In this teaching experience report, we describe a research experience for undergraduates (REUs) designed to cognitively support the work of two student research assistants (RAs) from a two-year college (2YC) on a funded project that involved analyzing user-generated content for an mHealth app. First, we suggest partnerships between two- and four-year institutions as a move toward REU equity because students from 2YCs are not typically afforded these opportunities. We then review the role of research in undergraduate learning and posit the importance of scaffolding to sequence cognitive leaps. Finally, we present the cognitive scaffolding we created and connect it to our hybrid card sorting-affinity diagramming content analysis method.

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In this original research article, we report findings locating technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs from 1,235 not-for-profit two-year colleges (2YCs); argue for an updated 2YC TPC research agenda at 2YCs; and provide concrete steps for increasing 2YC faculty inclusion in the field of TPC through conference attendance, service, and membership in national TPC organizations.

Recently, educators have created crowdsourced syllabi using social media. Activist syllabi are digitally circulated public collections of knowledge and knowledge-making about events and social movements. As technical communicators, we can function as curators of public intellectualism by providing accessibility and usability guidance for these activist syllabi in collaboration with activist syllabi creators. In turn, technical communicators can work with syllabi creators as a coalitional social justice strategy to enhance the circulation of these activist syllabi.

This essay assumes that the design and use of surveys is a fundamentally rhetorical act. It provides suggestions for employing and designing health-related surveys intended for research participants who might be characterized as inhabiting one or more precarious positionalities. We use “precarious positionality” to signal when research participants self-identify as one or more of the following: a racial and/or linguistic minority, economically disadvantaged, disabled, former or current drug user, undocumented, un(der)educated, oppressed, sexualized, disenfranchised, criminalized,and/or colonized. Drawing on the research team’s experiences with piloting what we hope will eventually become a nationwide survey, the essay describes how to avoid several survey-designpitfalls; it also makes recommendations for how to improve survey-based health research that enrolls participants who inhabit one or more precarious positionalities. Our recommendations attend to rhetorical complexities related to survey ethics, inclusion criteria, privacy, stigmatized and misleading language, variations in discursive repertoires, accessibility, and liability.

Cultural logics reveal a culture’s way of reasoning or a belief system. When paired with International Patient Experience Design (I-PXD), cultural logics provide insight into cultural contexts to help health and medical communicators design, test, and shape health and medical information across complex, dynamic international contexts. Using a Swedish context, I demonstrate the cultural logic-I-PXD interplay to construct a cultural logic. The process I highlight reveals how a paired cultural logic-I-PXD approach can provide a method to reveal cultural assumptions, expectations, and dynamics that can inform the design and testing of health and medical information in international contexts.

The United States is struggling with an opioid overdose (OD) crisis. The opioid OD epidemic includes legally prescribed and illicitly acquired opioids. Regardless of if an opioid is legal, understanding users' contexts of use is essential to design effective methods for individuals to reverse opioid OD. In other words, if health information is not designed to be contextually relevant, the opioid OD health information will be unusable. To demonstrate these distinct healthcare design contexts, I extend Patient Experience Design (PXD) to include community-based and technology-based contexts of use by analyzing two case examples of the Chicago Recovery Alliance's and PwrdBy's attempts to decrease deaths by opioid OD. Next, I discuss implications of community-based and technology-based PXD within communities of opioid users, critiquing each method and suggesting four contexts of use-heuristic categories to consider when designing health communication information for users in these contexts.

Considering aurality (hearing) and sonicity (sounds/noises) in our research sites promises much for rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholars. To show this value, I argue aural awareness of soundscapes provide opportunities to sensorially enrich our understanding of sonic experiences in acute care hospital settings, as in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) site at the center of my case study. To that end, the purpose of this article is threefold: 1) to identify aurality as a sensorial aspect in healthcare sensescapes worthy of RHM inquiry; 2) to foreground how these soundscapes shape care and caretaking in healthcare and clinical settings; and 3) to propose more careful considering and attending, as “earwitnesses,” to the sonic experiences of bodies in these settings. In the process, I propose “rhetorical ventriloquism” as a useful, responsible concept to consider how these sounds and noises appear to stand in for bodies and their physiologies and shape those bodies’ care, while amplifying those bodies as the healthcare technologies speak and sound for them. Furthermore, I suggest RHM scholars can act as earwitnesses who attend to sonicity and aurality in healthcare and clinical settings, as well as study how people are sensorially trained in these settings. CLICK HERE TO ACCESS SOUND FILES

This case study of an environmental engineer’s proposal-writing process reveals how the engineer (Beatrice) reifies, archives, and accesses her distributed memory across physical and digital sources in order to write proposals. Based on the authors’ observations of Beatrice’s proposal-writing process and their interviews with her, they arrived at three key conclusions: Beatrice distributes her memory across multiple physical and digital sources, the (spreadsheet) product calculator helps Beatrice to manage her cognitive load and relieve her working memory, and the product calculator allows Beatrice to reassemble her distributed memory and coordinate her cognition.

Health literacy is an embodied, multisensory experience that is invariably mediated by healthcare technologies. We illustrate this concept through three case studies that describe scenarios in which non-experts and lay experts engage in non-discursive literacy practices: parents caring for an infant in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) self-managing their treatment, and public audiences reporting symptoms to a crowd-sourced flu-tracking program.