This article reexamines the treatment of gender and feminism in technical, business, and workplace writing studies—areas in which the three of us teach. Surprisingly, the published discourse of our field seems to implicitly minimize the gendered nature of business and technical writing workplaces and classrooms. To understand this apparent lack of focus, we review five technical and business communication academic journals and build on previous quantitative evaluations done by Isabelle Thompson in 1999 and by Isabelle Thompson Elizabeth Overman Smith in 2006. We also review nine popular textbooks using a content analysis method based on Thompson’s work. Finally, we discuss current research in feminist pedagogies vis-à-vis these results and our own experiences in the professional writing classroom.

Prompted by Cushman’s and Grabill’s call to “ask and answer the difficult questions” about service learning (Reflections 2009), this article addresses the difficult question of “what happens when service learning goes wrong.” Authors engaged in family history writing and service learning with a local historical group. When the project was unable to be sustained, authors theorized a three-part methodological continuum of expectation, reality, and rectification to articulate the merits of failed attempts at service learning.

This article presents the concept of heritage literacy, a decision-making process by which people adopt, adapt, or alienate themselves from tools and literacies passed on between generations of people. In an auto-ethnographic study, four generations of a single family and Amish participants from the surrounding community were interviewed to explore the concept.