Faculty and Staff

Online, WWW 

This capstone course will support you in creating a digital portfolio, with the overarching goal to produce and articulate a professional identity based in reflective, collaborative practices bolstered by rigorous theoretical framing. Your portfolio will contain a set of artifacts (documents you have produced) for specific audiences and purposes in alignment with your professional identity and the M.A. program in Technical Communication. 

Your sense of professional identity as a competent technical communicator will vary depending on your goals and career trajectory. The capstone experience can help you to synthesize content from your work throughout the program as you recognize habits of mind, skills, and key theoretical or methodological approaches that have emerged across your programmatic experiences. Ultimately, a well-composed portfolio demonstrates a clear sense of professional identity, ability to reflect upon and illustrate skills, and preparedness to transition to another setting (e.g., the workplace, the academy, a doctoral program). 

Questions you’re invite to explore include: 

• How do I develop a portfolio that showcases my rhetorical finesse, design savvy, and academic acumen? 

• Why is theoretical framing important for portfolio development and artifact revision? 

• How do I showcase ethical communication competencies and why does it matter in a portfolio? 

• What are distinctions between an industry-, teaching-, and research-focused portfolio, and what role does academic framing play across these genre variations?