ABSTRACT
Universities around the world are grappling with the discourse of ‘employability’, and the push from governments and industry to do more to increase students’ ability to contribute to economic growth and social development. One response has been to develop sets of generic skills and attributes that need to be incorporated into curricula, teaching activities and assessments. Yet, many lecturers struggle to make meaning of these generic notions of employability because of a lack of contextualization within the specialized bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing, being and doing that are the disciplines. The knowledge students come to university to acquire is powerful because it is specialized, as are the ways in which we know and use it, and make it part of our identities. Using the concepts of specialization codes from Legitimation Code Theory to theorize different expressions of what makes knowledge and knowers valued and valid, this chapter shows you how to theorize and express your own discipline’s basis for legitimate achievement and success. This insight can help you to reflect on the learning outcomes for your modules and their alignment with both the discipline’s underlying specialization code as well as with teaching and assessment activities and expectations. Being able to consciously realize this code in students’ studies is an important part of their success.
