Fringing Electric Field Sensors: Design and Applications

I examine in this study career portfolio programs that require secondary school students to maintain and rearrange portfolios of their work (e.g. papers, artwork, and artifacts from extracurricular activities) and to reflect on what their portfolios say about who they are, were and will be as students, workers and citizens.

I consider how students of different backgrounds take on, adapt or resist program-endorsed definitions of good work and prepared workers as they construe themselves through portfolio composition as people with skills, interests, and career goals suitable for particular kinds of workplaces or post-secondary educational institutions.

Utilizing methods of critical discourse analysis and ethnography, I investigate how students work through texts (e.g. career portfolios) and practices of textual production (e.g. portfolio advisory meetings) to construe themselves as certain kinds of people preparing for certain kinds of futures in a changing socio-economic order.

This study advances knowledge in the field of education, where there is a dearth of research concerning how diverse students, parents and educators understand different genres of schoolwork as providing opportunities for students to acquire skills and experiences valued in the unstable education markets and job markets of an increasingly knowledge-driven economy and society.