Global Partnerships
Positioning Technical Communication Programs in the Context of Globalization
Doreen Starke-Meyerring
Centre for the Study and Teaching of Writing
Department of Integrated Studies in Education
McGill University
3700 Rue McTavish
Montréal, QC H3A 1Y2
Phone: 514.398.1308
Fax: 514.398.4529
doreen.starke-meyerring@mcgill.ca
Ann Hill Duin
Department of Rhetoric and
College of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Sciences
University of Minnesota
Coffey Hall 190
St. Paul, MN 55108
Phone: 612.625.9259
Fax: 612.625.8737
ahduin@umn.edu
Talene Palvetzian
Department of Integrated Studies in Education
McGill University
3700 Rue McTavish
Montréal, QC H3A 1Y2
Phone: 514.398.1308
Fax: 514.398.4529
tpalve@po-box.mcgill.ca
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful for the support provided by the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific
Communication for our study. We also wish to thank the participants in our study for giving so generously of
their time to share their expertise and insights into global partnerships with us.
Note
This research followed the guidelines for research ethics set by the Faculty of Education at McGill
University and by the University of Minnesota and was approved by the respective research ethics boards.
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Author Bios
Doreen Starke-Meyerring is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at
McGill University in Montréal, Canada, where she co-directs the Centre for the Study and Teaching of
Writing.
Ann Hill Duin is a Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and an Associate Dean for Academic Programs
and Student Affairs in the College of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Sciences at the University of
Minnesota.
Talene Palvetzian is a graduate student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill
University in Montréal, Canada.
Abstract
Globalization is radically transforming technical communication both in the workplace and in higher
education. This article examines these changes and the ways in which technical communication 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
CPTSC supported exploratory study of current partnership initiatives in technical communication 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.
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Global Partnerships:
Positioning Technical Communication Programs in the Context of Globalization
Certainly the top global concern for technical communicators in he U.S. is the notion of
sending technical communication work offshore (Barbara Giammona, 2004)
We are at the beginning of the era of transnational higher education, in which academic
institutions from one country operate in another, academic programs are jointly offered by
universities from different countries, and higher education is delivered through distance
technologies (Philip G. Altbach, 2004a)
As these quotations attest, technical communication both in the workplace and in higher education programs
is undergoing powerful change as a result of globalization. As technical communication manager Barbara
Giammona (2004) found in her survey of influential technical communication practitioners, globalization is
one of the key issues technical communicators face in the workplace. At the same time, as technical
communication programs respond to these changes, they find themselves positioned in what higher education
researcher Philip Altbach (2004 a, b) describes as a profoundly changing environment.
In this article, we explore these changes in both the workplace and in higher education and examine
how technical communication programs position themselves amid these changes. In the first part of this
article, we analyze globalization trends and their influence on technical communication in the workplace,
specifically noting the literacies technical communicators need to develop for global work and citizenship.
As we show, these changes increasingly call for new program partnerships to facilitate learning environments
that immerse technical communication students in global digital networks with professionals, peers, citizens,
and experts from diverse contexts; challenge students to negotiate and build shared learning cultures across
diverse boundaries; and provide students with new opportunities for civic engagement in a global context.
However, these are not only the only changes calling for new partnerships. They also play an increasingly
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important role for technical communication programs amid current globalization processes in higher
education, especially the inclusion of higher education in new global trade agreements.
Given these changes and the increasing importance of partnerships, we then examine how technical
communication faculty and programs position themselves amid globalization and specifically how they use
partnerships for this purpose. Drawing on an exploratory CPTSC-supported study of program partnerships,
the second part of the article analyzes emerging trends in technical communication program partnerships: the
priority technical communication faculty and departments assign to such partnerships, the purposes and
missions for which they pursue such partnerships, the activities that constitute their partnerships, and some of
the challenges they encounter in building and maintaining their partnerships. From this analysis, we develop
an early description of emerging global partnerships in technical communication programs, provide insights
for technical communication programs interested in developing such partnerships, suggest directions for the
field to facilitate such program partnerships, and offer questions for future research that arose from our
exploratory study.
