Arguably, the most critical component to a successful capstone project is having an enthusiastic and engaged Community Partner. The spirit of this project is to help advance energy and/or sustainability-related initiatives in your own community while affording you the opportunity to network in your own backyard. Your partnership could be with a non-profit organization, local business owner, or government entity. You'll work with them to establish or advance some energy and/or sustainability related initiative with policy implications (either at the local level or within their organization). Because this partnership will be central to your experience in the capstone semester, we need to establish it early so that you and your partner can then start solidifying the work you'll do for them during the semester itself.
The starting point is a community partner you want to work with (and who wants to work with you) and a topic of interest and value to them. We’re trying to advance something they’re already interested in and possibly invested in but perhaps don’t have the staff resources to work on right now while providing you with a good networking opportunity right in your own backyard.
To be considered for enrollment in the course, you must have secured a project partner and drafted the potential scope/deliverables for your project and submitted to the course instructor by:
Shared with permission of the students and their community partners, here are some examples from recent capstone projects. Check out some of the innovative and important work your classmates have done as you try to think about what you might want to do in your own community.
Fall 2023
Summer 2023
Spring 2023
Fall 2022
This project represents the culminating experience of your time as an ESP student. As such, it should pull together the wide array of knowledge you've learned and apply the skills you've refined in a practical scenario in the real world. We're going to be venturing out from behind your computers this semester to have a tangible impact in your community. In this inquiry-based project, you'll tackle the wicked problems of sustainability you see and experience in your own community (or workplace, perhaps). You will identify, organize, execute, and reflect on a local issue related to energy, the environment or sustainability more broadly with particular emphasis on policy-based solutions.
As you can see, the project components themselves constitute the majority of your grade.
Deliverable |
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Project Proposal |
Project Agreement (first we'll draft it, then you'll get your Community Partner to sign it) |
Literature Review |
Draft Community Partner Deliverables |
Presentation Rehearsal |
Digital Story |
Weekly Journals |
As you move through this project, you will be actively exploring new territory, interacting with others outside of Penn State and taking on new challenges. Your project will be an experience and keeping this weekly journal will help you reflect on these experiences and learn from them along the way.
As you write each journal entry, here are some tips for opening up this space and learning from the experience of your project. These areas must be addressed in each journal entry and will obviously vary in length and scope from week to week as your project evolves. As this is a journaling exercise, please feel free to be open and at ease in these communications. They will have a necessary conversational tone and structure and should definitely be written from the first person perspective. The nature of the project is also such that it is likely that some weeks the journaling will focus more on things that needed to be accomplished but weren't yet (and why that's the case).
Please use the three headings below to structure your weekly journal entries. I've included some suggestions for topics to write about under each heading, but you'll likely include others and not include each of these every time. Feel free to add an additional section at the end of any entry if you have something to discuss that didn't quite fit into one of those categories.
How long should a journal entry be? The length may vary from week to week, but a typical journal entry should be approximately 1 page double-spaced.
This Week's Accomplishments and My Project To-Do List
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Additional Issues to Consider
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Thinking Ahead to the Bigger Picture
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Grading Criteria | Total Possible Points (10) |
---|---|
Substance - The journal entry chronicles significant events of the week related to student’s project and progress. May also include issues, questions, concerns and other news, discussed in a way that relates to the project. Reflect on where the project stands and any necessary adjustments to research direction, contacts, or scheduling. The journal entry should be a narrative structured as follows:
|
9 |
Mechanics - Proofread for grammatical and typographical errors and includes appropriate citation where applicable. |
1 |
Note: Only to be completed as a graded assignment while enrolled in the course! This is *not* part of the application process to be considered for enrollment into EME 466. This document will live within your Final Capstone Portfolio, and may be something you share with your Community Partner or others you work with along the way this semester. Let's make it sharp!
The Project Proposal includes the following sections. Use subheads as shown to identify each section of your work.
