From Seminar to Scholarship

Professors Naomi Greenberg and Sherrell Powell
Health Sciences

Article

Powell, S., & Greenberg, N. (2009, March). ePortfolio: A tool to support best practice in occupational therapy education. Education Special Interest Section Quarterly,19(1), 2-4.

Full text of Quarterly available (pdf document)
 

Presentations

• "Reflection and ePortfolio in a Capstone Course," with Sherrell Powell, New York State Occupational Therapy Association Annual Conference, Columbia University, November 2010.
• "Enhancing the Capstone Course Experience," with Sherrell Powell, American Occupational Therapy Association Annual Conference, Orlando, Florida, April 2010.
• “Creating and Assessing Integrative Learning Assignments for an Ethics Course,” Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Annual Meeting, Cincinnati, Ohio, March 2010
• “Educating for Ethics Across a Professional Curriculum,” with Clarence Chan, PT, Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Annual Meeting, Cincinnati, Ohio, March 2009
• "ePortfolio: Electronic Scrapbooking for Mental  Health," New York State Occupational Therapy Association Conference,Syracuse, September 2008
• "Promoting Oral Communication for Health Career Students," CUNY League of Active Speech Professors Conference, City University of New York, Long Island City, April 2008
• "ePortfolio Across a Professional Curriculum," with Mary Beth Early and Rachel Mallari, Making Connections:International ePortfolio Conference, May 2008
• “ePortfolio Applications in Education and Practice,”Association of Caribbean Occupational Therapists Conference, Trinidad, (proxy)with Alison Lazarus, November 2007
• "ePortfolio: A Strategy for Success,"Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program Best Practices Conference,Albany, NY, June 2007
• “ePortfolio Applications in Occupational Therapy,”American Occupational Therapy Association Annual Conference, St. Louis, MO, May 2007

Reflection

Aspects of my professional development experiences with the Center that have inspired and sparked the writing of the article include:  the continuous opportunities for working collaboratively with colleagues on group assignments, the time allotted to specifically identify objectives and the steps needed to achieve them, creating and refining prompts, presenting formally and informally both at seminars and at the ePortfolio conference, setting deadlines and being expected to meet them. Our work in seminars over the years was one of the factors that led me to collaborate with Sherrell and to write the article. I mentioned to both Bret and Ros that the seminars themselves allowed us to get together to further our scholarship. While we connect regularly on essentials there was no programmed time outside of the CTL seminars to fuse our ideas that ultimately led to the article.  Each in our separate seminars heard the same encouragement and urging that ePortfolio be promoted in our specific disciplines. We came at it from different directions based on the repetitive focus on the specific objectives for each seminar. 

Specifically in the ePortfolio leadership seminar, participants read each other’s annotations and discussed, sometimes the same choice of article, from different perspectives. This was true in other seminars as well. Small groups looked at websites from other schools and non-LaGuardia examples of ePortfolios. We learned to distinguish why one was better than another in specific ways. This enabled me to be more sensitive to my own writing in the article and to try to analyze it in a similar fashion. The wisdom that could be drawn from seminar participants from other disciplines was particularly significant.  

The path that CTL created that led to my multiple professional development examples started well before the seminar itself. The lead time for submitting proposals for a national conference is as much as nine months. As soon as the announcements of CTL professional development opportunities were posted I perused them with an eye toward a future presentation that I had not yet attempted. Bret has pointed out regularly that CTL materials are designed to be used by others. The language, clarity and goals were all helpful. As I prepared an abstract and objectives, I selected sections that described the upcoming seminar.  I decided that if my proposal got accepted, I would have ample time through the seminar to polish what I said I would present. Some material for the article was also drawn from distributed materials. Two examples of presentations that were specifically started via CTL opportunities announcements are the following: 

"Enhancing the Capstone Course Experience," with Sherrell Powell, American Occupational Therapy Association Annual Conference, Orlando, Florida, April 2010.  “Creating and Assessing Integrative Learning Assignments for an Ethics Course,” Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Annual Meeting, Cincinnati, Ohio, March 2010. Both of these presentations were also the first of mine to actually have some monetary support from CTL; arranged through the 2009-2010 mini grant. CTL paid for my registration for the Ohio conference and for one capstone student’s participation at the Orlando conference. 

CTL has played such a positive role for my scholarship throughout the years. Even the requested rewrites for In Transit, were an especially important foundation in conjunction with writing the article.  The visibility of whatever we posted on Blackboard for our seminars allowed us to be open to constructive criticism as did sharing what we prepared for viewing within our small seminar groups. We learned to recognize that the end result would be for the best and that improvement was always possible.   

- Professor Naomi Greenberg