SITUATING TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION PROGRAMS IN THE CONTEXT OF
GLOBALIZATION
Globalization is a highly complex phenomenon and has complex implications for the literacies
technical communicators must develop (Hawisher & Selfe, 1999; Huckin, 2002; Starke-Meyerring, 2005)—
surely too complex to be addressed exhaustively in this article. Nevertheless, to contextualize global program
partnerships, we briefly explain how we use the term globalization and illustrate two key ways in which
globalization affects technical communication programs: first, through the changed workplace and
community environments in which technical communicators find themselves, and second, through the direct
impact globalization has had on higher education and thus on technical communication programs.
A highly contested term with many different and often ideologically charged meanings, globalization
is often defined from multiple perspectives, including economic perspectives (Stiglitz, 2002), ideological
perspectives (e.g., Rupert 2000), cultural perspectives (Appadurai; 2001; Jameson & Miyoshi, 2001), or
political perspectives (Ougaard, 2004). Regardless of the specific focus or perspective, however, current
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globalization processes have a concrete material basis: they are characterized by a revolutionary shift in the
means of production, i.e., the use of the Internet for the globally distributed production and delivery of
services. Services are not simply produced for more customers, but they are produced in different ways. No
longer do services have to be produced where they are consumed. For the first time, they are produced in
global networks that allow service producers to take advantage of the most favourable production conditions
around the world, e.g., in terms of labor costs, labor rights, environmental regulations, and other policies. In
addition, the Internet provides new opportunities for the worldwide sale and marketing of services that were
not available before.
According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2004), this tradability
revolution has led to an unprecedented surge in the transnationalization or globalization of corporations, in
particular in the service sector. With services constituting the largest part of most industrialized economies,
the change resulting from this tradability revolution has wide ranging consequences, affecting all
professionals, including technical communicators in the workplace and faculty in higher education. To a
large extent, from this perspective, globalization is about the policy changes needed to take advantage of the
Internet as a new globally distributed means of production—changes that are being advanced or resisted
locally and globally by existing and emerging players.
Implications of globalization for technical communication in workplace and community environments
Both as workplace professionals and as citizens, technical communicators increasingly experience a
radically changed communication environment as a result of globalization. As workplace professionals,
technical communicators experience this global distribution in a number of ways: through increased work in
globally distributed teams resulting from the global distribution of their tasks and those of their colleagues in
other professions; the direct engagement of diverse customers and other stakeholders in digital networks; the
influence of local and global policies, agreements, and corporate practices on their work; the changing
political roles of TNCs and customer expectations of these roles; and a resulting extended sense of
citizenship.
5
As their work and that of their colleagues in other professions, e.g. of engineers, translators, etc., is
distributed more globally, technical communicators increasingly work in cross-functional, globally
distributed teams (e.g., Bernhardt, 1999) with professionals from various professional, cultural, linguistic,
national, and ethnical backgrounds. In collaborating with their increasingly diverse colleagues, technical
communicators must be able to build shared virtual team spaces, exploring and weaving together a diverse
range of local cultural, linguistic, organizational, and professional contexts in ways that allow for developing
trusting relationships and for sharing knowledge across multiple boundaries.
Technical communicators also increasingly interact in global digital networks with their users for
whom they have traditionally written manuals and online help files. These users are also taking advantage of
the Internet as a global network to address problems, voice opinions, and rate products. For example, at
averatecforums.com, a user-organized unofficial support forum, nearly 2500 customers from different
countries, including Japan, Indonesia, Iraq, Russia, Italy, Germany, the UK, Venezuela, Chile, Mexico, the
United States, and Canada, discuss their problems and questions about Averatec computers in public for all
potential future customers to see. While technical communicators may in the past have focused on writing
their documentation for a local audience, though at a distance, and perhaps for translation down the road,
they must now quickly and effectively engage users from multiple and mixed backgrounds in the various
global networks in which they come together. The way technical communicators engage such a forum can
mean the difference between a showcase of disgruntled, dissatisfied customers and a fan forum of passionate
supporters.
