Call for Proposals for an Edited Collection:

Pressures on Technical Communication Programs in a New Age of Austerity

 

Deadline for proposals: July 15, 2012

Selection for manuscript submissions: August 15, 2012

Deadline for manuscripts: December 15, 2012

As colleges and universities across the country continue to deal with regular decreases in state funding, technical communication programs, in particular, are being forced -- as the theme of a recent CPTSC conference stated -- to "do more with less."  As budget cuts become the new normal, the long-term health of technical communication depends on our ability to evolve and adapt to an array of pressures: internal, external, and technological.

External pressures, including a decreased trust in public institutions in general, lead to internal pressures, pressures applied to academic programs from within our institutions. While local pressures are always unique and dependent on local contexts, many programs, in academic terms, are feeling a range of pressures:

●      Administrative pressure to increase students in degree programs

●      Push to move courses into cheaper, online environments and compete with for-profit institutions, professional certification programs, and even other universities for students

●      Increasing class sizes at all degree levels and on all platforms

●      Emphasis on assessment requiring quantifiable measures of student success and consequent efforts to track and interpret that data

●      Internal (within universities) funding formulas leading departments to see student credit-hours as a zero sum game, leading to less collaboration and a tendency to decentralize writing instruction

●      Increased teaching loads

●      Well-established trends of universities to leave empty faculty positions unfilled and rely increasingly on part-time and adjunct faculty

●      Increasing tenure standards forcing junior faculty to focus efforts on publish-or-perish

●      Tenure committees that continue to privilege scholarly monographs and shy away from newer media, including online journals and digital research projects, which are becoming increasingly important in our field

This Call for Proposals seeks submissions that explore the ways a new age of austerity is affecting technical communication as a profession and an academic discipline. Rather than a litany of complaints, however, we seek examples of innovative solutions to the problems that we face as a discipline. We'd like to initiate a wide-ranging conversation on the future of academic programs in technical communication in light of the "new reality" of contracting budgets.

Some questions that might guide contributors:

External Pressures

●      How do we confront growth of online TC certificates/programs?

●      How do we address the rise in for-profit institutions?

●      How do we read the decline in academic  TC jobs? At what point are we overproducing PhDs?

●      How do we prepare graduate students for the “austerity” job market?

●      How do we take advantage of skills students have upon entering classes?

Internal Pressures

●      How might we form meaningful, collaborative partnerships with other disciplines and departments in times of uncertainty and competition for resources?

●      How can we respond proactively for calls for ever more detailed assessment data? Can we use assessment data to craft arguments for more resources, or better use of existing resources?

●      What recruiting strategies can help ensure our programs have an adequate number of students? How do we manage the pressures of increased enrollment?

●      How do we promote faculty equity in the face of austerity? How do we mentor and protect junior faculty to ensure their success in this rapidly changing environment? Similarly, how do we manage the tension between encouraging exploration of new media in our own research and ensuring we meet the standards of traditional tenure committees? How do we lay the foundation for digital paths to tenure?

●      How do we work to keep your curriculum fresh and reflecting current trends in the workplace? How do we manage traditional tensions between teaching rhetorical concepts and teaching newer concepts?

Technological Pressures

●      What challenges do increased (institutional or student-driven) demand for distance education/online learning pose for technical communication programs? How have our programs successfully met these challenges, or resisted the pressure to migrate courses/programs online?

●      What role does open source software play in helping programs keep up with the demand to do more with less? How has your program leveraged -- or resisted -- open source software in response to the age of austerity?

●      What are the implications of the intersection of the new age of austerity (in which resources of all kinds become increasingly scarce) with the new digital age (in which technology --as objects of study and as tools of the trade -- proliferates) for technical communication programs and for technical communication practitioners?

●      How do we respond programmatically or pedagogically to the ever-diminishing technological development cycle? Given limited resources, how do we balance the desire to keep curricula current with the time it takes to revise, for example, a basic course in writing for the web in light of HTML 5, social media, and the rise of mobile platforms?

●      When/how do we account for MOOCs in our TC curricula?

 

Proposals should be no more than 750 words, submitted electronically to the editors at the addresses below.

Please direct questions to:

Denise Tillery – denise.tillery@unlv.edu

Julie Staggers – julie.staggers@unlv.edu

Ed Nagelhout – ed.nagelhout@unlv.edu