Portfolios as Boundary Object: Learning and Change in Teacher Education

Transformation in teacher education is seen as crucial for creating change within the educational system. In this article, we explore how members in a teacher education program interpret new ideas and tools such as portfolio assessment, case-based methods, and ICT. These ideas and tools are important conditions for the collective change of the institution, where portfolio assessment emerges as a new object between the subjectoriented communities. In activity theoretical terms, we suggest that learning is a matter of acting on and talking about the object within and between communities. These sideways movements lead to transformations on the object. This conception also gives us an alternative perspective on the classical theory/practice problem.