Routledge The New Normal: Pressures on Technical Communication Programs in the Age of Austerity (Baywood's Technical Communications)

As colleges and universities across the country continue to deal with regular decreases in state funding, technical communication programs, in particular, are being forced to "do more with less." As budget cuts become the new normal, the long-term health of technical communication depends on our ability to evolve and adapt to an array of internal, external, and technological pressures.  The New Normal: Pressures on Technical Communication Programs in the Age of Austerity explores the ways technical communication programs are responding to conditions of economic austerity and investigates how smaller programs, or programs situated in smaller institutions, use increasingly limited resources to meet the challenges of increased student demand, the responsibilities of teaching service courses effectively, the technological demands for online education, and the constant pressure to prepare our students appropriately for the ever-changing needs of the job market in technical communication.  More specifically, the contributors to this collection are overtly conscious of the marginalized/peripheral status of technical communication programs within both small and large institutions. This awareness allows them to articulate specific ways that austerity has had a direct, and local, effect on a particular technical communication program and to describe short- and long-term strategies for creating sustainable futures for a technical communication program, despite cuts and marginalization. From the Inside Flap IN PRAISE OF "This useful collection provides a valuable map for navigating the future of higher education and technical communication. The contributors do a great job of reframing the discussion in constructive ways that promote growth, sustainability, entrepreneurship, and service. They also offer useful field-tested strategies for building technical communication programs in a challenging but exciting new age. For better or worse, issues of austerity and value will be important considerations from now on. This book gives me reasons to hope." Richard Johnson-Sheehan, Director, Purdue Writing Lab, Professor, Purdue University, Author, Technical Communication Today "In The New Normal, Tillery and Nagelhout have assembled a set of critical, well-reasoned responses to the pressures technical and communication programs face as higher education in the U.S. has seen budgets shrink dramatically. Contributors to the collection document the results of austerity measures including increased pressures to do more with less and heightened expectations to deliver value. The voices in the collection are experienced and thoughtful, and they speak in a remarkably unified way about the circumstances they face at their own institutions, which are, nonetheless, as diverse as one might expect from a project that sought to capture a broad picture of higher ed. The result is a highly trustworthy account of the ways programs have productively dealt with cuts to their staff, changes to their instructional loads, pressures to deliver more instruction online, and demands to develop new sources of revenue, among other challenges. Happily, the story that emerges from the book is one of resilience rather than capitulation. The programs featured in the chapters find ways to serve students that are inspiring in the face of tough transitions and, at times, devastating reductions. The collection will be very valuable to program directors and faculty as a source of strategies for dealing effectively with institutional change." William Hart-Davidson, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Graduate Education, College of Arts & Letters, Michigan State University About the Author Denise Tillery is an associate professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA. She has published thirteen articles and presented more than twenty papers at national conferences on topics including environmental communication, gender and rhetoric, a