Cross-institutional research of pedagogy in the technical and professional communication classroom is needed to understand social justice teaching across multiple contexts. This collective case study discusses social justice-focused assignments given by eight instructors at different institutions. Results show that institutions with more diverse populations may have advantages in making social justice power differentials salient. Further, teacher positionality impacts the degree of social justice content incorporated.

Although the field of illustration is a major topic in technical and professional communication (TPC), social justice regarding medical illustrations is yet to be investigated. Drawing from an analysis of TPC journals, program websites, textbooks, and syllabi, this study explores how TPC could advance a social justice view on medical illustration, especially in the textbooks that we use in teaching medical and science writing courses. Not only did we find that very few medical and science writing textbooks included illustrations, but a significant number of illustrations were white. We suggest intentionality in the choice of pedagogical materials, overt discussion of social justice in the curriculum, and critical borrowing of pedagogical materials.

ABSTRACTAs immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article reports on a qualitative, multimethod study that employed a talk-aloud UX protocol to gather data on VR users' experience at the University of Connecticut's OPIM Research Lab. To fully define and contrast this data, we juxtapose these individual narratives with rhetorical analysis of marketing discourse, as presented by VR platform HTC Vive, Google's VR application Tilt Brush, and the Research Lab's promotional material. Based on our findings, we assert that sociotechnical imaginaries as constructed by promotional material often reduce the complexities of immersion in user experience. Such marketing rhetoric creates "top-down" imaginaries that contrast with "bottom-up" imaginaries generated in user experience, reinforcing the complex and fluid definitions of immersion. The resulting study has practical implications for stakeholders across higher education, especially in the context of innovation labs, as well as for technical and professional communication educators and practitioners.KEYWORDS: Immersive technologyinnovation labsvirtual realityimmersionuser experienceemerging technologyfuture imaginariessociotechnical imaginaries Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrent LuciaBrent Lucia is an Assistant Professor In-Residence at the University of Connecticut School of Business. He has a PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His current research explores the rhetorics of technology and its relationship to the production of space. His recent scholarship can be found in Rhetoric Review, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, and Enculturation.Matthew A. VetterMatthew A. Vetter is an Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research, which asks questions related to technology, rhetoric, and writing, has been published widely in venues such as Social Media and Society, Rhetoric Review, Studies in Higher Education, and Computers and Composition. His co-authored book, Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality, was published by Routledge in 2021.David A. SolbergDavid A. Solberg is a teaching assistant at the Holy Family Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his MA degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His master's thesis was entitled The Use of Parallelism in Poetry Writing for the Acquisition of English Grammar (available from ProQuest).

ABSTRACTThis study examines technological research in higher education as a social justice issue. Focusing on technologies developed for war, surveillance, and policing at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), we compare institutional and activist discourses about these projects, uncovering significant differences in accommodation strategies and values-based arguments. We conclude that locally situated controversies such as this one might value not only for social justice research, but also in providing pedagogical and theoretical scaffolding toward real local change.KEYWORDS: Social justice / ethicsscience communication / environmental communicationdigital technologies / emerging technologiestextual analysis / linguistic analysis AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank Alex Helberg and Laxman Singanamala, who each provided helpful feedback on drafts of this work. They are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to editors Rebecca Walton and Tracy Bridgeford for their useful comments and suggestions. In addition, they wish to thank their former colleagues and comrades at Carnegie Mellon University, who inspired many aspects of this project: particularly the members of CMU Against ICE who authored the Dis-Orientation Guide. Finally, they give special thanks to Alaina Foust and Gunjan, Manish, Siddhant, and Daksh Bhardwaj for their advice and support.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsCalvin PollakCalvin Pollak is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in Technical Communication & Rhetoric at Utah State University, where he teaches courses on research methods and professional editing. His scholarly interests include institutional rhetoric, language accessibility, and social justice. He is also co-founder, co-producer, and co-host of re:verb, a podcast about language in action.Sanvi BhardwajSanvi Bhardwaj is a junior at Cornell University studying Health Care Policy and Inequality Studies. Her scholarly interests include social justice, health disparities among marginalized groups, and community-based healthcare interventions. She is also involved in local activism as a member of Cornell Progressives.

