The field of adult literacy is complex. This complexity poses many challenges for literacy programs. This paper addresses the challenges of collaboration, diversity, attendance, assessment and professional development as they apply to adult literacy programs. Recommendations for increasing the success of literacy programs are provided.

The books under review here envision models of professional development not as episodes of developing skills or training faculty to conform to changing laws, rules, and pet projects of administrators, but rather as collaborative processes of education and reflection that encourage faculty to rethink their practices. They draw on research in composition theory and pedagogy, suggesting that more effective learning takes place when teachers trust learners to consider their own need for knowledge, invite learners to devise variations and applications of received knowledge, and resist keeping things simple to be sure they are correct. Applying different focuses, these books consider how to put teacher-learners at the center of the process of their own professional development. Jeffrey Jablonski argues that the expertise developed in composition studies needs to be recognized and respected in initiatives to implement Cross-Curricular Literacy programs. The writers of The Everyday Writing Center consider how, in the midst of increased professionalization, to maintain the serendipitous—even carnivalesque, at times—learning and teaching that the intimate and nonhierarchical space of a writing center can foster. And the collective wisdom in The Writing Center Director's Resource Book surveys the current state of writing center theory and practice, providing a reflective guide for developing the expertise of writing center administrators, who are (or could be) leaders in campus faculty development efforts.

The author considers faculty development and its potential relationship to the ethos of collaborative practice modeled both by critical (Freirean) pedagogy and by interdisciplinary research. As a primary concern for any academic administrator, faculty development is not only a teaching moment but also an opportunity for reciprocal exchange, learning, and knowledge production, allowing participants to challenge the received wisdom of their fields and to come to a more rhetorical understanding of their identities. The collaborative construction of new knowledge and an emerging understanding of identities are examined in the context of two professional development and administrative contexts: the assessment by faculty of the writing of entering, first-year students and a collegewide, first-year experience (learning-community) initiative.

It has become increasingly clear that U.S. faculty cannot afford to remain insular about global issues in teaching and the forces that are shaping them. At the same time, our desire to address or resist those issues, to join in or to find alternatives, needs to be contextualized. The three edited collections reviewed here address globalization of higher education in Australia, writing instruction in higher education in the United Kingdom, and interdisciplinary collaboration in U.S. higher education. The three bring different perspectives to current U.S. discussions of internationalization and interdisciplinary work in higher education and allow us to better understand issues in other cultures and disciplines while critically examining our own through new lenses.

Pedagogical and scholarly representations of collaborative writing and knowledge construction in technical communication have traditionally recognized consensus as the logical outcome of collaborative work, even as scholars and teachers have acknowledged the value of conflict and “dissensus” in the process of collaborative knowledge building. However, the conflict-laden work product of a Denver task force charged with recommending changes to the city police department's use-of-force policy and proposing a process for police oversight retains the collaborative group's dissensus and in doing so, illustrates an alternative method of collaborative reporting that challenges convention. Such an approach demonstrates a dissensus-based method of reporting that has the potential to open new rhetorical spaces for collaborative stakeholders by gainfully extending collaborative conversations and creating new opportunities for ethos development, thus offering scholars, teachers, and practitioners a way of reimagining the trajectory and outcome of collaborative work.

"Educating Future Public Workers: Can We Make Inquiry Professional?" begins with an observation: students in CIT 300: Communicating in the Helping Professions are preparing for the very human service careers that caused community residents in Ellen Cushman's The Struggle and the Tools such grief. Exploring options from community literacy research for addressing this contradiction, the paper commends a problem-based pedagogy focused on collaborative inquiry and knowledge building designed to represent the agency and expertise of others. The paper dramatizes this model of rhetorical education through the work of a pre-professional named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women and children seeking sanctuary from domestic abuse. The paper follows Hillary conducting a series of "rival readings" on the shelter's no dating policy with theorists, professionals, and, most importantly, those most directly affected by the rule: the shelter's residents. "Educating Future Public Workers" argues that community-based rhetorical research can offer faculty and students outside of English both a theoretical frame and a practical guide to community partnerships.

