Creating History, Telling Stories, and Making Special:

Portfolios, Scrapbooks, and Sketchbooks

}A
BY ELIZABETH DELACRUZ AND SANDY BALES
ll human communications are a form of storytelling about some aspect of the
world. They are shaped by human personality and grounded in their historical contexts (Fisher, 1987). Communications scholar Walter Fisher defines storytelling, or narration, as symbolic action, words, or deeds, that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them (1987). Stories, embedded as they are in myths, imagery, and rituals, embody the cultural histories and aspirations of social groups and solidify communitarian values (Campbell, 1949). The embellishing and fashioning of objects and rituals that tell stories enhance their communicative power; human communications that are conveyed in artful ways, that is, the human tendency to "make special"their communications, promote communality and one-hearted ness (Dissayanake, 2003).
With these ideas in mind, this article considers commonalities and differences among three kinds of artful human communications that appeared to us as a special kind of storytelling: preservice art teachers' electronic professional teaching portfolios, family and friendship scrapbooks of people we have met in our community, and artists' sketchbooks/journals. We first share insights from an evaluation of preservice art teachers' production of digital videos and electronic portfolios, productions that were intended by these students to document and showcase their best teaching practices. We then share findings from our inquiries about related creative and cumulative self-referencing forms of expression, including scrapbooks and sketchbooks/journals. Recurring themes are identified and speculations include discussion of the nature of these self-referencing repositories of experience; the value of telling one's story as a form of social bonding (Fisher, 1987; Kellman, 1998); the human need to collect, recontextualize, and confer meanings on objects as a means of seeking permanence in the world (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993); the intentional shaping and embellishing of some objects to make them special (Dissanayake, 2003); and the capaCity to share such expressions in caring ways with others. Connections to art education conclude the paper.

Background to the Preservice Art Teacher Electronic Teaching Portfolio

Professional teaching portfolios have long been used in our degree program to demonstrate that students meet state-mandated standards for teacher certification. Originally appearing as binders, student standards portfolios have typically contained students' teaching philosophies, research on multicultural artists, visual culture studies, studies of schools' resources and strategies for serving students with special needs, art lessons, teaching handouts, examples of their own artwork, an artist's statement, examples of student artwork, evaluations of their teaching, and newsletters to parents. With support from a federal technology grant, we experimented for 2 years with an electronic portfolio as a

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replacement for the binder, and examined the results of the transition to digital technology. The first year of the grant was conceptualized as a digital video project. Using compact digital video cameras, students were taped during teaching episodes in a practicum course, learned iMovie:rM and created 3-5 minute film composites of their teaching. During the second year, in a later course, these students each created a cumulative electronic portfolio that included their best teaching practices (including their edited films) and their collected representative work (aka artifacts) in the program. We conducted formal evaluations at the end of each semester for four semesters. Findings were shared in a narrative summary of our grant Final Report to the federal grant evaluation team. Students reported both the digital video project and the electronic portfolios to be powerful contributors to their sense of identity as emerging professionals. The strength of students' reported professional identification was attributable to processes particular to working with electronic technologies in the creation of these videos and electronic portfolios.

Documentary filmmaking ofbest teaching practices. Through the movie-making process, students saw their teaching in real time, for the purpose of selecting and editing film clips to create short representative film composites of their best teaching practices. The viewing and editing of teaching episodes took on another facet-autobiography and self-identification with a community ofpractice. In the creation of these film clips, students gained autonomy in the analysis of their teaching. No longer constrained to looking for teaching successes and flaws with their supervisors, they were now free to focus on various aspects of their teaching that were most interesting to them. During exit interviews, student teachers talked about how creating their films gave them a better sense of being an integral member of the classroom and about their belief that they were making a difference in the lives of the young students under their guidance.

