In 2010, Fairfield University, a Jesuit Carnegie Masters Level 1 University located in the Northeast, established its first doctoral -level program: the Doctorate of Nursing Practice (DNP). In a developing program such as the DNP, some of the most pressing concerns of current rhetoric and writing in the disciplines align and interact with the education of clinical nurse leaders — questions of transfer, ethical practice, reflection, assignment desi gn, and community engagement. Clearly, nursing scholar/practitioners and writing scholar/practitioners have much to offer and to learn from each other. In this article, we trace the initial action -research undertaken by the School of Nursing, the Writing C enter, and the Center for Academic Excellence to document, reflect upon, and support the reading and writing experiences of DNP graduate students as they negotiate the new curriculum.

This article focuses on the methodology for an academic literacies research project in an Integrated Content and Language (ICL) collaboration in economics and the ways in which the findings from the research contributed to further development and expansion of the ICL endeavour. The research was conducted independently rather than collaboratively and the paper reflects on the reasons for this. Experience from the project suggests the research methodologies and epistemologies in the two collaborating fields of economics and academic literacies lack congruence and points to the complexities of conducting collaborative research when research paradigms are so different.

This paper discusses an ongoing research-based collaboration between an academic literacies researcher and a lecturer in the field of Social Work aimed at exploring the nature of everyday writing in social work. The paper outlines the key principles of the methodology adopted—a text-oriented ethnography—and discusses the extent to which this methodology is facilitating a collaborative partnership towards meeting three interrelated goals: the empirical goal of building rich descriptions of writing in everyday social work practice; the ideological-epistemological goal of challenging a deficit discourse on writing (and writers); and the interventionist goal of working with institutions to harness writing in productive ways to learning and professional practice. Central to this methodological approach is an attempt to build a three-way conversation between the fields of 'new' literacy studies, in particular academic literacies; the discipline of social work education; and social work agencies/practitioners. We outline the methodology and foreground some key congruencies across these fields which are helping to facilitate successful collaboration.

In this paper I address the issue of collaboration between content lecturers and language lecturers or educational researchers. Whilst such collaboration is a desirable goal for disciplinary learning in monolingual settings, I suggest it takes on extra significance when two or more languages are involved in teaching and learning a discipline. Drawing on work in the area of scientific literacy, I make a case for the concept of disciplinary literacy as a useful vehicle for such collaboration, with the Carnegie Foundation's notion of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) being used as the overarching motivation. I argue that input from peers in other disciplines can help content lecturers, make informed decisions about the particular mix of communicative practices that are needed to develop disciplinary literacy in their courses. Clearly, this mix will be different from discipline to discipline and indeed vary within a discipline depending on the local linguistic environment and the nature of the course under discussion. As an aid to collaboration, I present a simple heuristic tool for initiating inter-faculty discussion—the Disciplinary Literacy Discussion Matrix. Using the matrix, content lecturers can discuss the disciplinary literacy goals of their teaching with other professionals, making their own decisions about the particular mix of communicative practices desired and the most appropriate methods for promoting these.

"Critical Visual Literacy: Multimodal Communication Across the Curriculum" makes the case for expanding the pedagogical space and communication possibilities in undergraduate communication-intensive and linked (learning community) courses by allowing students to create multimodal texts that deal with civic and cultural and/or discipline-specific themes. We argue that, rather than diluting the opportunities for rhetorical education—now comprised of critical literacy, visual literacy, and critical technological literacy in today's increasingly fast-moving visual and electronic cultural environment—multimodal composing more meaningfully reflects the environment in which students receive and generate text today. Using a theory base that draws from the literatures of composition and CAC, visual literacy, new media theory and ecology, and the theory and pedagogy of critical technological literacy, we make a case for this expansion of communication opportunities in undergraduate communication-intensive classes.