This article explores the collaborative experience of a university professor and the coordinator of a local hate crimes project as we developed and taught a service-learning course on public dialogue. We begin by describing dialogic communication and suggest that it can be integrated into other forms of public discourse, such as deliberation and advocacy, in order to enrich them. We then describe our course and analyze data we gathered during the semester to assess how the course affected our students. Our analysis suggests that although we missed some opportunities to optimize our students' learning, the course successfully prepared them to plan and facilitate public dialogues on diversity issues, and motivated most of them to become more engaged with their community as democratic citizens and promoters of social justice. We end with lessons learned and ideas for future research and practice.

As is true for engineering communication programs nationwide, at MIT curricular and pedagogical reforms have been driven by changes in the kinds of problems that engineers solve and the associated skill sets that engineers must now have in communication and teamwork. This article presents three case studies from communication-intensive classes at MIT that intend to help students develop the advanced communication skills required of professional engineers today. Highlighting classes in biological engineering, aeronautics/astronautics engineering, and biomedical engineering, we explore the following questions: What does it mean for educational practice if professional communication competencies and tasks are the goals? How can students and technical faculty best create the conditions for students to learn to be skilled team members? How can engineering students move from mere display of data to making skilled visual arguments based on those data? The importance of helping students meet the target competencies of professional practice, of teaching effective teamwork and collaboration, and of teaching students to understand and argue with visual data are recognized as widespread needs, and these case studies attest to the possibilities and challenges in meeting those needs.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> This paper describes a new cross-curricular design for an engineering communication course based on four themes: (1) ethics, accountability, and professionalism; (2) intellectual property; (3) design, creativity, and invention; and (4) globalization. It is believed that the thematic structure creates both dynamic and contemporary contexts for writing and research along with enough freedom to pursue individual student interests. The result is a higher degree of intrinsic motivation for the assignments. The course is a collaborative effort between an English department and a school of engineering designed to both improve curriculum and provide more assessment data for engineering accreditation. Among the criteria from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) is the “ability to communicate effectively.” Along with satisfying this criterion, the course discussed in this paper details how to capture data in support of an additional four of ABET's criteria known as “a–k.” After highlighting these ABET criteria and giving an overview of the structure of the course, the paper details each theme, including their respective readings and assignments. This new course was taught for the first time in the 2006–2007 academic year, and the paper closes by weighing the outcomes and implications of adopting a similar format. The current version of the syllabus and reading list for this course are included in this paper. </para>

Through interviews and courtroom observations in a case study done in collaboration with a community partner in two judicial districts in Minnesota, the authors extend the scholarly conversation about critical, activist research in business and technical communication and make pedagogical suggestions by studying two groups who contribute to the discourse about victim rights: judges who accept plea negotiations and make sentencing decisions and advocates who help victims contribute, through victim impact statements, their reactions as crime victims and their requests for certain punishments and conditions for the crime perpetrators. The authors identify the technologies of power used by each group to assert their disciplinary authority and trace how these assertions play out in the courtroom. They conclude that by capitalizing on the normative structures of impact statements, advocates may actually give victims more power. Such activist research might benefit research participants and enhance research methods.

Availability of online Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations is contributing to a shift in medical writers' organizational role from a peripheral to a central role where their responsibilities for the persuasiveness of documents and compliance with evolving regulations have increased dramatically. Therefore, curricula for medical writers should include instruction in persuasion, collaboration, strategic and project management, the drug development process, and the location and interpretation of FDA regulations.

Based on a case study of a global training team, this article focuses on an important ability for professional communicators: collaborating with translators. The study confirms the value of approaching translation as a collaborative recreation rather than mere information transfer and suggests the need to integrate translation with localization and to develop team rapport. Relevant abilities include understanding cultural and professional context, using bicultural vision, and building team relationships. Pursuit of these abilities should draw from translation studies and intercultural communication literature and be informed by diverse rhetorical traditions. Global educational and research partnerships are an ideal way to pursue these goals. Such collaboration can improve research methodology and challenge culturally based assumptions about translation-related communication roles and competencies.