ABSTRACTWe asked 15 editors about their perceptions of five sentences using singular they in different contexts and about the style guides that inform their work. Editors appreciated the inclusivity of indefinite and definite singular they and recognized APA for its leading-edge stance. Our findings indicate the need for editors to develop a heuristic for determining when to deviate from style guide advice and to develop their own system for mitigating ambiguity in relation to they.KEYWORDS: Editingsocial justice / ethics Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. We explained to editors that, in each sentence, the capitalized pronoun referred to the capitalized noun phrase.2. When we refer to a "comprehensive style guide," we mean a manual that provides standards for writing, editing, and publishing texts. A comprehensive style guide may be written by a publisher or discourse community but adopted widely. For example, University of Chicago Press's Chicago Manual of Style is used by other publishers and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is used in disciplines outside of psychology.Companies may create their own style guides for internal use. Such guides may or may not be as detailed or complete as comprehensive style guides and may, in fact, be based on or direct users to a comprehensive style guide for any gaps in content. For example, ACES: The Society for Editing "Style Guide and Proofreading Checklist" (Filippini, Citation2021) is for ACES communications and based on the AP Stylebook.Some editors in this study referred to style sheets. A copyeditor creates and uses a style sheet to note a running list of grammar and usage that are specific to a manuscript and which may be different from house style or a comprehensive style guide (CMOS, Section 2.55).Despite attempting to define these terms, we recognize there are overlaps among the categories and across fields. For example, the Microsoft Writing Style Guide began as an in-house style guide and is now used by other software companies. Further, there exist other contexts of the terms "style guide" and "style sheet," such as brand style guides, programming style guides, and web design style sheets.3. Of the remaining two editors, one said that they would revise the sentence to avoid using singular they, and the other said that they would use the name Pat again instead of a pronoun.4. Only three editors (4%) said they would edit the sentence.5. The two remaining editors differed in their responses. One said that they would avoid using singular they by revising the sentence; the other said that they would change the pronoun to her.6. Ten editors said that they would edit this sentence.7. As of August 16, 2022, AP Stylebook Online advice under "accent marks" reads: "Use accent marks or other diacritical marks with names of people who request them or are widely known to use them, or if quoting directly in a language that uses them: An officer spotted him and asked a question: "Cómo estás?" How are you? Otherwise, do not use these marks in English-language stories. Note: Many AP customers' computer systems ingest via the ANPA standard and will not receive diacritical marks published by the AP."Additional informationNotes on contributorsJo MackiewiczJo Mackiewicz is a professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University. She studies the communication of pedagogical and workplace interactions. Her book, Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge was published by SUNY Press in 2022.Shaya KrautShaya Kraut is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at Iowa State University, where she teaches first-year writing. She has also worked as an ESL teacher, a writing center tutor, and a teacher/tutor for adult basic education. Her research interests include composition pedagogy and critical literacy.Allison DurazziAllison Durazzi is a communication professional with experience in industry settings including law, the arts, and freelance editing. She is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University where she researches and teaches technical editing and teaches business, technical, and speech communication courses.

This article examines the role of TPC professionalism keywords on early career scholars' disciplinary enculturation. The article reports on a collaboration between the article's authors that explored how the deployment of professionalism keywords in teaching and research created conditions for defining what it might mean to work as a TPC professional. The article offers insights into the challenges keywords pose to forwarding non-normative understandings of professionalism that enable broader inclusion and visibility for TPC stakeholders.

This article explores how doctoral writers in interdisciplinary life sciences programs navigate genre-ing activities across multiple disciplines. In interdisciplinary environments, approaches to doing and teaching writing may benefit from a reimagining, particularly as findings suggest that writing at interdisciplinary boundaries is unsuited to apprenticeship models of pedagogy. I argue that meta-genre is a productive way of engaging with the destabilization of existing knowledge in technical communication in interdisciplinary spaces and of fostering interdisciplinary writing knowledge.

The COVID-19 pandemic made nearly every teacher and student online teachers and students in some capacity. This article presents a case study of an experienced, contingent technical and professional communication (TPC) instructor showing how she sets up, presents, and, most importantly, labors in her course for the benefit of her students and herself. This article ends with recommendations for other online TPC teachers and program administrators to support online TPC courses.