Component | Description | Notes |
---|---|---|
Project Title | Your title should be clearly descriptive. Choose something like "An Analysis of the Feasibility and Environmental Impact of a Single Use Plastics Ban for South Williamsport, PA" instead of "Banning Single Use Plastics" | |
Community Partner(s) | Ultimately, the project is intended to assist a specific community partner or partners in achieving a goal to address a sustainability-related challenge. Introduce your Partner's organization and provide a brief summary of the work you're doing for them. | 100 words |
Historical and Contemporary Context of Issue | Provide a brief summary (this will be expanded upon heavily in your Literature Review) of both the historical evolution and contemporary context the issue you're addressing (generally and in the context of the Community Partner organization). | 300 words |
Connection of Issue to Your Coursework | Provide a brief summary of the specific classes and content covered that you expect to best prepare you for this project. (This could include general education, elective coursework, and non-PSU courses, not just ESP major courses!) | 150 words |
Connection of Issue to the UN Sustainable Development Goals |
Discuss the UN SDG that this project most closely aligns with and why. |
300 words |
Personal Connection | Why does this project matter to you? What benefits do you see emerging from its successful completion? | 300 words |
Proposed Deliverables to Community Partner | This may change based on the Partner's stated needs or preferences or instructor guidance, but you should have a clear plan of what you think you can offer them over the course of the semester, along with a tentative timetable. | bulleted list with annotations |
Tentative Timeline | Provide a weekly timeline of your progress toward completion of the project. (This will inevitably change over the course of the semester, but thinking about this now will provide useful scaffolding for managing your time and staying on track.) | bulleted list or table format |
Upload your Project Proposal to Canvas by the due date given in the Course Calendar.
While each student's project will inherently be quite different, there are some standard guidelines for us to follow to ensure that expectations are met for the scope and rigor of the work you will undertake this semester. The Project Agreement is an informal contract of sorts between the three parties (Instructor, Student, and Community Partner). Students must scope their project, provide proposed deliverables, and secure their Community Partner's signature before the instructor will enroll them in the course.
To obtain a copy of the project agreement, your scope of work and list of deliverables must first be approved. Contact the course instructor for details.
After narrowing your three ideas down to one for your Capstone Project, your next step will be to conduct a rather extensive literature review on the topic. This literature review should help you fully understand the first two points below and then discuss the third. Think of this assignment as your background research on the topic and your justification for why your contribution to it is novel and necessary.
Think of this step as 'doing your homework' on the issue. You need to be knowledgeable on this subject matter to affect real change. It's critically important that you don't go in presenting possible solutions that have been attempted and failed, or aren't feasible for any number of reasons. To ensure you develop credibility and respect with your Community Partner and other relevant stakeholders, you must be knowledgeable.
Here are some resources for learning more about how to conduct and structure your literature review.
When drafting the Project Agreement, we determined and then agreed upon the types of deliverables you would provide to your Community Partner as tangible artifacts of your work this semester. These deliverables will be submitted and reviewed by the Instructor at least twice this semester:
The timing of your project (and therefore the subsequent development of these deliverables) might unavoidably conflict with the course deadline structure. If so, talk to your instructor about alternative arrangements. Flexibility is fine, but only if it's approved in advance.
Remember, the overarching goal of these projects is to provide our Community Partners with information that advances their goals and is of the most use to them. To that end, we need to let them help guide what the deliverable structure will look like. Aside from a presentation, which is a required component of every project, each student's project will take on its own shape and structure. Here is a list of possible (perhaps even likely) types of deliverables you'll want to consider providing to your Community Partner (or, that your Community Partner may specifically ask of you). Thinking of something not on this list? Let's talk about it!
Soon you'll venture 'into the wild' to present your findings and recommendations to your Community Partner and perhaps some citizens or other stakeholders. This is exciting! And maybe a little scary.
