In Case You Missed It: Selected Scholarship from the Discipline

We all tell our undergraduate and graduate students how important it is to keep current in the field. In our professional lives as writers and communicators, that means keeping track of trends in industry and technology; as academics, it means keeping up on our reading—the latest books, recent articles in journals, the proceedings of our major conferences—so that we can contribute to disciplinary conversations, teach our classes with integrity, and advance our own research agendas effectively. As part of this process, we show our appreciation to those who contribute to the knowledge of our field and participate in the process of peer review. We discuss the work of our disciplinary colleagues in the classes we teach or over coffee with our graduate students; we use it in professional training, and we cite it in our own research. What we gather in our journals represents our collected knowledge, not only in our libraries‟ databases and in various online contexts, but shared inside our classrooms and integrated with our ongoing intellectual reflections

Technical Communication, Participatory Action Research, and Global Civic Engagement: A Teaching, Research, and Social Action Collaboration in Kenya.

In response to recent calls for internationalization and greater social relevance in professional communication teaching and research, this article links service-learning pedagogy with participatory action research (PAR) methods. A multi-year collaborative project in Kenya illustrates both the challenges and the positive outcomes of international partnerships, which include increased intercultural communication skills, significant contributions to the literature, invigoration of teaching and curriculum, and the development of global civic awareness among all participants. In their recommendations for faculty interested in developing similar partnerships, the authors highlight the importance of understanding the theoretical foundations of servicelearning pedagogy and PAR methods, and advocate for the incorporation of exploratory site visits, pre-departure preparation for both students and faculty, critical reflection, efforts to ensure reciprocal benefits, and ongoing outcomes assessment

Comparing grades in online and face-to-face writing courses: Interpersonal accountability and institutional commitment

In spite of benefits surrounding distance education programs, many online writing courses suffer from low student completion rates. Student retention has been identified as a concern in a number of studies of online education. We extend this discussion by examining the relationship of assessment of student work to retention, and comparing the grades students receive in online and face-to-face undergraduate writing courses. Our data point to what we call the “thrive or dive” phenomenon for student performance in online writing courses, which describes the disproportionately high percentage of students who fail or do not complete online courses compared to conventional, face-to-face courses. We extend this discussion on challenges related to student retention and propose instructional approaches for online learning that include the interpersonal accountability between teachers and students, as well as the institutional commitment necessary to ensure that students can succeed in online writing courses and programs

Education As Apprenticeship for Social Action: Composition Instruction, Critical Consciousness, and Engaged Pedagogy

As a professional teacher of writing, I see language as one of many locations in which political struggles exist, and the classroom as a site from which my students and I can actively examine culture, developing strategies of language-use that can facilitate social change. Critical and feminist pedagogies are two closely-related ways of teaching from which we can examine socially-created power structures so that society can move towards new ways of thinking and towards a new consciousness. The state of critical consciousness that results from these pedagogies becomes realized when students, studying as apprentices for social action, begin to speak out for the interests of groups of which they are members

Guest Editor\u27s Introduction: Practitioners of Action Research in International Educational Settings

This special issue of Networks focuses on Action Research in International (non-North American) Educational Settings and brings together work by practitioners from several educational settings such as Spain, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Hawaii. In these articles, the authors explore the challenges, experiences, and promises of increased globalization in education. This work includes case studies focusing on specific teaching experiences as well as critical descriptions of the lives and values of action researchers in international contexts

World Religions and Professional Communication: Theories and Practices of the Discipline

Scholarly conversations about the influence of religion on professional communication have largely been absent in our discipline’s published literature, yet religion often intersects with the work of teachers, researchers, and practitioners. It intersects with rhetorical patterns at many levels and contexts, including the organizations in which we work and volunteer, the sites where we conduct research and solve problems, and our teaching/training practices with students, clients, co-workers, community partners, and the many other populations we regularly serve in our professional lives. To explore the intersections of religion, globalization, and professional communication, this special edition of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization presents four articles, each addressing a specific way religion interacts with local, national, and world contexts

The dynamic interplay of interaction goals, emotion, and conflict styles: Testing a model of intrapersonal and interpersonal effects on conflict styles

This study examines the dynamic interplay of interaction goals, emotion, and conflict styles. Using a three (counterpart conflict styles: competing, integrating, obliging) by two (counterpart emotion: anger, compassion) factorial design, this study seeks to understand the dynamic nature of the conflict process. It also explored a model integrating both intrapersonal and interpersonal effects on conflict styles. Proactive-reactive comparisons reveal both overall changes in interaction goals, emotion, and conflict styles over the course of conflict and specific changes attributable to counterpart emotion and conflict styles. Results also indicate that interpersonal effects of counterpart emotion and conflict styles on one’s own reactive conflict styles are largely mediated through intrapersonal processes of reactive emotion and interaction goals

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29