As citizens both in their workplace and in their communities, technical communicators also
experience the social and political changes that accompany the globally distributed production and delivery
of services as they are being advanced by governments and corporations. To facilitate the use of the Internet
as a means of global service production and delivery, governments and corporations have created global
institutions and agreements, most notably the World Trade Organization (WTO) with its General Agreement
on Trade in Services (GATS). Adopted in 1995, this agreement is designed to remove local policies in the
149 WTO member countries that could possibly restrict or impede the globally distributed production and
sale of services, including technical communication services. The agreement is built around an agenda of
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“progressive liberalization,” which means that each round of negotiations must lead to the removal of more
local policies in more service sectors from local service markets to pave the way for the global production
and distribution of services.
The proposed changes to local policies for global trade in services are far reaching, affecting 160
service sectors, including such vital services as water, health, transportation, food, communication, and
education services. In essence, countries are expected to increasingly open their markets to service providers
from WTO member countries, to treat service providers and consumers from those countries equally, and to
treat them as equal to local service providers and consumers. This “national treatment” includes, for
example, the way service providers are subsidized and regulated, or the way foreign and local service
consumers are charged for services. To provide only a few examples, according to the agreement, in higher
education, differential tuition fees for foreign and local students would disadvantage foreign service
consumers. Similarly, once a service such as technical communication services is committed to national
treatment under the GATS, countries must ensure that service providers from WTO member countries have
the same access to local markets under the same conditions as local service providers.
Although the changes brought about by global organizations and agreements can have far-reaching
implications for local communities, currently, citizens have little direct input on these policies and
agreements. Unlike local governments, which may be subject to freedom-of-information laws, global
organizations currently are not subject to such transparency. In fact, WTO negotiations, for example, usually
take place behind closed doors, and the requests for local market access countries make of each other usually
remain confidential. As massive demonstrations during such negotiations attest, however, the changes
advanced by these organizations are highly contested.
To participate in shaping this emerging global order, new civil society organizations and new
practices of citizen participation are emerging, giving rise to what political scientists have referred to as an
emerging global civil society with changing boundaries of citizenship (e.g., Jenson & Papillon, 2002;
Muetzelfeldt & Smith, 2002). According to Jenson & Papillon (2002) and Muetzelfeldt & Smith (2002), the
relationships that constitute the core of citizenship—those between citizens and governance institutions as
well as those among citizens—are changing dramatically as they increasingly extend across nations and
7
include global governance institutions. As Muetzelfeldt and Smith (2002) explain, “modes of political action
are developing across national boundaries in response to global governance and policy issues” (p. 59).
Accordingly, the number of associations, social movements, and civil society organizations has risen
dramatically in recent years, and increasingly, they operate not between nations—internationally, but rather
across nations—transnationally. Civil Society or Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), for example, have
grown from less than 10,000 before 1980 to more than 45,000 now (Union of International Organizations, as
cited in Tapscott & Ticoll, 2003, p. 190).
As a result, with local communities increasingly being influenced by global governance institutions
and policies as well as by policies and practices in other countries (e.g., labor laws, environmental
regulations), local deliberation and engagement alone will not suffice to influence these policies and
practices. As JoAnn Hackos notes, for technical communicators this means that in order to advance their
field and profession in light of emerging global corporate and governance practices, technical communicators
“need to promote professionalism worldwide and work for higher wages in the field everywhere” (as cited in
Giammona, 2004, p. 355). Such worldwide engagement may be particularly important for technical
communicators since their field is one that usually accompanies the rise of technology-intensive knowledge
societies. As a result, therefore, the field has begun to emerge in countries around the world, and with this
emergence, the accompanying struggle for professional and disciplinary status plays out repeatedly across
locations.