Community is a tricky word: although it often connotes an inclusive and harmonious collaborative space, too often it signifies a site of struggle and negotiation, an attempt to find a common framework for conflicting and seemingly contradictory impulses. One of the marks of those active in "community literacy studies," "service-learning" and '"engaged scholarship" is the desire to place themselves in the struggle to build a common framework for collaboration and, within that architecture, to move forward towards building a shared notion of educational, social, and/or political rights.

In spring 2007, I began working with a fellow graduate student in Purdue’s Rhet/Comp program on a community engagement project that would become the basis for both our dissertations. Allen and I agreed to work together because of our mutual interests in community engagement and public rhetorics, as well as our complementary interests in professional writing and usability (what we would call “his things”), and writing program administration and adult basic education (“my things”).

This essay examines the origins and initial objectives of the Comedy Club—an after school comic theatre program that develops an original sketch comedy show annually at Colonel E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Wheaton, Maryland—along with the value of university-middle school collaborations. Throughout, I document administrative issues, some associated with university collaborations and others endemic to the public school system and the impact this collaboration had on my own research and teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park. Employing a feminist ethnography as my method, this discussion draws from interviews, participant-observation methods, and first-hand involvement to examine how this program is efficacious for students, the school district, the university and community at large.

The CITYbuild Consortium of Schools is a consortium of design and planning schools based at the Tulane City Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. This group came together after Katrina through common interests in grass roots neighborhood recovery support. The article looks at the context in which such a consortium came to be, some of the results of the first two years of collaborative practice and some critical reflection on the goals and realities of this model of collaborative community design in a post disaster context.

This essay explores the intersection between writing studies and civic engagement through the action projects developed in E465: Prison Literature and Writing. Such literacy activism creates immediate opportunities for advanced undergraduates to more fully understand the work of literacy in contested spaces like jail and extends a call to action for writing teachers to acknowledge the possibility of community-based writing collaborations.

After the controversial police shooting of a developmentally-disabled African-American teenager in July 2003, the new mayor of Denver, CO, appointed a politically diverse task force to revise the police department's use-of-force policy and propose a new model for police oversight. This teaching case is based on the task force's deliberations and collaborative efforts to build policy consensus in a sometimes rancorous, high-stakes environment. In it, I reconstruct the story of the shooting that gave rise to the task force, trace the arc of the task force's 104-day existence, and analyze the letter and final report submitted by the task force's co-chairs to (1) demonstrate the highly-pressurized nature of policy language invention and the crucial impact of word choice in such policy, and (2) illustrate the difficulty the task force encountered in attempting to secure consensus and the manner in which the final work product acknowledges, rather than obscures, this struggle. Finally, the case includes recommended readings and a guide for individual and group activities for implementation in either an undergraduate- or graduate-level technical communication course.

New forms of computer-mediated, online learning can benefit from new forms of assessment that fit the medium and the pedagogical style of the online environment. This paper investigates students' learning styles and learning strategies in taking online collaborative exams. Applying constructivist and collaborative learning theories, the collaborative examination features students' active participation in various phases of the exam process through small group activities online. Students' learning strategies, including deep learning and collaborative learning, are investigated using a 1 3 field quasi-experiment to compare the team-based collaborative online exam with the traditional in-class exam and with the participatory exam, where students participate in the online exam processes individually. Data analysis using results from 485 students indicates that collaborative examinations significantly reduced surface learning in exam study, enhanced interactions and the sense of an online learning community, and increased perceived learning. The results also suggest learning predispositions were significantly correlated with exam study strategies, and provide indications of their effects on learning strategies.

This article explains the rules for playing the “Interpretation Game” in a literature-based first-year writing class, describes the resulting class discussion, and reflects on the ways that rules and games can promote rich collaboration.

