Balancing Institutional Demands with Effective Practice: A Lesson in Curricular and Professional Development

Abstract

Relying on Wiggins and McThighe's (2005) outcomes based "backward design," we have the end goal of developing Penrose's (2012) professional characteristics of "expertise" and "autonomy" in our P&TW instructors. To do so, we're using Spinuzzi's (2005) outline of participatory design methods to develop the professional community Penrose outlines as the space that fosters professionalism while also revising and maintaining curricular materials and online master courses.

4. (Teaching) Ethics and Technical Communication

“…The most recent special issue focused on training online technical communication instructors (Bartolotta et al, 2017;Grover et al, 2017;, including for cross-cultural and global communication courses (Gonzales & Baca, 2017;Thrush & Popham, 2013). Other literature has discussed online program administration by examining the balance between instructor autonomy and curricular consistency (Maid & D'Angelo, 2013;Rodrigo & Ramírez, 2017;Tillery & Nagelhout, 2013) and assessing the effectiveness of online program orientations for students . Other authors have also adapted popular pedagogical practices such as service-learning (Bourelle, 2014;Nielsen, 2016;Soria & Weiner, 2013) and multimodal writing (Bourelle et al, 2017) to online environments.…”

Communicating the “Write” Values

“…The prevalence of full-time tenure-track PTC faculty is growing [12], but these instructors are still often the "lone rangers" of their specialty within English departments, tasked with overseeing and evaluating a team of contingent faculty [13]. In addition, professors at large universities have increasingly conducted PTC seminars online over the past decade [11], and an exponential number will likely become virtual or hybrid instructors in the 2020-2021 school year due to safety concerns and gathering restrictions imposed in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.…”

“…In a nationwide study of full-time non-tenure track faculty, 64 percent cited prior experience in the workplace and 90 percent indicated they had taken a course on teaching writing, though only 41 percent received training in PTC-specific pedagogy [14]. Online PTC instructors report they receive technological support, but less regarding how to leverage the software to support discipline-specific instructional goals [11]. Beyond initial training, all types of PTC instructors are seeking additional professional development, and non-tenure track professionals especially cite challenges in accessing academic-and industry-focused opportunities [9].…”

“…Not knowing the best practices of a field can limit the applicability and even accuracy of instructor feedback to students writing in unfamiliar disciplines [3,7]. Strengthening students' understanding of their own discipline-specific conventions has been a prevalent topic in research involving computational rhetorical and linguistic analysis [2,8], but less methodology has been crafted to support instructors, even as scholars have advocated for more discipline-specific training and professional development opportunities [9][10][11]. Can methods of computer-based text analysis, adept at illuminating "nuances of professional communication," [1] be used to deepen instructors' understanding of the genres they must teach and evaluate?…”

12. Preparing Future Professionals in and for a Global Context: A Case for Telecollaborative Educational Initiatives

“…The most recent special issue focused on training online technical communication instructors (Bartolotta et al, 2017;Grover et al, 2017;, including for cross-cultural and global communication courses (Gonzales & Baca, 2017;Thrush & Popham, 2013). Other literature has discussed online program administration by examining the balance between instructor autonomy and curricular consistency (Maid & D'Angelo, 2013;Rodrigo & Ramírez, 2017;Tillery & Nagelhout, 2013) and assessing the effectiveness of online program orientations for students . Other authors have also adapted popular pedagogical practices such as service-learning Nielsen, 2016;Soria & Weiner, 2013) and multimodal writing (Bourelle et al, 2017) to online environments.…”