Capstone Experience purposes: an international, multidisciplinary study

Capstone experiences (CEs) serve a variety of purposes in higher education as places to apply academic skills, explore post-graduate life and employment, and achieve a meaningful undergraduate event. This study investigated the purposes of CEs through a content analysis of institutional course syllabi/course outlines/module outlines and catalog/calendar descriptions at five institutions of higher education: a large public research university in Canada, a large public teaching university in the U.K., a large public research university campus in the U.S., and two medium-sized private liberal arts universities in the U.S. Using the CE purposes found in a review of scholarly literature as a research guide, the authors analyzed 84 institutional documents. CE purposes that appeared in the sample at lower percentages when compared with published studies included oral communication, a coherent academic experience, preparation for graduate school, preparation for life after college, and civic engagement/service learning. Implications for practice include the need for instructors and administrators to consider revising CE documents to better reflect the content and goals of the courses and to address the requirements of other audiences (e.g., program reviewers, accreditation evaluators). Moreover, the results of this study may assist educators in considering reasons for omitting explicit purposes from CE documents and/or justifying the inclusion of previously omitted purposes

Evidence-Based Pedagogy for Values Outcomes in Capstone Experiences

Undergraduate programs that focus on disciplinary knowledge and skills can reinforce pre-existing mindsets or ideologies that can lead to insufficient questioning of certain types of information (e.g., empirical data or model results) or insufficient valuing of certain types of information (e.g., Indigenous knowledge). One way to address this challenge is to include values-based learning and assessment strategies that empower students to better understand and engage with their complex and changing worlds. General Education (GenEd) Capstone Experiences (CE) often seek to instill values such as thoughtfulness, openness, and responsibility, but scholarly analysis of the pedagogies and their effectiveness is limited, as is discussion on the inclusion of similar pedagogies in discipline-focused courses. This study addresses this research disparity by using a mixed methods approach to investigate student and faculty perceptions of the values integrated by a GenEd CE program and the pedagogies used to integrate those values. Results demonstrate that the integration of reflection and discussion pedagogies has the potential to influence a variety of values-based outcomes. Institutional leaders and CE instructors may integrate these pedagogies into their CEs, with mindful attention to the associated values that they seek to instill

A Side of Family, Hold the Mother: Dare Wright and Her Fictive Kin in the Lonely Doll Series

This chapter analyzes the 1950s and 1960s Lonely Doll children’s picture books by the Canadian author Dare Wright, tracing how the books simultaneously evoke the mother and render her absent. Exploring the significance of the absence of mother in the texts, the chapter considers not only how and why this absence matters, but also how multiple other textual functions matter, including character creation, storylines, narrative voices, and the photographic images at work. This transdisciplinary study blends literary analysis with Barthes’ theory of narrative codes, history, and biography to demonstrate what these texts unearth about a motherless family portrait, which calls into question the extent to which a mother is needed at all