Technical communicators participate in the emerging global civil society not only as members of
their professions and their communities, but also increasingly as employees of TNCs. TNCs especially in the
services industry have grown both in numbers and in economic power; many of them now have larger
economies than most countries (Institute for Policy Studies, 2000). As a result, they are important members
of many local communities around the world and are increasingly expected to make global corporate
citizenship one of their core missions. Increasingly, investors, customers, and other stakeholders demand
“triple bottom-line accounting,” considering not only financial but also social and environmental
performance. In recent years, corporations have therefore seen an increase in socially responsible investing
(SRI), an investment strategy that considers the financial as well as the social and environmental
8
consequences of investments. In the U.S., for example, the professionally managed assets involved in SRI
rose from $40 million in 1984 to $639 billion in 1995 and to $2.16 trillion in 2003 (Social Investment
Forum, 2003, p. 2). Moreover, shareholders increasingly file and vote on social resolutions to influence
corporate practices regarding labor rights, health, diversity, and environmental protection as well as on
crossover resolutions to link social and environmental performance to corporate governance, including
executive pay.
In addition, TNCs have increasingly been influenced by civil society organizations to achieve social
and environmental performance objectives. As Tapscott and Ticoll (2003) observe, "countless companies …
have changed their products and services, altered labor and employment practices, and even redefined core
business strategies in response to NGO recommendations or action campaigns" (p. 191). As examples
Tapscott and Ticoll mention the case of Home Depot being forced by an environmental group to discontinue
the use of old-growth Amazon lumber or Nike being forced to set labor standards in production facilities
around the world. In fact, as Tapscott and Ticoll explain, many TNCs (e.g. Shell, BP, Chiquita, Ford, HP,
GM) now partner with NGOs to demonstrate their alignment with stakeholder interest in social and
environmental performance. Moreover, research conducted by NGOs, such as the Worldlife Fund or the
famous scorecards of the Environmental Defense Fund, serves the SRI industry in making decisions about
the social and environmental performance of TNCs. And beyond NGOs, customers and other stakeholders
now easily organize in digital networks such as gapsucks.org across nations to engage companies; question
their products, services, and practices; or boycott them altogether.
For technical communicators, all of these changes have a number of complex implications. First,
many of these emerging global citizenship practices happen in digital networks, again requiring technical
communicators to directly engage diverse audiences in shared online spaces across multiple boundaries.
Second, the changes involve a different sense of citizenship for technical communicators both as citizens in
their various communities and as employees of TNCs, where global corporate citizenship is increasingly
becoming part of the core mission. This new sense of citizenship also includes an understanding of emerging
global governance and civil society institutions and their local-global interplay. As globalization researchers
Suárez-Orozco and Qin-Hilliard (2004) observe, “while human lives continue to be lived in local realities,
9
these realities are increasingly being challenged and integrated into larger global networks of relationships”
(p. 2). Third, as a result of the ideologically highly contested social changes involved in globalization, the
work of technical communicators is more politicized than ever before, and they increasingly need to engage a
greater variety of stakeholders with a greater variety of interests than just “using” products or services. Most
importantly, whether they work with colleagues in globally distributed teams, with customers in online
customer-organized forums, or with fellow professionals and citizens to advance their professional and local
communities, their communication happens increasingly in global digital networks. In these networks, direct
engagement with a greater variety of individuals who frequently do not share any cultural contexts becomes
the norm rather than only a possibility.
These social changes hold a number of complex implications technical communication programs
might consider in designing learning environments that prepare technical communicators for global work and
citizenship. Learning environments that reflect the changing context of globalization will most likely exhibit
these characteristics:

First, such learning environments will be globally networked. As corporate, customer, and public
communication increasingly happen in global networks, so must learning in technical
communication programs. For this purpose, partnerships enable programs to offer open and
globally networked learning environments that extend beyond the confines of local classrooms.

Second, these networked learning environments will be systematically designed to foster the
kinds of literacies technical communicators need to develop for global work and citizenship
(Huckin, 2002; Hawisher & Selfe, 1999; Starke-Meyerring, 2005). These literacies cannot any
more be left up to chance encounters through international study programs.