ABSTRACTThis article argues that game design can be used to teach design thinking within a pedagogy of making. It analyzes qualitative survey responses from 12 writing teachers who asked students to design social justice games and argues that games not only give students practice in design thinking but that, as multimodal, embodied systems, games can enact social theories and, as such, be a way for students to empathize with and design for wicked social problems.KEYWORDS: Computer-based learningcritical theorypedagogical theoryrhetoric of technologysocial theoryusability studies Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRebekah Shultz ColbyRebekah Shultz Colby is a Teaching Professor at the University of Denver. She has co-edited The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games. She has published articles on using games to theorize and teach rhetoric and technical writing in Computers and Composition and Communication Design Quarterly.

In a Spring 2020 Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) course on risk communication, we watched the COVID-19 pandemic unfold and discussed how technical communicators can foreground vulnerable and marginalized populations who are often excluded from official communication channels. The article below offers perspectives on tactical communication and/or coalition building during a pandemic, coining the term tactical risk communication (TRC) and examining how TRC functions in the face of a global health crisis.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) curricula tend to prioritize hyperpragmatist learning outcomes, objectives, and activities. Drawing on a grounded theory analysis of curricular self-assessment data, including interviews with community partners, we argue that TPC in the U.S. is at constant risk of co-option by market logics. Through a speculative curricular framework that works toward building more just, liveable worlds, this essay reimagines TPC curricula as an opportunity to redress inequities caused by exploitative market logics.

This article argues that science fiction is a powerful tool for teaching ethics in the technical communication classroom. As a literary genre, science fiction is uniquely situated to critique the social and political consequences of technological progress and to guide future behaviors. Using a speculative fiction-themed technical communication seminar as a case study, this essay demonstrates how science fiction theory, narratives, and projects can encourage students to think more holistically about their future roles as scientists and communicators. Such an approach can reinvigorate traditional workplace genres, support responsible decision-making, and promote multiculturalism, environmentalism, and social justice.

Hewett and Bourelle (2019) have collected a series of essays aimed to help program administrators (PAs) develop and fine-tune online training and professional development programs in technical and ...

This article introduces “rhetorical body work” as a framework for understanding professional embodiment in health provider education and technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy. Using the case study of clinical nursing simulations and drawing on sociological theory, I provide a detailed analysis of three components of rhetorical body work as they manifest in three simulation scenarios: physical, emotional, and discursive. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for the embodied teaching of TPC.

Building upon critical and intercultural work in the field, Haas and Eble’s edited collection, Key Theoretical Frameworks: Teaching Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century offers a soci...

Through an auto-ethnographic reflection, this article describes an attempt to enact a Black Feminist pedagogy in an undergraduate business writing course. Discussing both benefits and challenges to this pedagogical approach, I advocate for an increase in decolonial methodologies and pedagogies in teaching technical and professional communication and argue for their potential to intervene for equity and justice in both the classroom and the workplace.

Although trade and politics have made the world a smaller place, politics and businesses remain local in most parts of the world (Starke-Meyerring, 2005). Therefore, industries and practices are be...

This article reports on a mixed methods rhetorical analysis of a data set of news reports on campus sexual assault. A macro-level qualitative analysis of narratives combined with micro-level quantitative content analysis of verb voice offers insight into how news media shapes perceptions of power, blame, and agency in reporting. These findings offer implications for how public actors discuss campus sexual assault and implications for the teaching and practice of research methods in technical communication.

Drawing from literature on communication as a physical, material experience, this article expands Cargile Cook’s “layered literacies” (2002) pedagogical framework to include a seventh literacy—embodied literacy. The article uses a classroom case study in which students coproduced a cookbook with low-income, elderly, disabled users, to demonstrate how students can become more responsible and effective technical communicators by recognizing users’ divergent embodied experiences. The article includes suggestions for concrete classroom practices that encourage such embodied literacy.

This article outlines an approach to teaching a Writing for the Health Professions course and situates this approach within the aims of and tensions between the medical humanities, the rhetoric of health and medicine, and disability studies. This analysis provides a pragmatic walkthrough of how assignments in such courses can be linked to programmatic outcomes (with SOAP [Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan] note and patient education assignments as extended examples) as well as an interdisciplinary framework for future empirical studies.