Professional electronic portfolios. With digital videos of their best teaching practices completed in an earlier practicum course, we then asked students to digitize their self-study of their own artistic development (a project central to this course), and to transition to an electronic format in the creation of their professional teaching portfolio (a requirement for certification). We anticipated that the DVD format would provide a compact, portable, and flexible version of the cumulative teaching binder. The DVD project required three new behaviors: a creation of a storyboard, a script, and an internal hyper-linking of artifacts selected for inclusion. The storyboard required students to visually pre-plan the location and flow of each artifact selected for inclusion. The script resulted in an audio-recorded voice-over that introduced the portfolio and offered a narrative about the artifacts. This process required students to write a statement about who they are and what they believe as art teachers. The inner linking of materials to be included on the DVD provided structure, established meaningful connections between materials included, and made the portfolio navigable. In formal evaluations, students mentioned the planning, selecting, editing, and scripting processes as integral to their growing sense of identity as a teacher, rather than merely as a student ina teacher preparation program. Moreover, students saw themselves through their own eyes, rather than through the lens of their supervisor, the critic teacher. We also noted that for these students the value of meaningfully connected video footage, self-selected teaching artifacts, and self-authored orally spoken statements of values took precedence over their former preoccupation with grades. Discussion. The nature of the transition from student to professional art teacher in the mind of the emerging practitioner is poorly understood in art education, and reflective practice is seen as essential to this process (Kowalchuk, 1999; Unrath & Norlund, 2009). Purposeful repeated viewings of films of their teaching allowed our students to see aspects in the teaching complex previously missed, evoked the felt quality of the teaching experience, and strengthened their appreciation of the classroom community. Self-reflection was facilitated through the processes of reexamining, selecting, and editing segments for digital video production, and students recognized these processes as important contributors to their professional identities. As we concluded our evaluation of the federal grant we noted not only the value of self identification with a community of practice, but also the importance of archiving, choosing and arranging artifacts that embody meaningful symbolic content, and of shaping that content into a coherent story about one's life. The electronic portfolios embodied a sense of the history (albeit a highly selective history) of these students while they progressed in our degree program. And they had a communal character.

Figure 1. Front "page" of an electronic professional portfolio. Name of artist in image retained and used with permission of the artist.

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Students reported both the digital video project and the electronic portfolios to be powerful
contributors to their sense of identity as emerging professionals.
Creating Identities, Archiving Personal and Communal Histories, and the Power of Stories
Our focus up to this time had been on the students' emergence of a sense of being affiliated with a community of professionals, on the quality and content of the kinds of objects students selected as representations of that affiliation, on the caring manner in which they organized and displayed these objects, and on the stories they told through them. This led us to wonder how personal histories and communal identities might similarly be constructed through creative processes used by individuals who artfully create other kinds of self-referencing forms of expression. We broadened our focus, and using ethnographic interview methods, we conducted video-taped interviews with new individuals, other students and artists who regularly kept artists' sketchbooks and journals, and students and other people living in East Central Illinois who made family scrapbooks. We also photographed their work, and analyzed recordings and photographic documentations, probing for recurring patterns. Findings suggest intriguing themes that include notions about history and identity, about why humans collect things, about the power of storytelling, and about making things special. discourse, for example, in the scholarly discipline of historiography, and as evidenced by the increasing popularity of autoethnography in anthropology, communications, new media studies, and qualitative research. The narrative component in these kinds of creative and autobiographical forms of self-expression both informs their making and makes them comprehensible to others.

Contemporary Scrapbookers: Family Historians and Chroniclers of Friendship

Just as the power of the narrative to reinforce personal and communitarian values was highly evident in our students' electronic portfolios, we also found it in the scrapbooks we examined. Scrapbookers collect objects, write stories of shared histories, and creatively assemble their collections of photographs, memorabilia, and decorative and symbolic motifs that reference valued people and events. The artistically designed page layouts and visual embellishments add and convey aesthetic pleasure, and signify the importance of the people and events depicted and remembered.

Telling one's story. Underlying these endeavors (creating professional electronic teaching portfolios, making family scrapbooks, and keeping an artist's journal/sketchbook) is the need to tell one's story. Contained within these forms of self-representation are the collected/collective personal thoughts, feelings, and stories of self in relation to and identification with others, whether or not they include the tellers' professional communities of practice, real and imagined, or the tellers' immediate community of close friends and family. Interest in telling the story is growing in academic

