice of creating an ePortfolio prompts graduate students to reflect on their actual achievements within each professional role, further developing their identification within those roles. Applying ePortfolio practices to graduate students can open a new avenue for future research into graduate professional identity development practices.
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