This article shows how digital archives can enrich the humanities classroom; I trace the collaborative creation of “I Remain”: A Digital Archive of Letters, Manuscripts, and Ephemera at Lehigh University, demonstrating how the archive engaged students' different learning styles, causing them to interrogate the way history is represented and processed.

This essay explores the potential for wikis in English classrooms and writing pedagogy through discussion of a class project involving Wikitravel. Topics include the influence that wikis have on collaboration, an example of networked writing, and the role of writing with technology in knowledge creation.

This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories, programs, departments, and universities, which introduced students to the genre system of National Institutes of Health grant proposals and helped them in moving from peripheral participation to more central participation. While cognitive apprenticeship employs devices such as modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and collaboration to enhance learning in formal settings, social apprenticeship requires socialization, interaction, and collaboration with experts, colleagues, and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences. The study suggests that writing instructors should acknowledge and incorporate resources in other activity systems in which students participate, i.e., their laboratories and home departments, and teach genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students' enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities.

Hillary democ miss is Tutors is no c At the ing, bu directo much o dents -both in the classroom and without. We attended class at the CUNY Graduate Center on 42 nd Street, and many of us were living in an NYU dorm across from Washington Square Park

Substantive expertise of a subject is often equated with the ability to teach it.

A Short Course in Writing provides a good occasion to ask what makes a textbook in rhetoric and composition a classic. The fact that Bruffee's book is among the first to appear in the Longman Classics in Rhetoric and Composition series cannot be attributed, after all, to its commercial success. In his review of the original manuscript of A Short Course , Richard Beai, the most prominent English editor at the time, told Paul O'Connell, who published the first edition at Winthrop in 1972, that Bruffee could either alter the book and sell a lot of copies or publish the book as is and make history.1 What Beai predicted has indeed come to pass. As A Short Course appeared in subsequent editions (the 2nd from Winthrop in 1980; the 3rd from Little Brown in 1985; and the 4th from HarperCollins in 1993), it has influenced, far out of proportion to its sales, the actual practices of writing instruction and, more broadly, of educational reform in U.S. college composition.

Structured writing is a method for developing categories of information that can be single sourced, or reused, for various contexts. Creating distinct structures—such as concepts, procedures, and examples—prepares content for the application of XML markup elements that describe each category. A content management system identifies these structural elements, which facilitates reuse and repurposing. Students seeking positions in organizations that single source information must become proficient in structured writing and in writing collaboratively.

Twenty years after the publication of Patricia Sullivan's ldquoBeyond a narrow conception of usability testingrdquo in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, three scholars - all Sullivan's students - reflect on the history and development of usability testing and research. Following Sullivan, this article argues that usability bridges the divide between science and rhetoric and asserts that usability is most effective when it respects the knowledge-making practices of a variety of disciplines. By interrogating trends in usability method, the authors argue for a definition of usability that relies on multiple epistemologies to triangulate knowledge-making. The article opens with a brief history of the development of usability methods and argues that usability requires a balance between empirical observation and rhetoric. Usability interprets human action and is enriched by articulating context and accepting contingency. Usability relies on effective collaboration and cooperation among stakeholders in the design of technology. Ultimately, professional and technical communication scholars are best prepared to coin new knowledge with a long and wide view of usability.

Research Article| October 01 2007 The CAPITAL Centre: Teaching Shakespeare (and More) through a Collaboration between a University and an Arts Organization Jonathan Bate; Jonathan Bate Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Susan Brock Susan Brock Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2007) 7 (3): 341–358. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan Bate, Susan Brock; The CAPITAL Centre: Teaching Shakespeare (and More) through a Collaboration between a University and an Arts Organization. Pedagogy 1 October 2007; 7 (3): 341–358. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-004 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Expectations for a book in its 6th edition are relatively high: it must have more than casual merit to garner continued editions, and this book meets most expectations quite nicely. Structure, content, and presentation combine for an effective text for those practicing technical communication (or pursuing the educational prerequisites for such a career plan). Some of the topics covered include: resources for technical communication; visual communication; workplace literacy; collaboration and ethics; document design; the need for good definitions; description; instructions, procedures, and process explanations; the different types of reports; letters, memos, and email; and career communication (a.k.a. resume writing) and oral presentations. The text is well written and should prove useful to the practicing technical writer, regardless of the particular industry in which he or she is employed. It will be referred to on a regular basis.

