The discourse-based interview (DBI) allows researchers to explore writers’ tacit knowledge. This article describes how we taught and learned to adapt a DBI-based interviewing process through the reflections of both the professor and two graduate students in a graduate-level course, Field Methods in Technical Communication. By participating in a large-scale research project focusing on how online PhD students viewed their education post-graduation, current graduate students learned about planning, conducting, and analyzing interviews. The authors reflect on how they not only learned qualitative methods, but how the experience made them feel like part of a research community (as well as an academic community). Taking a dialogic approach, the professor and both graduate students weave narratives, reflections, and the voices of their participants to share their experiences in uncovering tacit knowledge using a DBI-inspired process.

As Open Educational Resources (OER) increasingly receive attention from academics, educational foundations, and government agencies, exemplars will emerge that lower student textbook costs by moving away from commercial publishers through self-publishing or curating web-based resources. Joe Moxley’s Writing Commons serves as a scaled OER model in its careful consideration of the processes involved in producing accessible resources that meet user needs. Writing Commons hosts hundreds of peer-reviewed resources on writing instruction for use as a course text or supplement by students and faculty in a variety of disciplines. Moxley’s work on the site reflects the challenges and rewards of putting the entire publishing process of educational resources in the hands of faculty.

While composition studies researchers have examined the ways social media are impacting our lives inside and outside of the classroom, less attention has been given to the ways in which social media—specifically Social Network Sites (SNSs)—may enhance our own research methods and methodologies by helping to combat research participant attrition and build a community around a research project. In this article, we share some of the successes and shortfalls of using SNSs for research purposes, based on our own experiences using Facebook in the context of our writing program’s Longitudinal Study of Student Writers. Specifically, we present five considerations related to the integration of Facebook for research—Building a Community, Sharing Study Data, Constructing Identity, Understanding Analytics, and Conducting Usability Testing—and we discuss how these methods can be extended to other SNSs.

This article details how we integrate Jody Shipka’s approach to creativity and rhetorical awareness into a Professional Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology major at the University of South Florida. We situate Shipka’s pedagogy alongside postpedagogy, differentiating the latter from postcomposition. In short, we argue that postpedagogy echoes educational theory that insists upon the importance of disequilibrium. We then report how our students respond to our disequilibrating pedagogy, collecting survey responses via an IRB approved study. We hope these responses can help instructors interested in our postpedagogical notion of creativity anticipate and prepare for student discomfort and resistance—to recognize the fine distinction between productively confused and hopelessly lost. With that goal in mind, we conclude by addressing difficult questions of assessment.

This program profile describes a new approach towards integrating communication within Mechanical Engineering curricula. The author, who holds a joint appointment between Technical Communication and Mechanical Engineering at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, has been collaborating with Mechanical Engineering colleagues to establish a department-wide program with the goal of facilitating transfer of rhetorical instruction to engineering deliverables involving written and oral communication. To carry out this goal, the program incorporates a set of best practices informed by prior research in the areas of knowledge transfer, writing studies, and educational theory. These best practices and the theories informing them are described in this profile. In addition, the author offers preliminary lessons learned and presents implications for writing faculty interested in facilitating transfer through interdisciplinary initiatives.