The rhetoric of health and medicine has only begun to intervene in health pedagogy. In contrast, the medical humanities has spearheaded curriculum to address dehumanizing trends in medicine. This article argues that rhetorical scholars can align with medical humanities’ initiatives and uniquely contribute to health curriculum. Drawing on the author’s research on clinical simulation, the article discusses rhetorical methodologies, genre theory, and critical lenses as areas for pedagogical collaboration between rhetoricians and health practitioners.

Understanding technological literacy for technical communicators is crucial for effective pedagogy in technical and professional communication. Challenges of teaching technical communication students the functions and concepts of workplace software include the number of rapidly changing applications, a desire to focus on education over training, limited faculty expertise in software, limited resources for teaching software, and a desire to focus on technical communication principles. To address these challenges, the authors explore how to use a four-level framework of technological literacy along with existing resources to design a course to help students use, understand, and evaluate technical communication technology.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) programs rely on contingent faculty to achieve their curricular mission. However, contingent faculty lack professional development opportunities. In this article, the author reports survey results (N = 91) and three cases studies that provide information on contingent faculty and their preparation for online teaching and then provides a three-step approach for TPC program administrators and faculty to follow so that programs can create sustainable professional development opportunities for contingent faculty to teach online.

This article explores how to train educators to teach online internship courses. The article introduces an online internship course focused on workplace communication available to students across the university. Approaches to training educators to teach this course include requiring educators to immerse themselves in experiential learning situations, leveraging innovative uses of contemporary technologies for communication, and reflecting on online teaching processes.

This article reports on an effort by the authors to use usability testing as a component of online teacher training for their multimajor technical communication course. The article further explains the ways in which program administrators at other institutions can create their own usability testing protocols for formative online teacher training in course design and in principles of user-centered design.

A common challenge facing those who prepare graduate students to teach writing online is the need to help those students connect online writing instruction (OWI) theory with their classroom practic...

Tenure-line faculty—teaching onsite or online—are typically perceived as resident scholars and instructors who live local to their institutions. A geographically diversified tenure-line faculty, however, could also serve the education of students by bringing a wider array of influences and opportunities to the online classroom. Programs in technical communication must examine how to incorporate extralocated faculty and how to prepare willing and eligible faculty for extralocated teaching, research, and service.

AbstractPeople use software in service of complex tasks that are distributed over sprawling and idiosyncratically constructed technological and social networks. The aims and means of carrying out those tasks are not only complex but uncertain, which creates problems for providing help if the tasks, starting points, and endpoints cannot be assumed. Uncertain problems are characteristic of networks, and software forums stand out as effective public spaces in which help can be pursued in a network fashion that differs from traditional help documentation. This article describes the results of a quantitative descriptive study of such practices in four software forums.Keywords: documentationforumsinstruction setsnetworks NotesThis study received an exemption approval from North Carolina State University IRB on November 24, 2010. IRB approval #1774. A condition of approval is that all quoted material is kept anonymous to the extent possible.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJason SwartsJason Swarts is a professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching centers on mobile communication, coordinative work practices, and emerging genres of technical communication.

Teaching intercultural rhetoric and professional communication seminars has been one of my most enjoyable experiences as a college professor. It comes with a cost though. Finding relevant and updat...

Over the past two decades, scientific editors have attempted to correct “mistaken” assumptions about scientific images and to curb unethical image-manipulation practices. Reactions to the advent and abuse of image-adjustment software (such as Adobe Photoshop) reveal the complex relations among visual representations, scientific credibility, and epistemic rhetoric. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's model of argumentation provides a flexible system for understanding these relations and for teaching students to use scientific images ethically and effectively.

Abstract This article examines tutorials from the Web site, Instructables.com, to highlight the rhetorical possibilities of including personal narratives in instructions. The narratives in these tutorials offer detailed accounts of their authors' experiences when constructing their projects, thereby functioning as accounts of the authors' craft knowledge. Pitched to amateur hobbyists, rather than the professional audiences of many forms of conventional technical communication, these tutorials offer new ways of teaching craft knowledge and techniques. Keywords: amateurcraftinstructionsmotivationnarrative Additional informationNotes on contributorsDerek Van Ittersum Derek Van Ittersum is an assistant professor of English at Kent State University, where he teaches in the Literacy, Rhetoric, and Social Practice graduate program. His research examines new writing technologies and innovative writing practices.