This book bridges two fields - the management of teams and the use of collaborative software tools to support work in the virtual team environment. It is divided into two parts: the first addressing the managing of virtual teams and the second an evaluation of software tools to support the virtual teams. Chapter 1 discusses team dynamics in a virtual team. Chapter 2 concerns the establishment of a virtual team. Chapter 3 discusses the choice of particular collaborative tools. Chapter 4 addresses decisions about communicating with the team, while Chapter 5 addresses the issues of coordinating the team. In Chapter 6, the authors advocate the use of a wiki for authorship of documents, while in Chapter 7, they discuss the conduct of project reviews. Chapter 8 concerns the processes required to manage risk and change, while Chapter 9 wraps up Part 1 by discussing the evaluation of projects. Part 2 describes the general classes of tools available, the variety of features available in tools, and the interaction of those features with different types of of situations presented in virtual team work. The chapters of this part deal with the general approach used by the authors, the issues of installation, customization and security, collaborative software suites, meeting and communication tools, information broadcasting tools, information sharing tools, information gathering tools, "push" technologies, and wikis. The guidance provided in this book will be of considerable assistance to anyone making decisions about appropriate tools to support collaborative virtual teamwork.

Technology mediated learning (TML) is gaining interest from both academic researchers and communication professionals as training with Internet technology and Web-based distance learning become increasingly popular. This paper investigates social norms, individual-level cultural orientation (collectivism), and affective commitment (internalization and identification) and studies their influences on the system users' (or learners') attitude toward sharing knowledge by email in the TML environment. An empirical test of the proposed model was conducted in the pilot test (n=155) and the main test (n=411). Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for TML, knowledge management, and e-collaboration are discussed in the paper.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Heath's previous work in the field includes a translation of Hermogenes's On Issues with detailed introduction and commentary (1995) and numerous essays in journals and edited collections (listed among the works cited at the end of this review). See Kennedy (2003 ——— . “Some Recent Controversies in the Study of Later Greek Rhetoric.” American Journal of Philology 124.2 ( 2003 ): 295 – 301 . [Google Scholar]) for an overview of some of the recent work in the study of Greek rhetoric under the Roman Empire. Much important work on Hellenistic rhetoric and rhetorical criticism of the Bible is being done in the “Pepperdine” series of books and conferences, including, most recently, Olbricht et al. (2002 et al. . Eds. Rhetorical Argumentation in Biblical Texts: Papers from the Lund 2000 Conference . Harrisonburg , PA : Trinity Press International , 2002 . [Google Scholar]; 2005 ———, et al. Eds. Rhetoric, Ethic, and Moral Persuasion in Biblical Discourse . Harrisonburg , PA : T&T Clark International , 2005 . [Google Scholar]). See Dilts (1983 Dilts , Mervin . Scholia Demosthenica . Leipzig : Teubner , 1983–1986 . [Google Scholar]) and Gibson (2002 Gibson , Craig A. Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and his Ancient Commentators . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2002 . [Google Scholar]) for recent work on Demosthenes scholia. For consensus, see, inter alia, Kennedy (1983 ——— . Greek Rhetoric Under the Christian Emperors . Princeton , NJ : Princeton University Press , 1983 . [Google Scholar]), Pernot (1993a Pernot , Laurent . La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain. Tome 1: Histoire et technique . Paris : Institut d'Etudes Augustiniennes , 1993a . [Google Scholar] and 1993b ——— . La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le Monde gréco-romain. Tome 2: Les Valeurs . Paris : Institut d'Etudes Augustiniennes , 1993b . [Google Scholar]), Russell (1983 Russell , D. A. Greek Declamation . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 1983 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and Walker (2000 Walker , Jeffrey . Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2000 . [Google Scholar]). Parks (1945 Parks , E. P. The Roman Rhetorical Schools as Preparation for the Courts under the Early Empire . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 1945 . [Google Scholar]) takes a position similar to that of MRC. Other scholars who emphasize the collaborative and evolving nature of ancient pedagogical works include Dilts and Kennedy (1997 Dilts , Mervin S. and George Kennedy . Eds. Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire . Leiden : Brill , 1997 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Gibson (2002 Gibson , Craig A. Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and his Ancient Commentators . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2002 . [Google Scholar]), and Poster (1998 Poster , Carol . “(Re)positioning Pedagogy: A Feminist Historiography of Aristotle's Rhetorica.” Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle . Ed. Cynthia Freeland . University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press , 1998 . 327 – 350 . [Google Scholar]; 2007 ——— . “A Conversation Halved: Epistolary Theory in Graeco-Roman Antiquity.” Letter-Writing Manuals from Antiquity to the Present . Eds. Carol Poster and Linda Mitchell . Columbia : University of South Carolina Press , 2007 . [Google Scholar]).