Third, these learning environments will allow for experiential learning opportunities.
Communication in global digital networks cannot be adequately addressed by isolated discussions
of textbook chapters on “international technical communication.”

Fourth, these experiential learning opportunities in global digital networks will be systematically
integrated into the technical communication curriculum. Traditional experiential learning
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opportunities such as study-abroad experiences—while invaluable, often are not tightly integrated
into the technical communication curriculum.

Fifth, these experiential learning opportunities will be part of the curriculum for all students.
Given the extent to which instantaneous communication with increasingly diverse audiences has
become the norm in digital networks, such experiential learning opportunities cannot be considered
an optional separate add-on experience only for the 0.2 % of undergraduate students who do
participate in study-abroad programs (Altbach, 2004a).

Sixth, such learning environments will link local with global learning in the curriculum rather
than separate these learning experiences into regular local curriculum and separate international or
other community experiences.
Surely, there are many more implications; however, these points begin to illustrate that creating globally
networked learning environments for their students is nearly an impossible task for programs to accomplish
on their own. In fact, the nature of communication in global digital networks requires extensive global
partnership work.
Implications of Globalization for Technical Communication Programs and Higher Education
As technical communication programs build their global partnership networks, they knowingly or
unknowingly participate in the globalization of higher education. In higher education, this changing
environment includes the reconceptualization of higher education as a service that is subject to global trade
agreements, which are designed to accelerate the global distribution of services, in particular the General
Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) currently being negotiated by the WTO. The GATS negotiations
are designed to remove trade barriers or so-called trade-distorting effects of local public policies for service
industries— a process called "trade liberalization" in the language of the WTO. Trade barriers can include
any government regulation that restricts market access in a given country, ranging from government
subsidies of a specific industry to import restrictions or tariffs on specific goods or services. Potential trade
barriers in higher education, according to the United States Negotiating Proposal, include national policies
and laws that involve the "prohibition of higher education … offered by foreign entities," "inappropriate
11
restrictions on electronic transmission of course materials," or "measures requiring the use of a local partner"
to name only a few. For example, regarding China, the United States has requested the removal of
government restrictions on for-profit higher education (ACE, 2004). Because the WTO considers education a
tradable service, higher education, including professional communication programs, are subject to this
agreement.
The inclusion of higher education in the GATS has been advanced predominantly by ministries of
trade and commerce, not of education, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand,
and Australia. In the United States, the Department of Commerce, Office of the Trade Representative, for
example, developed the U.S. Negotiating Proposal for global trade in higher education in close collaboration
with the National Committee for International Trade in Education (NCITE), a lobbying group consisting
mostly of for-profit education providers such as the University of Phoenix, Jones International University,
Sylvan Learning, Educational Testing Service, and others.
In contrast, the inclusion of higher education in the GATS has been opposed by education
associations representing public and private nonprofit higher education institutions worldwide. The
American Council on Education (ACE) and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), for
example, joined with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) and the European
University Association to sign a Joint Declaration on Higher Education and the General Agreement on
Trade in Services. In this declaration, the organizations urge their respective governments not to commit
higher education services or the related categories of adult and other education services to the GATS. As the
signatories state, "higher education is not a 'commodity'…. The mission of higher education is to contribute
to the sustainable development and improvement of society as a whole…" (p. 1).
In addition, ACE and CHEA have repeatedly sent letters to the U.S. Trade Representative in an
effort to keep higher education out of global trade negotiations. For example, David Ward, President of ACE,
in a letter signed by more than 20 educational organizations together representing every public and private,
two- and four-year college and university in the United States, argues that "in an effort to open certain
markets for the relatively small proprietary higher education services sector, the U.S. offer [on higher
education services to the GATS negotiations] will have the unintended consequence of undermining all
12
traditional higher education services in the U.S." (n. p.). In the attachment to the letter, Ward (2003) cites the
example of U.S. public institutions possibly being vulnerable to a charge of violating GATS national
treatment obligations if the institutions grant credit for a course taken at another U.S. institution, but deny
such credit for a similar course taken at a foreign institution.
