The portfolio as a tool for learning and assessment in the Internship in Teaching Informatics

This work arises from the activities developed in the course unit Internship in Informatics Education I, which took place in the 1st semester of the 2022-2023 academic year, focusing, in particular, on the process leading to the elaboration of the portfolio as an active learning strategy, promoting critical, interventional and argumentative reflection on the observation, design and teaching process developed during the professionalizing internship of the Masters Course in Teaching of Informatics at the University of the Azores (UAc). This curricular unit runs in parallel with a curricular unit on Didactics of Informatics I, which aims to contribute to the construction of an informed and pedagogically situated teaching practice, namely at the level of Pre-School Education and the 1st Cycle of Basic Education, framing it within the specificities of the pedagogical environments for which it is intended and where the various pedagogical learning and assessment strategies are focused. Our aim was therefore, on the one hand, to give an account of how the portfolio was introduced in the context of the internship and, on the other hand, to understand how students and teachers were appropriating the use of this tool for the assessment of the curricular unit itself. The study was carried out during the first semester of the first edition of the course and involved the seven students enrolled, all of whom had a 1st cycle degree in Informatics, six of whom had teaching experience in an educational context. In a methodological narrative that followed a reflective and experimental approach, the text raises some aspects worthy of reflection, considering their relevance in the reconstruction of the students' educational action and their own learning process and, consequently, in the children's learning. In general, from the teachers' point of view, the e-portfolios proved to be an effective, practical, and appropriate tool for the students' training context, allowing for continuous and close monitoring of the work that was being carried out and a progressive construction of the reflexivity of the students, future teachers.