This article reexamines the historical emergence of peer response as a pedagogical technique in composition classrooms. It first reviews Anne Ruggles Gere's influential account of that history, focusing on how that account was shaped by process pedagogy, collaborative learning theory, and ideologies of classroom authority and student autonomy. Then the author explores an alternative genealogy in which peer response emerges out of classroom practices of recitation and correction. The purpose of this rereading of peer response's history is to reconfigure teacher and student agency and also to suggest how historical analysis can enable or constrain present-day practices.

As distributed work begins to shift the nature of practice for technical communication professionals in the workplace, faculty need new frameworks to help prepare students for roles that involve negotiating, supporting, and facilitating virtual global collaboration. This paper identifies key areas of metaknowledge appropriate to these new frameworks by synthesizing a review of current scholarship on such collaborations and a case study of students participating in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural team project.

This essay examines the impact of difference in the service-learning classroom and offers an overview of three approaches to creating community while engaging students in dialogues on difference. The authors reflect on the local pedagogies they create in response to the anger, tensions, and challenges that arise In the classroom and at the service learning site. By composing this essay together, the authors hope to embody the collaborative nature of service learning courses.

Research Article| April 01 2007 Learning Unbound: Using Moos for Classroom Collaboration Jason B. Jones; Jason B. Jones Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scott Ellis Scott Ellis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2007) 7 (2): 258–264. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2006-034 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jason B. Jones, Scott Ellis; Learning Unbound: Using Moos for Classroom Collaboration. Pedagogy 1 April 2007; 7 (2): 258–264. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2006-034 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Globalization is radically transforming technical communication (TC) both in the workplace and in higher education. This article examines these changes and the ways in which TC programs position themselves amid globalization, in particular the ways in which they use emerging global partnerships to prepare students for global work and citizenship. For this purpose, the authors report on a Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication-supported exploratory study of current partnership initiatives in TC programs. The study indicated a high level of activity, planning, and interest in global partnerships and revealed a range of creative and innovative partnerships that systematically integrate new opportunities for experiential learning, collaborative international research, and civic engagement in a global context into programs and their curricula. Partnerships also emphasize cultural sensitivity, equal partner contribution, and mutual benefit, thus offering alternatives to emerging global trade visions of higher education. The article also identifies key challenges that partnerships face, suggesting implications for programs and the field as a whole to facilitate successful partnerships.

Globalization is radically transforming technical communication (TC) both in the workplace and in higher education. This article examines these changes and the ways in which TC programs position themselves amid globalization, in particular the ways in which they use emerging global partnerships to prepare students for global work and citizenship. For this purpose, the authors report on a Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication-supported exploratory study of current partnership initiatives in TC programs. The study indicated a high level of activity, planning, and interest in global partnerships and revealed a range of creative and innovative partnerships that systematically integrate new opportunities for experiential learning, collaborative international research, and civic engagement in a global context into programs and their curricula. Partnerships also emphasize cultural sensitivity, equal partner contribution, and mutual benefit, thus offering alternatives to emerging global trade visions of higher education. The article also identifies key challenges that partnerships face, suggesting implications for programs and the field as a whole to facilitate successful partnerships.