Figure 3. Selection from a family heritage album. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Figure 2. Youthful scrapbooks. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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Equally important to the scrapbooker is the sharing of scrapbooks with friends and family (Seabrook, 1991; Williams, 1991). Shared stories have personal significance to not only the storyteller (the scrapbook maker), but also social significance within intimate social networks (the intended audience for the story). Writing, telling, hearing, and reflecting on shared life stories may have profound effects on the lives of scrapbookers and their families. For example, the telling and listening that went into creating a family scrapbook reconciled one scrapbooker's family relationships. Cynthia' told us about her family as she showed us a memory album she'd created for her terminally ill father-in-law. This album includes handwritten notes from her husband, her son, and herself. Before he died Cynthia's father-in-law asked her to get his wife (Cynthia's mother-in-law) to make her own family heritage albums. Cynthia believes that the albums subsequently created by her mother-in-law have reconciled past rifts and brought her family closer, and that her father-in-law knew this would happen. Another scrapbooker similarly told us how she made a friendship scrapbook to reconcile an old friendship after a misunderstanding. For Sally, her friends were her surrogate family, and her relationships with lifelong friends were important to her sense of belonging. Jeanne, another scrapbooker, told us how important scrapbooks are to maintaining family relationships that now span great distances, as her children have married and moved across the country. Jeanne's home is filled with her family albums-organized around trips, special events, and years in their family historyalong with framed family photographs, news clippings, trophies and ribbons, and memorabilia that are prominently displayed throughout her home. For Cynthia, Sally, and Jean ne, scrapbooks serve as both an arch ive of remembrance and belonging, and a regularly performed ritual of reconnecting.

blogs on the Internet, are a reflection of the very human need to tell our stories, to create a record of our lives" (Clyde, 2005, p. 53). They are a self-telling that attempt to produce coherence, wholeness, and significance out of ephemeral moments (Tucker et aI., 2006). Sometimes they traverse past, present, and future, both distinguishing and mixing eras discriminatingly. They are a conversation between the maker and her ancestors, her immediate circle of family and friends, and/ or her anticipated decedents yet to come. Scrapbooks are also repositories, filled with objects and memories from the scrapbooker's everyday life: photographs, memorabilia, newspaper clippings, magazine cutouts, drawings, any manner of decorative embellishments, and, importantly, writings. Writings may include (but are not limited to) documentary-styled descriptions of people, places, dates, and events; inside jokes or quirky phrases from the culture at large; and/ or quotes from individuals represented in the photographs and mementos. Whatever the style, journal entries are considered a priority in the completion of a scrapbook layout, second only to the photographs themselves (Danet & Katriel, 1989).

Like Scrapbooks, Sketchbooks are Artful Repositories of Images, Curiosities, Quests, Journeys, and Life Narratives
Like scrapbooks, artists' sketchbooks are sometimes used to capture moments in time, but sketchbooks have a more serendipitous structure. Like the electronic portfoliOS of our preservice teachers, sketchbooks allow artists to track their own development over time, work through ideas, and see multiple works collected into one place. In addition to drawings, visual documentations, and plans for future artworks, sketchbooks may house a curious collection of ephemera, photographs, newspaper clippings, Xeroxed images, magazine cutouts, inspirational sayings, musical notations, birch bark, postcards, scraps of ragged-edge paper with partially completed renderings, course handouts, personal mementos, and a wide variety of writings. Artists' sketchbook drawings, writings, and other materials tend to be assembled in the chronological order of their making and/or finding, rather than reassembled page-by-page for specific purposes, as are scrapbooks or profeSSional portfolios. We are likely to see elements of caricature, appropriation, analogy, distortion, abstraction, and humor alongside stylized and realistic depictions. Personal, unique, and everyday encounters and ideas form the contents of artists' sketchbooks, document artists' surroundings, and provide cryptic clues about their thoughts and feelings. The quick sketches and fragmentary notes that comprise artists' sketchbooks are often exploratory, and their connections across pages are not obvious to a casual viewer. For the sketchbook artist, it is an ongoing narrative of fragmented experiences, and the intended beneficiary is immediately, but not always, an audience of one.

Discussion. Contemporary scrapbooks derive from ancient albums, 15th-century commonplace books, and 16th-century cabinets of curiosity (Ruth, 1995; Bernhard, 2005; Tucker, Ott, & Buckler, 2006). Scrapbooks are a personal archive of valued experiences, events, rituals, and everyday moments. Their contents include objects collected, catalogued, annotated, and re-presented for the purpose of remembering. "Scrapbooks, like diaries and today's

Scrapbooking in the digital age. Many scrapbookers no longer merely cut and paste clippings, memorabilia, and photos directly into albums. Two of our study participants currently utilized electronic technologies extensively in the creation of their scrapbooks. Computers, digital cameras, scanners, desktop publishing software, scrapbook page layout software programs, and inexpensive home printers now make it easy to create profeSSional-looking materials and layouts (Levie, 2004). Scrapbookers may also pay others online to create family scrapbooks for them, and/or use online services to have their albums profeSSionally printed in hardbound books. And some scrapbooks currently may exist only in digital form. Although the variety in media, styles, sizes, and purposes of contemporary scrapbooks is vast, what connects them is a sense of wanting permanence in the world. Importantly, scrapbooks are made to be given to loved ones, shared, seen, and/or performed by the scrapbooker to intended audiences. We note that a common practice of family members, upon visits to childhood homes, is to get out the family scrapbooks and gather around them for remembering and shared storytelling.