Overall, the consequences of the GATS for higher education programs are not yet fully understood
(Knight, 2002). Some of the consequences, however, likely include an influx of foreign higher education
providers, especially for-profit ones, into local markets. Here higher education scholars have been
particularly concerned about the agreement facilitating the flow of education predominantly in one direction:
from wealthy English-speaking countries to so-called developing countries (Altbach, 2004b; CarrChellmann, 2004; Marginson, 2004; Stromquist, 2002). The key concern is that well-resourced higher
education providers in the North, especially those who operate in English as the lingua franca of science and
technology, have a huge trade advantage compared to those less well-resourced. Moreover, by being pushed
through the progressive liberalization agenda of the GATS to open their higher education markets,
developing countries may experience an influx of higher education at the same time as they are working to
expand their own higher education systems to meet their local education and research needs. The kind of
global flow of higher education promoted by the GATS, therefore, involves the risk of Northern dominance
and control over education markets in developing countries, which some researchers refer to as the risk of
neo-colonization (Altbach, 2004b; Schugurensky & Davidson-Harden, 2003).
Interestingly, as Marginson (2004) observes, however, this vision of global trade in higher
education—the unfettered sale of higher education courses and programs around the world like bananas or
fast food burgers—has not borne out so far. Marginson notes that many large-scale e-learning initiatives such
as the UK e-University (62 million pounds), Cardean University (Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Columbia,
London School of Economics and Political Science, and University of Chicago business schools) with $100
million initial investment, and Universitas 21 (a consortium of research universities from Europe, North
America, Australia, and Asia) were developed to meet the growing higher education needs in Asia and other
regions. Despite large amounts of public and private investment, however, most of these initiatives have
failed or have not been able to attract the large numbers of students worldwide they had expected. While
13
some may argue that the GATS has not been in place long enough, Marginson points to such reasons as
lacking technological infrastructures, lacking innovations in teaching methods, the monocultural and
monolingual nature of the curricula, their lack of sensitivity to local contexts and needs, and the power
asymmetries between foreign providers and local educators and administrators (p. 77). Instead of the global
trade or banana vision of higher education, Marginson argues that “the key is cultural respect, expressed in
long-term partnerships with nationally-based agencies and local/ regional institutions, that are conducted on
the basis of equality and reciprocity” (p. 110). These two aspects—cultural sensitivity and equality, then are
two additional important characteristics of globally networked learning environments and of the partnerships
that sustain them.
As these developments show, in this changing context of global higher education, global partnerships
become increasingly important, and they can provide alternatives to the emerging global trade paradigm—
alternatives that engage programs, students, and faculty in shared learning environments, research projects,
and civic engagement initiatives that allow all participants to learn from each other, develop global literacies,
and benefit from their engagement equally. The ways in which technical communication programs position
themselves amid globalization and the kinds of partnerships they develop for this purpose, then involve
political decisions that reflect the context of the increasing commercialization of higher education (Faber &
Johnson-Eilola, 2005). These decisions can mean the difference between global trade for profit and global
literacies for mutual learning and understanding that advance local communities. In this way, partnerships
also present opportunities for program and faculty agency in shaping the globalization of higher education.
POSITIONING TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION PROGRAMS IN THE GLOBAL ARENA:
EMERGING TRENDS IN GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Given these changes both in the workplace and in higher education as well as the growing
importance of partnerships, in this second part of our article, we analyze emerging trends in partnership
development in technical communication programs—the priorities faculty and departments assign to them,
the purposes and activities they pursue, and the challenges they face. Understanding these partnerships will
14
help us advance their development and hence opportunities for students to develop global literacies, while
also identifying sustainable models that provide alternatives to global trade in higher education through
collaboration, sharing, and mutual enrichment.