Abstract The authors argue that technical communication instructors are in a particularly apt position to teach social media as key to students’ lives as technical communicators and future professionals. Drawing on the concepts of reach and crowd sourcing as heuristics to rearticulate dominant cultural narratives of social media as deleterious to students’ careers, the authors offer a case study of an introductory professional and technical communication pedagogy that helped to disrupt uncritical deployments of social media. Keywords: crowd sourcingpedagogyreachsocial media ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors give many thanks to Dr. David J. Reamer and the students enrolled in his technical writing course at the University of Tampa for their feedback and comments on the student documentation published on Instructables. The authors also appreciate thoughtful and engaged reviewer comments that helped us to develop this article. Notes Students are not misguided in their concerns about social media use and its connection to employment, and perhaps even university admissions practices. As of May 13, Citation2013, the National Conferences of State Legislatures reports that social-media privacy protection laws are being introduced or are pending in 36 states. These states are seeking to stop the practice of employers and universities from requesting logins and passwords of employees or students to their social media sites. According to the conference, four states already have such protections, including Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (para 1). These same laws are under debate as both industry and regulatory finances groups argue for the veracity of having access to social media outlets in order to monitor employee discussions of sensitive financial information (Eaglesham & Rothfeld, Citation2013, para 1). In the particular semester discussed, students all used Instructables to ensure they were working with the same interface and design features and to allow for more robust user-testing. We understand that some students in professional and technical writing courses might be eager to learn about and use social media for their professional development, but we see this position as equally capable of reinforcing the binary of good/bad that is worthy of complication. Neither position affords human agency because technology is the determinant factor in either a student's success or failure. Additional informationNotes on contributorsElise Verzosa Hurley Elise Verzosa Hurley is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Her research interests include technical and professional communication pedagogy, visual rhetoric, and multimodal composition. Her work has appeared in Kairos. Amy C. Kimme Hea Amy C. Kimme Hea is Writing Program Director and Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, and author of Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers.

The expanding use of social media such as Twitter has raised the stakes for teaching our students about individual and organizational ethoi. This article considers the role of organizations' Twitter feeds during emergency situations, particularly Hurricane Irene in 2011, to argue for a pedagogical model for helping students collaboratively code tweets to assess their rhetorical effects and to improve their own awareness and use of microblogging as a communication tool.

This study investigates politeness strategies within meetings of designers who met face-to-face and technical communicators who met via teleconference and, more specifically, politeness strategies of existing members toward group newcomers and vice versa. Based on the results of this study, I suggest that issues of power and social distance affect politeness strategies by both groups during their initial interactions and suggest that technical communication educators should better prepare students by teaching benefits, detriments, and realities of particular linguistic politeness choices.

This article considers how users employ extraorganizational technical communication to reshape technologies, both materially and symbolically, even after these technologies enter into common use. Specifically, I analyze how women bicyclists of the 1890s authored instructional materials to complicate gendered and classed assumptions about users implicit in manufacturer-produced texts. I argue that technical communicators, in their teaching and research, should consider the role that extraorganizational technical communication plays in generating vital and lasting cultural changes.

This article offers productive usability as a usability approach that focuses on the usefulness of civic Web sites. Although some sites meet traditional usability standards, civic sites might fail to support technical literacy, productive inquiry, collaboration, and a multidimensional perspective—all essential ingredients for citizen-initiated change online. In this article, we map productive usability onto broader philosophies of usability and offer a framework for rethinking usability in civic settings and for teaching productive usability.

The field of technical communication has made notable progress in researching and teaching intercultural issues. Not enough discussion, however, is available on assessing students’ intercultural competence. This article attempts to start this discussion and invite further research. It suggests a working definition to conceptualize intercultural competence and draws upon diverse disciplines to review different assessment methods, including their strengths, drawbacks, and potential applications in technical communication classes.

This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy's parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010 Kuhn , V. , Johnson , D. J. , & Lopez , D. ( 2010 ). Speaking with students: Profiles in digital pedagogy . Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy , 14 ( 2 ). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/14.2/interviews/kuhn/index.html [Google Scholar]) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.