Their sketchbooks served as journals for personal reflection, artistic aspirations, and as a place for exploring inner worlds, including self-doubts.

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Three participants in our inquiry, Bridget, Matthew, and Ted, maintain different kinds of sketchbooks, and they carry a sketchbook at all times. Bridget has a sketchbook in which she keeps receipts, bids, contacts, costs, and other documents for a large-scale community sculpture she is planning. It includes renderings, dimensions, technical processes, notes about materials, and information about the site. Matthew's pocket-size sketchbook contains whimsical sketches of skateboarders and white suburban ninjas, phrases of music, doodles, jokes, illustrations, photographs, postcards, and found materials to draw on. Among many other things, Ted's sketchbooks contain fully rendered figure drawings and storyboards for a comic book series he intends to publish.

Sketchbooks as journals. All of the sketchbook artists we talked to wrote extensively in their sketchbooks. Their sketchbooks served as journals for personal reflection, artistic aspirations, and as a place for exploring inner worlds, including self-doubts. In one entry, Ted wrote an entire page about his self-consciousness during animated debates with friends, pondering his sense of himself as listener, conversationalist, and "measurer of his own words; considering his insecurities and need to establish authority, and finally reconciling these feelings by the end of the page. Bridget, committed to building two massive sculpture projects and anxious because of their scale, explained how her sketchbook writings keep her focused and grounded. In contrast, Matthew's sketchbook journal entries are a log of important experiences kept in a regular and disciplined manner. His entries are written in a matter-of-fact style and include, for example, descriptions of a camping trip to Minnesota with his buddies, and a family vacation to London. All of the sketchbooks we examined appeared as stories in the process of being formed, endings yet to be determined, and with some stories defying closure.
Figure 4 (top). A sketchbook serving as a repository of ephemera. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Figure 5 (bottom). A sketchbook journal entry. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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When created and shared in caring ways with others in the

communal setting of an art classroom, these kinds ofcreative activities and cultural productions provide an additional benefit ofconnecting individual students to peers. When shared beyond

the classroom these idiosyncratic, creative, personal/cultural

productions may further connect students to kin and to other valued individuals in students' social networks.
Insights and Speculations
-The idea of collecting life experiences and then reassembling that collection as a quest or a story to be told was mentioned by each of the individuals that we talked to (preservice art teachers, local scrapbookers, and artists). Their portfolios, scrapbooks, and sketchbooks/journals provide a means of archiving experiences and insights for later use, as well as a working through of problems to gain deeper understanding. The following insights encapsulate some of our other speculations about these forms of creative personal expression.

others. One of our scrapbookers, Cynthia, represents a scrapbooking company and hosts monthly scrapbooking workshops in her home. As she explained these gatherings, we were reminded of multi-age Amish quilting bees, organized around themes of preserving cultural tradition, creating caring and community. Not only are individuals keeping sketchbooks, diaries, and scrapbooks, they are doing so on the Web, and in great numbers. Personal and commercial sites composed of digital diaries, blogs, histories, digital portfolios, digital scrapbooks, and sites promoting products for the creation and maintenance of these forms of expression number in the tens of millions. Intriguing sites include virtual repositories in which one can archive family histories, including a site where one can upload raw data (names, dates, and events) onto a form and have someone, a historian, presumably, write that data into a narrative history. Books retrieved in another Internet search produced revealing titles such as "Becoming the Author of Your Experience;' "The Story of Your Life;' "Writing the Family arrative;' "This is Your Life Story;' "Turning Memories into Memoirs: A Handbook for Writing Lifestories;' and "Bringing Your Family History to Life Through Social History;' suggest not merely a burgeoning commercial market for history writing, but a basic contemporary human need to tell and preserve our stories.

Recontextualization as meaning making.

