No abstract

This article argues for developing linked courses in technical communication where the instructor facilitates a service-learning curriculum and then serves as faculty advisor within subsequent internships. In these linked courses, students write technical documents before moving into internships where they write similar documents. Specifically, the article examines the results from one such class and offers both theoretical and practical advice for collaborating with nonprofit and creating internships that are beneficial for both the students and the nonprofit. In addition, the discussion highlights students' preparedness to enter the field of technical communication, as evidenced through their internship work and their final reflections. Through careful consideration of the nonprofit' responses, I suggest making changes to professional and technical communication curricula for linked courses and internships, including the addition of an objective of professionalism that teaches students to not only write in a professional manner, but to also consider their actions and responsibilities within the context of an organizational culture.

Service-learning projects and traditional internships both prepare the student of technical communication for the workforce in many ways. What is lacking in the scholarship is a discussion of how to successfully link these two ideas. To help teachers implement courses that bridge the gap between service-learning projects and internships, I discuss how to design a course in technical communication that actively prepares students for subsequent internships with nonprofit agencies. In specific, I outline social development and social learning theories, service-learning pedagogies, and lesson plans and assignments that integrate these theories into practice. This project serves as a model that insists that the teacher first instructs students regarding not only rhetorical aspects of document design, including audience awareness and style, but also in placing the students in internships and designing assignments to be fulfilled in internship roles. The combination of classroom practices with an internship supports the idea that students learn the value of the process of writing, including the social embeddedness that can often influence their writing.

This article examines the teaching of a multimodal pedagogy in an online technical communication classroom. Based on the results of an e-portfolio assessment, the authors argue that multimodality can be taught successfully in the online environment if the instructor carefully plans and scaffolds each assignment. Specifically, they argue for an increased emphasis within the technical communication classroom on teaching the e-portfolio as a genre that not only exemplifies students’ multimodal literacies but also establishes their identities as technical communicators in the 21st century. This article provides a model for teaching multimodal composition in the online technical communication classroom and calls for more scholarship on teaching the e-portfolio in the digital environment.

In 2007, Hewett and Ehmann Powers developed a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly called "Online Teaching and Learning: Preparation, Development, and Organizational Communication" to consider organizational concerns and educators' necessary professional development preparation and strategies for teaching in online settings. This special issue focused specifically on the teaching and administration of online education in rhetoric and technical communication, with contributors writing about such topics as training concerns with regard to global settings (St.Amant, 2007), instructors' willingness and preparedness to teach online framed within cultural geography metaphors (Meloncon, 2007), and the need for immersing prospective online educators in the very environment into which they are expected to teach (Cook, 2007). Since the issue's publication 10 years ago, the number of distance students across the country has increased, with online education outpacing traditional onsite (often referred to as "face-to-face") enrollment (Kelly, 2015) and a reported 7.1 million students taking at least one online class (Allen & Seaman, 2014). Not coincidentally, the number of fully online and hybrid technical and professional communication (TPC) programs also has increased, with many institutions (e.g.,