The purpose of this study was to examine the meaning of the diverse experiences of
preservice early childhood teachers during their participation in a career portfolio
production program. A career portfolio production program was implemented during a
nine-week period of time, and data were gathered to explore the meaning of their
experiences in that process, which involved their journals, the report of their coaching
professor and small- group interview data. The collected data were analyzed by
encoding. As a result of analyzing the data, their experiences were categorized into
eight categories: perceiving the flow of time, gathering scattered experiences, finding
oneself amid chaos, being aware of being together, building psychological wellbeing,
imagining one's own future as an early childhood teacher, mapping out one's future
and making one's way to the world. The meanings of their experiences were
reclassified into three stages: beginning, development and wrapping-up stages, in
which there were two, four and two meanings respectively. The findings indicated that
they were mostly cognizant of the meaning of their own experiences of producing
career portfolio while they participated in the program step by step.