Portfolio Development and the Assessment of Prior Learning,
Elana Michelson, Alan Mandell, and Contributors. Stylus, 2004.
Reviewed by Jaime Hylton, PhD, University of New England

In a time when innumerable books are appearing on the subjects of portfolio development and assessment of student learning, Michelson and Mandell have edited a volume on the topics in combination and their relationship to experiential learning. Herein they discuss the use of the portfolio as a "reflective bridge" connecting students' experiential (usually workplace) learning with their subsequent or simultaneous academic learning. Since the appearance in 1990 of the first edition of this book, Portfolio Development and Adult Learning, the worlds of adult and experiential learning have changed quite markedly. Whereas fifteen years ago, programs granting credit for academically equivalent knowledge belonged primarily to large state university systems or progressive liberal arts colleges affiliated with the Catholic church, today they exist in public and private/urban and rural/community and research colleges and universities not only in the United States, but also in Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. In the current edition, Michelson and Mandell broaden their treatment of the use of portfolios in order to bring readers up to date on the "moving target" that is today's prior learning assessment (PLA).

Michelson and Mandell use the first two chapters of the book to outline the changes that have occurred in PLA since its founding approximately three decades ago and to summarize six approaches to portfolio development. Chapter 1 puts portfolio development in historical context, explaining how changes in economic and intellectual climates have created new imperatives and new challenges for PLA. In chapter 2, the six approaches to portfolio development (Academic Orientation, The Meaning of Education, Personal Exploration, Learning from the Outsider Within, The World of Work and Careers, and Dimensions of Expertise) are described, and the authors provide additional insight into the uses of these approaches by exploring ways in which each might meet the varying needs of three different adult learners.

The remaining twelve chapters are models contributed by practitioners in which they explain the evolution of their own institutions' particular uses of portfolios in the assessment of adult learning. Nine of the twelve institutions included are located in the United States; the remaining three, located in Canada, Britain, and South Africa, serve to underscore the authors' contention that PLA now functions in a "truly international domain." If there is a weakness in this book, this is where it lies. Although in their introduction, Michelson and Mandell attempt to build a case for the internationalization of PLA, only two of the twelve models they present exist outside of North America, and in subsequent pages, the authors in fact build an even stronger case for the close alignment between the use of portfolios as assessment tools and the American ideals of nonelitism and social equity. They cite, for example, the "paradigmatically American belief" in the value of the individual, and they emphasize the importance of John Dewey's notion of ‘inner experience' in the formation of knowledge. Listed in the supplement to chapter 2, "Resources for Portfolio Development," are texts intended for adult learners in a North American context. Here the authors admit that, although parallel texts in other national contexts certainly exist, they "made no consistent effort to identify them."

Readers are likely to find the twelve models of portfolio development in practice to be the most useful part of the book. The now classic models of Alverno, Empire State, Evergreen State, and London Metropolitan are here, but so, too, are less well known models like Diane Hill's Native North American approach at First Nations Technical Institute and Theresa Hoffmann's description of the University of Maryland University College's computer-mediated portfolio development in the burgeoning area of distance education. Other models include Sinclair Community College in Ohio, the state colleges of Vermont, a postgraduate program at the University of Technology in Sydney, and the post-apartheid recognition of prior learning at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. As Michelson and Mandell point out in their introduction, the assessment of students' prior experiential learning always has been a product of its time and place. Nevertheless, although the particular circumstances of each of the model schools are different, taken in toto, the twelve models described in this section provide ample evidence that—even as the practice of PLA is being recast in light of tightening budgets, new student populations, redefined institutional goals, and changing relationships between working and schooling—the philosophical underpinnings have remained constant. In every case, the reader finds evidence of the values inherent in PLA as teachers and students use portfolios to mediate the ways in which individual lives and learning are affected by gender, race, class, politics, and economics.