Methodological Approach
Since these partnerships are relatively recent developments and have therefore not been researched
very much, the purpose of this study was exploratory. Specifically, our purpose was to gain early insights
into these emerging partnerships as programs begin to position themselves in a global higher education
context. Accordingly, our methodology is predominantly based on an exploratory Web-based survey
(Appendix A).
The purpose of this survey was to gain insights into the role that global partnerships currently play in
technical communication, how common they are, the priority that faculty and programs assign to them, the
purposes they pursue with them, the challenges they have encountered, and the challenges that keep others
from engaging in such partnerships. For this purpose, we received permission to distribute the URL for the
web-based survey in individualized email messages to members of the Council for Programs in Technical
and Scientific Communication (CPTSC). Our rationale for approaching CPTSC members was twofold: First,
the CPTSC addresses programmatic issues in particular, so that members share a particular interest in
program development. Second, although we may have focused on department chairpersons, we chose instead
to contact all CPTSC members, thus including both administrators and faculty because oftentimes global
partnerships, especially those directed at collaborative curriculum projects, are initiated by individual faculty.
By contacting both faculty and administrators with an interest in program development, we were able to
obtain a richer perspective of emerging trends in partnership development.
We emailed the survey URL to all of the email addresses on the CPTSC member list, of which 256
were still valid. Of these members, 81 responded, resulting in a response rate of roughly 30%. Most of our
survey respondents identified themselves as faculty, and 28 identified themselves as administrators (figure
1). All together, these respondents described 64 programs.
INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE
15
In addition, to better understand some of the emerging trends, especially the purposes faculty and
programs pursue with their partnerships, we also draw on six 30-60-minute semi-structured phone interviews
with selected individual faculty and department heads who had initiated such partnerships. For these
interviews, we selected survey respondents representing the range of initiatives that emerged from our
survey. As we discuss below, from our survey we discovered that different partnerships pursued different
purposes and focused on different aspects of their missions. While some focused heavily on research, others
focused on teaching, and yet others saw civic engagement as their guiding purpose. We chose 1 or 2 faculty
for each purpose. Likewise, our survey had indicated that partnerships are being initiated at different levels—
oftentimes by faculty as well as by department heads. Again, we selected interviewees for additional insights
that represented both types of origins. In addition, our interviewees represented well-established partnerships
in the sense that they had been working on them for several years and had worked with more than one
partner, so that they were able to provide experienced insight. We based our interview questions on an earlier
framework for partnership development (Duin & Starke-Meyerring, 2003), here focusing on questions
related to the vision for the partnership, partnership activities, and the challenges it faced.
Again, the purpose of our research was not to provide a complete description or analysis of all
partnerships currently underway. Such an analysis would be beyond the scope of this article. Rather, our
purpose was to understand emerging trends and to gain early insights into the development of these
partnerships, what missions or visions they are pursuing in a globalizing context, the kinds of research
questions they raise, what insights other programs might already glean from these partnerships as they
embark on partnership development as well, and the ways in which the field may perhaps facilitate these
partnerships.
CURRENT PARTNERSHIPS: FREQUENCY AND PRIORITY
To understand the current situation in partnership development, we asked how many such
partnerships currently exist or are in the planning stages, and for those faculty and departments that were not
planning them, an indication of the current interest level. Surprisingly, the vast majority of survey
respondents either mentioned an existing or planned partnership initiative or expressed interest in such an
16
initiative (see figure 1). Altogether, 41 or roughly two thirds of the 64 programs that were described,
indicated some level of commitment to or interest in such partnerships either at the department or faculty
level. Fifteen programs indicated that they currently maintain such a partnership at various stages, eight
indicated that they are planning such a partnership, and 18 expressed an interest in developing such a
partnership.
INSERT FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE.
Interestingly, we sometimes received conflicting responses from members of the same department.