One of the Program Competencies ESP seeks to emphasize is strong communication skills - both oral and written. We have many opportunities to demonstrate the written communication skills, but fewer for oral communication. You are required to present your capstone project to your Community Partner in some capacity as a deliverable for this course. Before that though, we will run through that presentation together as a Zoom rehearsal. This is an opportunity for us to think about the story of your project and how you tell that story to your Community Partner. We'll go through your slides and try to anticipate and prepare proactively for the questions they're likely to have.
The goal of this assignment is to succinctly package your semester's worth of work into a compact, professionally attractive artifact that outlives the confines of our class together. This can be something you share with your community partner, prospective employers during interviews, and more. You've worked really hard this semester and now it's time to tell the story of what you've learned and why it matters.
Remember, this is a relatively new assignment using technology we've not previously dug into in this class. I'm excited to see what you've come up with and am trying to give you both a lot of latitude for creativity while also providing some structure so you have an idea of where to go.
Throughout the course of this semester, you will be develop, describe, and share your own Sustainabilty Worldview. We'll build this idea unit by unit, largely following a model presented by Victor Nolet in Chapter 4 of Educating for Sustainability: Principles and Practices for Teachers (on Course Reserve, assigned reading for Week 4).
We'll use this sustainability worldview as a guiding framework which will not only help you complete your capstone project itself, but will also get you thinking reflectively about the type of work you'd like to pursue (and why) when you graduate.
Read the Nolet (2016) chapter, the Earth Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights, and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and then write about the following:
Grading Criteria | Total Possible Points (20) |
---|---|
Substance - Thoroughly answers the questions asked and provides appropriate support of those answers from required course readings (and external sources as relevant). Submission is thoughtful and detailed. |
15 |
Mechanics - Proofread for grammatical and typographical errors and includes appropriate citation where applicable. |
5 |
Focus on the knowledge you've been developing as you dig into your Capstone. As Nolet (2016) suggests, this knowledge should be both broad and basic as well as more specialized. Use your big ideas for solving sustainability issues to help cultivate that broader knowledge you'll need to build a solid foundation.
Grading Criteria | Total Possible Points (20) |
---|---|
Substance - Thoroughly answers the questions asked and provides appropriate support of those answers from required course readings (and external sources as relevant). Submission is thoughtful and detailed. |
20 |
Mechanics - Proofread for grammatical and typographical errors and includes appropriate citation where applicable. |
5 |
Nolet (2016) describes the goal of our entire Capstone experience rather nicely:
"Engage directly with real-world problems and challenges that enable [students] to apply theory in authentic contexts and to develop habits of thinking and dispositions to act on behalf of sustainability goals."
Grading Criteria | Total Possible Points (20) |
---|---|
Substance - Thoroughly answers the questions asked and provides appropriate support of those answers from required course readings (and external sources as relevant). Submission is thoughtful and detailed. |
15 |
Mechanics - Proofread for grammatical and typographical errors and includes appropriate citation where applicable. |
5 |
For our final Sustainability Worldview assignment, you need to pull everything together. This project has afforded you the opportunity to really test yourself - whether that's your assumptions, preconceptions, biases, or beliefs (Nolet, 2016).
