Doreen Starke-Meyerring

Meeting the Challenges of Globalization A Framework for Global Literacies in Professional Communication Programs

Drawing on globalization literature, this article analyzes key themes in globalization discourse, discusses their implications for professional communication programs, and links the themes specifically to the literacies professional communicators need to develop in the context of globalization. The article proposes a framework for professional communication literacies in this context to facilitate dialogue about the implications of globalization for literacies in professional communication programs and help teachers and program developers design and revise courses and programs that foster global literacies. It concludes by suggesting specific examples for applying this framework to the development or revision of teaching materials, courses, and programs.

Global Partnerships: Positioning Technical Communication Programs in the Context of Globalization

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.

Building a Shared Virtual Learning Culture An International Classroom Partnership

Business professionals increasingly use digital tools to collaborate across multiple cultures, locations, and time zones. Success in this complex environment depends on a shared culture that facilitates the making of knowledge and the best contributions of all team members. To prepare managers for such communication, the authors designed and implemented a semester-long intercultural virtual team project between a management communication course in the United States and one in Canada. To prevent faultlines between subgroups on each campus, the authors set a clear outcome for students’ research, established equity between the two sites, structured assignments so that students worked interdependently across sites”, and encouraged inclusive communication. Faculty considering such a partnership should incorporate a robust collaborative workspace, incorporate preliminary exercises before a large project, provide intensive mentoring and instruction on peer review, arrange for a real visit or videoconference between locations, and expect the project to be both fun and demanding.

The Paradox of Writing in Doctoral Education: Student Experiences

Drawing on interviews with doctoral students from different disciplines in different years of their doctoral studies, this chapter examines student experiences with writing during their studies. As the chapter shows, what surfaces in these experiences is a paradox of writing: On the one hand, the discursive knowledge-making practices research cultures develop over generations to accomplish their knowledge work become normalized, invisible, and appear universal to long-term members of research cultures. On the other hand, for newcomers, these very practices constitute new territory and a vital site of inquiry into how knowledge and researcher identities are produced and negotiated in these research cultures. Left unaddressed, the paradox proves highly consequential for doctoral student learning as students encounter supervisor perceptions of writing as “common sense”, a universal skill, and therefore as a non-question. Accordingly, for doctoral students, writing as a vital site of learning to participate in disciplinary knowledge-making practices is lost, with students disoriented, afraid to ask questions about the very knowledge-making practices in which they are to participate, and left without opportunities to actively negotiate complex identity struggles involved in that participation. The chapter concludes by proposing a systemic approach to writing development in doctoral education that places rigorous research-based inquiry into the ways in which writing enables and constrains the production of knowledge, researcher identity, and disciplinarity at the heart of doctoral education.

Professional Communication in the Learning Marketspace A Call for Partnering

As society increasingly inhabits digital spaces in addition to physical places, the environment in which professional communication programs function undergoes fundamental change. The specific dynamics of these digital spaces have resulted in the emergence of learning marketspaces and present a program with three choices for positioning itself: (1) staying at its homestead, its own individual home page; (2) paying rent for a space in someone elses learning marketspace; or (3) partnering to build a learning marketspace. This article addresses the third choice and suggests how programs may go about partnering to build a learning marketspace. The authors examine the following questions: Why partner to develop a learning marketspace? What are critical components of a learning marketspace for professional communication? and How might we assess a programs readiness for partnering in the learning marketspace?

Globally Networked Learning Environments in Professional Communication: Challenging Normalized Ways of Learning, Teaching, and Knowing

Even a cursory glance at the daily news will provide ample testimony to the importance for professional communication of the contributions to this special issue of Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC). Indeed, as recent events have made abundantly clear, the most pressing challenges and crises we face—be these economic or environmental crises or social justice issues—are global. And yet, despite their global nature and their far-reaching consequences for local communities, much deliberation and decision making about these issues has been shifted to global economic

Globally Networked Learning Environments: Reshaping the Intersections of Globalization and E-Learning in Higher Education:

As many e-learning scholars have emphasized, e-learning – situated in a global network of digital technologies – has, of course, a complex global dimension that manifests itself in diverse ways in different institutional, disciplinary, national, and other local academic and educational traditions as digital technologies intersect with local educational practices, policies, and pedagogies. Accordingly, many e-learning scholars have placed this global dimension of e-learning and its local manifestations at the heart of their scholarship, with Lam (2009), for example, examining the literacy practices of immigrant teenagers in online environments; Al-Fadhli (2008) exploring the perceptions of e-learning at Kuwait University; and Marumo et al (2009) studying the role of an elearning platform for educational innovation in Botswana. Others have compared information and communication technology knowledge and usage through the lens of gender and class in Ghana (Kwapong, 2009); studied the role of e-learning in an early childhood programme offered at a virtual university in Africa (Pence, 2007); examined the role of new literacies in the teaching of

Genre, knowledge and digital code in web-based communities: an integrated theoretical framework for shaping digital discursive spaces

Emerging digital discursive spaces, such as wikis, offer new opportunities for knowledge communication. However, participants join such spaces through the lenses of their established discursive practices. These practices, however, interact with the code – the technological design – of these spaces, which can reproduce, question, or undermine them, and present alternative opportunities and visions for knowledge communication. Participants, therefore, ultimately face questions about the ways in which tensions between established (genred) practices and alternative practices enabled by code are to be negotiated. Drawing on theories of rhetoric and technology, this article offers an integrated theoretical framework that allows developers of online communities to examine the established rhetorical practices of participants and the ways in which the code of the discursive space may question or facilitate these practices. The paper then illustrates how this framework may be applied to facilitating academic knowledge communication in a wiki space and concludes with implications for decision-making in shaping digital discursive spaces for knowledge communication.

Theoretical and practical considerations for virtual learning environments in technical communication: An annotated bibliography

Many technical communication educators are exploring the potential of new and emerging Information technology, specifically the World Wide Web, for delivery of their courses. This bibliography intends to help technical communicators explore the potential of virtual learning environments for their courses and to provide a point of entry into this burgeoning but rather unstructured field of inquiry. More specifically, the bibliography intends to provide a structured overview of approaches to conceptualizing, designing, developing, and evaluating virtual learning environments.

The Rhetoric of the Internet in Higher Education Policy: A Cross-Cultural Study:

THE IMPORTANCE OF PAYING ATTENTION to the technology agenda in the educational policies of the United States was demonstrated by Cynthia Selfe (1999) in her analysis of the 1996 initiative “Getting America’s Students Ready.” Selfe showed how the technology literacy project enjoyed considerable public support induced by popular utopian narratives about technology as the harbinger of democracy, economic growth, and progress—despite having reproduced, if not exacerbated, inequities based on race and poverty.