The spaces in which public deliberation most often takes place are institutionally, technologically, and scientifically complex. In this article, we argue that in order to participate, citizens must be able to invent valued knowledge. This invention requires using complex information technologies to access, assemble, and analyze information in order to produce the professional and technical performances expected in contemporary civic forums. We argue for a civic rhetoric that expands to research the complicated nature of interface technologies, the inventional practices of citizens as they use these technologies, and the pedagogical approaches to encourage the type of collaborative and coordinated work these invention strategies require.

This study uses student reflections of previous success in academic writing to guide instructors as they design writing assignments. Seventy-one students in five classes responded to a questionnaire designed to help them identify particularly successful writing experiences and reflect on the circumstances, strategies, and methods they believed impacted their success. Student responses to these questions were analyzed to identify broad categories or themes. This process produced an "emic" or insider's view of what constitutes successful writing assignments and writing process. The findings suggest that students self report their writing as successful when the writing assignment engenders engagement, commitment, collaboration, a systematic approach, and opportunities for external confirmation. Instructors can include these considerations as they plan the writing assignments for their courses. Discovering what student writers believe constitutes good writing and what strategies most effectively help them produce high quality writing provides an opportunity to design writing assignments that empower students to join the conversation in their discourse community. If faculty are aware of student perceptions of writing assignments and use those perceptions in assignment design, the products may be more satisfying for both student writers and faculty readers.

This historical case study of a non-rule policy document (NPD) adopted by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management describes an emerging genre in environmental discourse. The NPD standardizes environmental public policy for land disposal of foundry sand, a solid waste. The collaborative writing process took six months with industry input, and the NPD was presented to two environmental boards. Two contrasts, in process and format, distinguish NPDs from rules. The NPD is an entirely new kind of writing which includes guidance for implementing statutes. The writing process in the case involves government writers and industry representatives, although it does not include other public input such as public hearings. Instead, the staff of the pollution control agency simply presents the NPD to the appropriate environmental policy boards and arranges for its publication. This article adds to the body of knowledge about technical writing in government, specifically environmental policy and non-academic genres.

This article examines the uses of oral testimony in writing about literacy in historical context, especially about the literacy traditions of populations “hidden from history”-immigrants, refugees, and undocumented persons-who are entering U.S. schools and workplaces, and whose literacy histories may be unknown or lost. Drawing on testimonies collected from Laotian Hmong refugees, I offer the following propositions: First, that oral testimonies provide information about literacy that may be unavailable in documentary records. Second, that oral testimonies may reveal deeply held values and attitudes about literacy that cannot be derived from the documentary evidence. Third, that oral testimonies disclose the full range of human experience, rational and emotional, and that this may lead to new understandings of literacy. Finally, that oral histories invite collaboration between researcher and informant in writing new histories of literacy-though not always in ways commonly assumed.

Those who focus on the study of visual information continue to search for effective ways to conceptualize that inquiry. However, many visual examples are better categorized as visual/verbal collaboration, complicating analysis. When analysis is based on the assumption that visual and verbal modalities perform in similar ways, important complementary differences are overlooked. Therefore, this investigation presents a series of observations from a perspective rooted in difference, which leads to the argument that visual/verbal messages develop when cohesive and perceptual relationships form between image and text, resulting in four types of loose to tight visual/verbal collaboration. Examples of each can clarify, contradict, or challenge common understanding for a particular audience. Finally, a perspective in difference uncovers another kind of image/text collaboration, which instead of relying solely on actual images and text, depends on a weave of actual with imagined text and images, leading to an untapped rhetorical opportunity.