Scrapbooking and creation of portfolios involve removal of objects from their original contexts and redefinition by the collector/ designer. This is a derivative process-things are taken from somewhere else and put into a scrapbook (DeCandido, 1993), but the process also has connective capacity, as objects and memories are gathered in ways that connect past to present, in anticipation of an imagined or desired future (Tucker et aI., 2006). Similarly, the visual recordings and reflective writings of the sketchbook artists we interviewed engaged similar processes of recontextualization. And our students' teaching portfoliOS were, in essence, an exercise in conferring desired meanings upon selected objects, and connecting these objects and intended meanings into a coherent whole with a particular purpose in mind. These kinds of self-referential forms of personal and communitarian expression also each represent an ideology, a point of view, an historical moment, and a fascinating facet of contemporary material culture, ripe for multiple interpretations and/or critical analysis.

Why we need things. Artifacts objectify the self in a variety of ways. Objects stabilize our sense of who we are, giving a permanent shape to our views of ourselves. Objects reveal the continuity of the self through time. And objects function as symbols of valued relationships, giving concrete evidence of one's place in a social network (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993). Things of this sort provide external order, a cultural script, and physical evidence of aspects of life that are inherently fleeting and intangible. "Without external props even our personal identity fades and goes out of focus; the self is a fragile construction of the mind" (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, p. 13). We need our scripts and props to remember, to impose order on the random fragments that make up a life, and to connect to others. For artists like Bridget, a sketchbook/journal reveals "form and patterns in the myriad of seemingly formless experiences and activities that make up my days, weeks and months." Similarly, creating scrapbook gives the maker a means of control over the objects, experiences, and memories, and gives them a feeling of order within themselves (Katriel & Farrell, 1991).

Connections to Art Education

These findings and speculations are important to art education insofar as art educators are interested in why meaning is attached to "things;' how individuals use these "things" to tell their own stories and convey their history, and how they do this in purposeful, artistic ways that are meant to have an aesthetically pleasing impact. We believe that there are important linkages between the human need to preserve and creatively retell one's personal history, and meaningful classroom practices in the art room. In closing, we offer a few possible connections to art education that now seem rather elf-evident. Art education practices in classrooms and beyond are well served when learning activities involve students in reflective processes that include the saving and creative assembling, in artful ways, of experiences

Documenting and domesticating life experience: caring, connecting, and commerce. The theme of caring permeates
the act of scrapbook making: care in making and care for the people included, especially when shared with insiders (Katriel & Farrell, 1991). Twenty years ago, scrapbooking was mostly a teen and young female adult activity (Danet & Katriel, 1989). Now it is done by all ages and is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. We relate these interests to the related growth in family history writing and genealogy (see for example, Library of Congress, n. d.), and observe a growing cottage industry for both scrapbooking in homes and scrapbooking for

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and things that have special meaning to individual students. Young people like to collect a good many things (collectibles, personal memorabilia, iconic contemporary cultural artifacts, cool stuff, etc.), to organize and enjoy these things, and many of these things are personally valuable to these young people (Stone, 2004). We also know that students are already predisposed to archiving and sharing their personal stories, photographs, and experiences in creative ways, as evidenced by the phenomenal growth of online sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Student construction of an autobiographical portfolio or profile that creatively conveys a self-representation of individual accomplishments, experiences, and aspirations; her/his creation of a personal scrapbook or heritage album of creatively arranged objects and writings that tell of personal and communal histories; and/or the keeping of a sketchbook/journal of insights and renderings captured in fleeting moments may each serve as a means

of making special and strengthen student identities that are in the process of developing. These kinds of student productions may be created with and without digital media. When created and shared in caring ways with others in the communal setting of an art classroom, these kinds of creative activities and cultural productions provide an additional benefit of connecting individual students to peers. When shared beyond the classroom these idiosyncratic, creative, personal/cultural productions may further connect students to kin and to other valued individuals in students' social networks. In an era of schooling riddled with standardization, competition, and ever increasing pressures to conform to predetermined outcomes that have some purported future benefit (economic or otherwise), these kinds of personal/social, creative/ connective, fun/quirky, and caring activities are greatly needed in contemporary art education educational settings.

Elizabeth Delacruz is Associate Professor of Art Education and Womens Studies, and Editor, Visual Arts Research Journal, at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. E-mail: edelacru@uiuc.edu Sandy Bales is a former instructor in Art Education at the University ofIllinois, Urbana Champaign, and currently a community arts and environmental educator in East Central Illinois. E-mail: sbales@illinois.edu

ENDNOTE
I We use pseudo-names throughout this article.

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