The capstone experience in English (ENG 499c) is designed to help students craft their professional identities. Our course readings encourage the exploration of our discipline as a profession, and we will complete authentic writing assignments that sharpen our professional writing skills.
This focus is part of a statewide push to prepare all college graduates for the workforce. The Council on Postsecondary Education, the body that oversees higher education in the state, has noted “[n]early three in four employers say they have a hard time finding recent college graduates with the essential soft skills needed to succeed in the workplace.” To address this, the CPE crafted The Kentucky Graduate Profile, “a set of career-focused learning outcomes each graduate should demonstrate as part of their college curriculum.”
The ability to “perform professionally” is the sixth outcome of this Profile, and accountability and reliability are two indicators of this professional performance. To meet this outcome in ENG 499c, we will be treating our course meetings and assignment submissions as employment requirements. Students will be expected to be in class, on time, and to submit their work in the proper format on the scheduled due date. Any deviation from this will be considered a dereliction of work duty.
This may sound like a general restatement of standard class policies, but, before you confidently assert you’ve performed professionally throughout the entirety of your college career, I want you to consider the level of performance that has been expected of students. How often were students considered present even after they missed a significant portion of a class period? How often were they given significant grace periods for submission? Or not subject to firm due dates at all? And how often were they granted excuses for absences that did not meet the requirements outlined in UAR 131.05? (Fun fact: medical documentation, in and of itself, is not incontrovertible evidence of an excused absence.)
Current forms of education do not consistently stress the accountability and reliability employers wish to assume. There is no work equivalent of a “no zero grading policy,” and employers do not create person-centered plans to address chronic absenteeism. The steep increase in performance expectations is one of the many reasons the final semester of student teaching feels so different for education students. The affordances students have relied upon, or seen other students rely upon, are just not there for the burgeoning professionals who are now responsible for the classroom and its management.
ENG 499c will be implementing a more rigorous means of accountability, adopting the professional expectation of an employer. Have a non-emergency medical appointment? You’ll be using one of your non-excused absences (our equivalent of sick days). Have something that just comes up that keeps you from class? Take a non-excused “personal” day. Happen to use up your non-excused absences, and something genuinely comes up? You will have to take docked pay for missed work (i.e., point reduction in the class) if that reason does not meet the parameters outlined in UAR 131.05.
While this more rigorous form of accountability does come with the possibility of penalization, I want you to think of this admittedly enhanced requirement as *dispositional development.* Not only will you have the opportunity to treat your classroom experience as a professional scenario, but you will also be able to demonstrate the foundational elements of successful job performance: showing up and getting work done on time.
And to hold myself accountable–because, let’s face it, my own relatively lax take on attendance in other classes hasn’t exactly instilled accountability or reliability in students outside of ENG 499c–I’m going to provide you with an opportunity to earn points while you “perform professionally.” The first student who alerts me to a typo or error in our ENG 499c course materials will receive an extra credit point (i.e., one point added to their course total in ENG 499c) for every typo/error. So you’ll be earning points for professional rigor while I will be “paying you a bonus” because I did not fulfill baseline expectations for professionalism!
A note about ADA compliance: Nothing in this articulation of professionalism is designed to negate or counter documented accommodation needs. Students who provide the proper documentation from our Disability Services office will receive an individualized articulation of “professional standards” that meets departmentally identified expectations. This articulation, which will be in writing, will be witnessed by the department chair, and, if needs be, the Disability Services coordinator. The process will be the programmatic equivalent of an employee meeting with HR to ensure proper accommodations are available in the workplace.
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