Use of portfolios in Religious Studies

Abstract

In our new programme for Religious Studies leading to BA, MA or BTh we try to use portfolios in order to help the students to reflect on their work in the different courses and on how knowledge and abilities attained can prepare for different tasks in different practical contexts and to take responsibility for their own educational process. We are convinced that this is very important in a programme for Religious Studies, but we believe that this approach can also be of great interest for other educational programmes. We want to evaluate and reflect on our efforts to implement our ideas and improve the programme in such a way that the documentation can be of interest for academic teachers in other programmes with similar educational goals. Particularly we want to * improve the written information given to the new students, * improve the content and student tasks of the first module in which the educational ideas are presented, * develop a portfolio task in which third year students work as tutors for first year students, * develop a web-site with virtual class-rooms for information, discussion and administration of all written reports prepared for the portfolios, * experiment with different forms of feed-back on documents written by the students, * try to give specific inputs to the development of the writing skills of the students at specific points in the programme, * make some follow-up studies on two groups of students and on the implementation process viewed through the eyes of different teachers, * document and reflect on our experiences and relate them both to our disciplinary theories and to general educational theories.