Text-based interviews that compared the teacher's intention for a given comment on an engineering student's paper with the student's understanding of the comment were used to examine the extent to which students understand the comments they receive and to determine the characteristics of comments that are well understood and those that are not. The teachers' comments analyzed in this study were fully understood only about half the time. Inclusion of a reason or explicit instructions helped students understand the comments.

This special issue features articles that address legal issues as they relate to technical communication research, pedagogy, and practice. The articles will assist instructors who wish to engage classes in activities that allow students to understand, analyze, and respond to legal dilemmas related to workplace activities. The articles will also highlight contemporary subjects for research inquiry in technical communication, including the relationship between technical communication and civic engagement, which often depends on the study of legal processes. It is our hope that this special issue will generate interest in the intersection of technical communication and the law and that it will provide readers of TCQ with a valuable and unique foundation for teaching and research in this area.

Abstract This article explores the challenges and opportunities that the rising numbers of students with disabilities and the changing definition of disability pose to technical communication teachers and researchers. Specifically, in a teacher-researcher study that combines methods from disability studies, I report on the effectiveness of multimodal and universal design approaches to more comprehensively address disability and accessibility in the classroom and to revise traditional impairment-specific approaches to disability in technical communication. Notes 1. CitationCharlton (1998), in Nothing About Us Without Us, recalls hearing this slogan in South Africa in 1993 from two separate leaders of Disabled People of South Africa, Michael Masutha and William Rowland, and he writes, “The slogan's power derives from its location of the source of many types of (disability) oppression and its simultaneous opposition to such oppression in the context of control and voice” (p. 3). 2. Other principles include guidelines for equitable use, varieties of perceptible information, and appropriate size and space for approach and use. See http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprincipleshtmlformat.html for quoted guidelines. 3. CAPTCHA is an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. It is a challenge-response test that usually visually distorts and warps letters, assuming that a human can decode the letters but a computer cannot. 4. For details on the similarities and differences between usability and accessibility, see CitationThatcher et al. (2006), pp. 26–28. Chapter 1, “Understanding Web Accessibility,” is useful for students to read and discuss during this segment of the class. 5. Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by CitationThatcher et al. (2006) is also a useful resource for students to consult, particularly Chapter 1.

Programs in technical and professional communication are continually challenged by issues of location and dislocation. Historic changes and interdisciplinary initiatives are in progress at colleges and universities worldwide. The five articles of this special issue will offer a portrait of the multiple ways that technical communication programs are positioning themselves to do innovative teaching and research.

“The study of activity ceases to be the psychology of an individual, but instead focuses on the interaction between an individual, systems of artifacts, and other individuals in historically developing institutional settings” (Miettinen, 1997). As teaching technical writing online becomes more widespread, teachers and scholars are identifying ways to increase teaching/learning efficacy. One way of accomplishing this goal is by continually reflecting on different types of student ethos being constructed in an online course. The changes that occur in the ethos development process can be contextualized through activity theory, which emphasizes the dynamic, evolving nature of social environments. Activity theory's focus on cultural history and tools makes it ideal for exploring active communication among multiple participants in an online technical communication environment. The triangle of human activity adapted and developed by Engeström (1987) Engeström, Y. 1987. Learning by expanding: An activity theoretical approach to developmental research., Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit Oy. [Google Scholar] provides a framework for exploring ethos as an object within an online course's activity system.

This article attempts to summarize the history of ATTW. It focuses on issues that led to the need for an organization devoted to technical writing, and the individuals who were leaders in ATTW, as well as in NCTE and CCCC, whose efforts provided the foundation for the presence of technical writing as a legitimate teaching and research discipline. We draw on existing historical pieces and the contributions provided by many of the first ATTW members to capture the history of ATTW. We describe the major changes in ATTW from 1973–2007 and conclude with our reflections, as well as important questions we believe to be critical to the future of ATTW

This article discusses the rise of conservation writing as a new field of technical communication, and it offers pedagogical strategies for teaching conservation writing and building curricula. Conservation writing is an umbrella term for a range of writing about ecology, biology, the outdoors, and environmental policies and ethics. It places the natural world at the center of readers' attention, often viewing sustainability as a core value. A course or curriculum in this kind of writing would likely need to help students master a variety of genres, while providing a working knowledge in environmental law, ethics, and politics.