Examples of Good Practice from LaGuardia Community College

LaGuardia Community College in New York City serves perhaps the most diverse student population in the world. Two-thirds of our 50,000 credit and non-credit students were born outside the United States. Our students hail from over 160 different countries and speak over 110 different languages in addition to English. The challenge for LaGuardia is not to educate “about” diversity and inter-cultural understanding, but rather to use our diverse students and faculty to enhance and deepen our pedagogy and curriculum.

ePortfolio

One of our key innovations is the ePortfolio. An ePortfolio is an individualized web-based compendium where students collect examples of their coursework and creatively represent themselves and their education within a proscribed format that also serves as a tool for employment or transfer to other colleges, The ePortfolio process grounds the academic experience of LaGuardia students in educational community, connecting them with each other, providing space for the assertion of cultural identity within a college that blends multiple national and aesthetic perspectives. LaGuardia ePortfolios are alive with music, color, pictures and videos from around the world. The ePortfolios sing with the power of immigrants’ stories, the sagas of students making their way in the multicultural neighborhoods of New York.

At LaGuardia, ePortfolios require that students make connections between who they are-including their backgrounds-and their dreams of achievement through education. Because ePortfolio is both universal and individual, a creative tension emerges: students’ cultural diversity is documented and revealed; and, at the same time, students articulate their shared connection with the learning process and the college community. This dialectic generates a unique pedagogical resource. Since few college texts or learning materials reflect the startling diversity of LaGuardia students’ cultural backgrounds, the ePortfolio enables faculty to incorporate students’ rich and complex lived experiences into a transformed curriculum.

Over 7,500 LaGuardia students build ePortfolios each year, making the program one of the largest in the U.S. Many LaGuardia students begin depositing work in the ePortfolio in their first semesters at the college and continually refine their presentations as they move forward, each time looking to reflect on and understand the process of growth and intellectual improvement within a global perspective. Personal essays encourage students to explore their changing sense of themselves. Designed to help students connect classroom, career, and personal goals and experiences, the ePortfolio moves students toward not only integrated learning, but also more integrated lives. The world comes together, for each student, each class, and each faculty member who nurtures an ePortfolio.

This page is part of a series of Examples of Good Practice.