MATC Portfolio

The primary form of programmatic assessment for your MATC will be a portfolio, submitted at the conclusion of the ENGL 5000 Capstone Course.

Capstone Course

The Capstone Course will support you to create a portable digital portfolio, the overarching goal is to produce and articulate a professional identity based in reflective, collaborative practices bolstered by rigorous theoretical framing. Consequently, you are invited to develop a portfolio that contains a set of artifacts (things you have produced) for specific audiences and purposes in alignment with your professional identity and the MATC program outcomes as described in the Graduate Student Handbook. 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 emerged across your programmatic experiences.

Rather than simply making an attractive document, your goal is to produce a portfolio of revised artifacts grounded in core curricular concepts and skills. 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).

Sample Syllabus

Portfolio

The audience and purpose for this digital portfolio is three-fold. First, a digital portfolio represents your work to the working world. As such, you tailor your portfolio for the professional conversation you wish to enter or in which you want to advance. Thus, you'll need to research that audience and understand the genre conventions of digital portfolios in those places/spaces, which requires talking to professionals in the domains you wish to enter. Second, the most immediate audience for this portfolio is your capstone course instructor and your cohort of peers. Together, they act as a bridge between you and outside audiences. Third, after you have completed your Capstone Course and before you can be conferred a degree, an ad hoc committee of TCR faculty must pass or fail your final MATC portfolio. Their assessment is based upon programmatic learning objectives specified in the graduate handbook. Hence, the portfolio's audience and purpose in the third instance means that you need to demonstrate your competence in keeping with programmatic objectives and academic rigor, which the capstone, as a penultimate step, should help you to accomplish.

MATC Program Outcomes

• synthesize individual and collaborative revision and development processes to better organize, format, frame, and clearly showcase professional and technical communication prowess;
  
• engage with and integrate theories, concepts, and frameworks from technical communication and/or rhetorical scholarship;
  
• employ a variety of appropriate communication technologies and medias in the service of supporting a professional identity;
• demonstrate rhetorical awareness of effective portfolio design by creating appropriate and user-centered technical documentation justified with relevant theory;
• devise a more informed theoretical and rhetorical framework for portfolio artifacts,
  particularly one that demonstrates sensitivity to the ethical, professional, and cultural issues that face technical communicators;
• revise existing artifacts and provide effective critical feedback in alignment with professional expectations, and
• apply professional development skills and genre research to create an effective portfolio, dossier, and employment materials that demonstrate the capacity to enter the workforce in technical communication as advanced hires, OR to enter doctoral programs in rhetoric, technical communication, and related fields.

 

Submitting Portfolios

The portfolio and all artifacts must be submitted to the Capstone Course professor as per their syllabus requirements and electronically to the DGS either as a website link (preferred) or email with a link to a OneDrive folder.

Please contact the TCR DGS if you have any immediate questions.