AbstractThis article offers a rationale and model for a reflective capstone course for English majors. Rooted in the SoTL concepts of active transfer and project-based experiential learning, this course asks students to reflect on and analyze their undergraduate work while developing a toolkit to articulate the value of their humanities degrees. Toward that end, students create scaffolded professional projects in multiple genres that help them highlight the soft skills they have developed in their academic career.

This program profile details the incorporation, scaffolding, and assessment of a large programmatic common reading initiative as a framework for other program directors to incorporate programmatic change and generate faculty buy-in. This profile describes the integration of a diversity-themed common reader used in a first-year experience program into a first-year composition program. The authors describe the main elements of implementation: selecting a diversity-themed common reader and preparing and executing multiple methods of faculty training. Additionally, the assessment methods of the program—including a faculty survey providing feedback on the administrative support and activities surrounding the common reading program, a survey collecting students’ diversity experiences, and student focus groups that collect the students’ responses to the pedagogical methods engaging them in diversity-themed work—are discussed. How the program’s implementation, faculty development activities, and assessment methods have been modified based on faculty engagement, student feedback, and survey results is also defined.