Grading Criteria | Total Possible Points (40) |
---|---|
Substance - Thoroughly answers the questions asked and provides appropriate support of those answers from required course readings (and external sources as relevant). Submission is thoughtful and detailed. |
30 |
Mechanics - Proofread for grammatical and typographical errors and includes appropriate citation where applicable. |
10 |
Links
[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme466/capstone
[2] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme466/node/476
[3] https://sites.google.com/view/zoned-out/home?authuser=1
[4] https://new.express.adobe.com/webpage/Zf0AE38SkDVcM
[5] https://sites.google.com/view/shiomidai-community-report/home
[6] https://new.express.adobe.com/webpage/Dz9sUQu0xnCBR
[7] https://sites.google.com/psu.edu/junghyunro-eme466-final/home
[8] https://sites.google.com/view/2023-esp-capstone/home
[9] https://sites.google.com/view/recycling-overview/home
[10] https://mayamorrison.my.canva.site/
[11] https://sites.psu.edu/eme466capstoneproject/
[12] https://express.adobe.com/page/nwUdVaGKTl6Fc/
[13] https://express.adobe.com/page/ATb3F21BDZ9Wn/
[14] https://webpage-test.my.canva.site/capstone-project-fall-2022
[15] https://sites.google.com/view/seancollins-capstone/home?authuser=0
[16] https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-upgrade-prop/home?authuser=0
[17] https://sites.psu.edu/turfreplacement/
[18] https://sites.google.com/view/capstonedigitalstory/home?authuser=0
[19] https://sites.google.com/view/mlopezcapstoneportfolio/capstone
[20] https://sites.google.com/view/raymondfarmproject/home
[21] https://www.canva.com/design/DAFUlK6anak/ml3ZF9RQeWdZn7siM03qaw/view?utm_content=DAFUlK6anak&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton
[22] https://krobesongrubb-eme466capstone-psu.my.canva.site/
[23] https://sites.google.com/view/firemethods-psucapstone/home
[24] https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300
[25] https://gwc.psu.edu/files/2016/12/Literature-Review-Packet-Summer-2018-14ngdgc.pdf
[26] http://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/types-of-writing/literature-review/
[27] https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/literature-reviews/
[28] https://rise.articulate.com/share/G_ruMtxvViJr2T3o2jihdzNzRZhQ5sJC#/
[29] https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fspark.adobe.com%2Fpage%2FgQCbYtUq3brta%2F&data=04%7C01%7Cbjn151%40psu.edu%7Cfb731c31fda74f557aaf08d931874a2a%7C7cf48d453ddb4389a9c1c115526eb52e%7C0%7C0%7C637595279406834313%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=wcGitm9vkW3TuDaeecTGkaBBgn54KAk3HUsMogPB37U%3D&reserved=0
[30] https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fspark.adobe.com%2Fpage%2Fa22wbvT3w9QCw%2F&data=04%7C01%7Cbjn151%40psu.edu%7Cfb731c31fda74f557aaf08d931874a2a%7C7cf48d453ddb4389a9c1c115526eb52e%7C0%7C0%7C637595279406834313%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=ZgVbmVyVZsg5B%2BlM6if0lsObKD01kGZwKRJkH%2BIs5Qw%3D&reserved=0
[31] https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fspark.adobe.com%2Fpage%2F0Fe8uRLw0yRy2%2F&data=04%7C01%7Cbjn151%40psu.edu%7Cfb731c31fda74f557aaf08d931874a2a%7C7cf48d453ddb4389a9c1c115526eb52e%7C0%7C0%7C637595279406844275%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=F%2FTXKjlYYafZoJz3e1tC7PUJo2RQhpU147k8senP3LY%3D&reserved=0
[32] https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fspark.adobe.com%2Fpage%2F0dIg93jfEKZGJ%2F&data=04%7C01%7Cbjn151%40psu.edu%7Cfb731c31fda74f557aaf08d931874a2a%7C7cf48d453ddb4389a9c1c115526eb52e%7C0%7C0%7C637595279406854224%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=QD28yfWGmq1jNdcJvpNQPFsFA7Du1lDEedN4iefAez4%3D&reserved=0
[33] https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fspark.adobe.com%2Fpage%2FWPJ1iSVT0Mv5r%2F&data=04%7C01%7Cbjn151%40psu.edu%7Cfb731c31fda74f557aaf08d931874a2a%7C7cf48d453ddb4389a9c1c115526eb52e%7C0%7C0%7C637595279406854224%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=P0dU2ceZkc0mW%2Bj6VhUl3PQrHooRNXIo6Fqei%2BSyMzg%3D&reserved=0