Programmatic Perspectives

Programmatic Perspectives, the journal of the Council of Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, is soliciting articles about theoretical and practical aspects of technical communication program administration. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to,

• Program assessment
• Curriculum development and innovation
• Cross-cultural issues
• Faculty development
• Technology integration
• Relationship-building
• Diversity issues
• Program maintenance
• Programs transitions (expansion from certificate to major)
• Student and faculty recruitment
• Recruitment and retention
• Internationalization/globalization
• Historical perspectives on program administration
• New program development

The editors, Tracy Bridgeford, Michael Salvo, and Bill Williamson, welcome articles of 6,000-10,000 words and shorter articles of 4000-6,000 words for the Program Showcase. Submissions should conform to APA.

Articles are accepted on an ongoing basis. Queries are welcome. Please include the author’s name, e-mail address, phone number, and affiliation on a separate cover sheet. Please send submissions in Microsoft Word or .RTF as an email attachment to Michael J. Salvo at salvo@purdue.edu.

All manuscripts should be submitted as a Word attachment and sent via email to Michael J. Salvo (salvo@purdue.edu). Authors should remove any identifying content to facilitate blind peer review.

If the article contains illustrations  (drawings, photographs, images), please create each illustration in a separate file and zip all files together. Illustrations should be saved at 300 dpi or better in EPS, TIFF, PSD, GIF, or JPG format.

Articles should be formatted according to the APA. Page proofs will be sent to the designated author as PDF files.

The Program Showcase features articles about specific academic programs in Technical and Scientific Communication. The purpose of this section is to share a sense of history, identity, engagement, and change in the administration of our academic sites for professional development.

Each program in our community represents a response to some local need and is created and administered with a sense of local community, academic, and professional values. The Program Showcase seeks to capture the knowledge, experience, and conceptual frameworks that drive our administrative activities. In other words, the forum seeks to capture what is useful, interesting, and challenging about the administration of specific programs with the ultimate goal of building upon our shared knowledge.

Although the specific content of these showcases will be determined by the authors, who are the best judges of what is most important to share about their programs, we are generally interested in the following areas for discussion:

 

Program History

Description. What kind of program is it? How old is it? How big is it? What is the primary curricular focus? Where is it located within the institution? What features and characteristics define the program?

Impetus. What forces or needs prompted the creation of the program(s)?

Changes over time. How has the program changed over time? What has prompted those changes?

Students and Graduates. Who enrolls in the program? What are their most important qualities and characteristics? Where have program graduates gone? What kind of work do they do?

Faculty. What faculty contribute to the program? What kind of specializations or research interests do they have? What key roles have faculty played in the program during its history?

 

Program Mission

Mission statement. Does the program have a defining mission statement? How does that statement drive curriculum? administration?

Programmatic vision. What theoretical perspectives ground the program's design? What theoretical perspectives drive the program's pedagogy? What theoretical perspectives are instilled in the students or what impact their emerging sense of identity?

 

Curriculum

Coursework. What courses are available in the program? What courses are required? How are they structured?

Experiences. What experiences or opportunities define the curriculum?

Other. What other elements contribute to the professional development of students enrolled in the program?

 

Challenges

Challenges. What administrative or programmatic challenges have defined the work of program administrators over time? How have those challenges changed over time? What challenges are persistent? How have the program administrators responded to calls for action from the TSC community? from local forces?

Lessons learned. What have your faculty and students learned from administering the program? What lessons might also be of interest and use to the TSC community?

 

Submissions

Submissions for the Program Showcase should be 4000 to 6000 words and should conform to APA guidelines. Please include the author’s name, e-mail address, phone number, and affiliation on a separate cover sheet. Please send submissions as Microsoft Word or .RTF as an email attachment to Michael Salvo at salvo@purdue.edu.

Deadline

Generally, reviewers are allowed 60 days to complete a review.

 

Length

1000-1500 words for reviews of single texts

1000-2500 words for reviews of multiple texts

 

Focus

Focus your review on those concerns most relevant to our target audience: technical communication administrators who are interested in the theory and practice of program development and administration. If appropriate, focus your review on how the text(s) contribute to just one aspect of the profession—for example, programmatic assessment or curriculum development. We encourage you to omit relatively minor concerns, such as minute details about what each chapter contains.

If possible, address the following concerns in your review:

• how the text(s) specifically contributes to the profession in terms of programmatic issues and perspectives or how it fails to do so;

• how the text(s) compare with similar ones in the profession.

Heading Formatting

Include the following information for each text reviewed:

• title
• author(s) or editor(s)
• place of publication
• publisher
• date of publication
• number of pages

Provide the following information after the heading and before the first paragraph:

Reviewed by (Your First Name, Your Last Name), (Your Institution)

 

Use of Citations, Evidence, and Quotations

Use APA style for all citations.

Do not feel obligated to provide extensive evidence (including direct quotations) from the text(s) to support your claims. In fact, we might need to edit supporting evidence to reduce length.

If you decide to provide supporting evidence:

• include page citations for quoted material (for example, Smith makes a strong case that “the profession will raise its stature considerably if more quality research on this topic is completed” (p. 143);
• provide full citations for other publications mentioned in your review.

Guidelines for Submitting Reviews

Send the review as an email attachment in Word format to

• Karla Saari Kitalong (kitalong@mtu.edu)

Questions?

If you have any questions or anticipate having trouble meeting your deadline, please contact Karla Saari Kitalong as soon as possible to see if other arrangements can be made.