Young black women curate visual arts e-portfolios: negotiating digital disciplined identities, infrastructural inequality and public visibility

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing importance of digital portfolios for justifying creative work and study opportunities, little is known about arts students’ creative appropriation of online portfolios in secondary school. In particular, there is a research gap concerning the challenges that young black women face when curating portfolios as visual arts students. This paper describes the key challenges that three such government school students negotiated when taught to creatively appropriate an online portfolio software for curating showcase visual arts e-portfolios: In formal contexts, art students’ e-portfolios are strongly shaped by assimilatory norms. Visual arts students who want to develop portfolios that follow local or global crafts and fandoms must negotiate their low status in, or complete exclusion from, the national syllabus. Students in under-resourced school and home settings may already be using other online portfolio solutions that suit their purposes better than the particular software prescribed in arts lessons. Online portfolios are public by default and young women negotiated this risk by using pseudonymous self-presentations. Each student's classroom practices were also constrained by a technology selected for its minimalist exhibition aesthetic. Students curated showcase exhibitions, but the prescribed service did not facilitate a wider exploration of contemporary digital practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Assimilation
• creativity
• e-portfolio
• online identity
• participatory culture
• visual arts

Acknowledgements

The DOE and Western Cape Education Visual Arts Department supported access to both research sites. Special thanks to the research participants, their visual arts educators and both school managements for their involvement and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Travis Noakes is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow whose work focuses on digital identities, online content creation and strategic design. He explores how individuals follow varied strategies in creating and sharing content that reflects their contrasting circumstances and priorities.

ORCID

Travis Noakes http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9566-8983

Notes

1 Pseudonyms are used for each student's name to protect their privacy and that of their school.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by South Africa’s National Research Fund, which provided funding as part of its ‘Procedural literacy, digital media and curriculum’ grant.