While some respondents from a department indicated that there was a partnership, others thought there was a
partnership in the planning phase, and yet others thought that there was no partnership initiative at all. In
some cases, the department chair or a faculty member had begun planning or initiating a partnership initiative
of which other respondents from the department were not yet aware. This divergence in responses from
department members indicates that these partnerships are often initiated from the bottom up—at the
grassroots level and sometimes by individual faculty only, with little knowledge of other faculty or
administrators in the same program. In such cases, given our interest in the range of both individual faculty
curriculum and program partnerships, we took the response from the individual who indicated that there was
a partnership to mean that somewhere in the department, there was indeed a partnership emerging or in place.
To gain a fuller understanding of the role global partnerships currently play in technical
communication programs, we asked respondents to indicate the priority they assigned to global partnerships
in program development. Because partnerships emerge at different levels—sometimes initiated by individual
faculty and sometimes by department heads, we also asked what priority respondents perceived their
departments assigned to these partnerships.
Overall, respondents indicated that they personally assigned a higher priority to these partnerships
than did their corresponding departments (figure 3). This discrepancy between individual and perceived
department priority may result from a self-selection bias since the survey was conducted over the Web, and
those faculty with an interest in such partnerships may have felt interested in the topic and as a result may
have chosen to respond. Regardless, however, the results show that those who consider global partnerships
important do not necessarily perceive a supportive atmosphere from their departments.
17
INSERT FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE
MISSIONS AND ACTIVITIES OF PARTNERSHIPS
What missions do emerging global partnerships pursue and what activities constitute these partnerships?
Perhaps not surprisingly, partnerships are usually designed to support one or more of the key missions of
departments and institutions—teaching, research, or service. Many of them touch on all three aspects, and
sometimes partnerships may emerge for one particular purpose, for example, for teaching and learning.
However, as they develop their partnered learning environments, faculty often find that their work provides
rich opportunities for research, so that they often continue to collaborate on research presentations and
publications as a result of their shared teaching work. Here we illustrate how partnerships define their
missions in the three areas—teaching, research, and service, and what activities they pursue to achieve their
mission. What is perhaps surprising is the diversity of approaches and the creativity with which faculty and
administrators pursue the systematic integration of a global perspective and experiential learning
opportunities into their courses and programs.
Teaching—Course and Program Development
In support of a department’s teaching mission, partnerships are often developed by faculty in order to
share curriculum development and to design—increasingly Internet-facilitated—learning environments and
projects that provide students with experiential opportunities to engage in intercultural collaboration through
shared discussion forums, small course projects, or semester-long virtual team projects. These partnerships
tend to be two-way or multiple-way partnerships in which knowledge, experience, and perspectives flow
equally in all directions, so that all participating partners learn from each other. They usually involve a large
number of students, typically all students in a course or course section, and they often develop innovative
collaborative, intercultural pedagogies.
One such partnership, for example, is the Transatlantic Project, an Internet network between
technical communication courses in the Technical Communication program at the University of WisconsinStout and translation courses at various European universities, including the Université Paris 7 (France), the
Hogeschool Gent (Belgium), the Handelshøjskolen i Århus (Denmark), the Universität Graz (Austria), and
18
the Università degli Studi di Trieste (Italy). Initiated in 1999 by Bruce Maylath of the University of
Wisconsin-Stout and his colleague Sonia Vandepitte of the Hogeschool Gent, the partnership originally
linked students in their two courses through an electronic collaboration project in which students in the
technical communication course at the University of Wisconsin-Stout wrote a set of instructions that was
translated by the translation students at the Hogeschool Gent. Since then, the partnership has expanded to all
sections of the course at Wisconsin-Stout and to translation courses at other European universities, now
including 13 instructors and 200-300 students in six countries in a given semester.
Through the project, the students learn how to collaborate both cross-functionally and crossculturally and how to facilitate that collaboration, for example, by developing terminology glossaries, and
perhaps most importantly, by questioning the cultural assumptions of their texts, recognizing the diverse and
situated needs of their different target audiences, and recognizing the ambiguity of their language choices. As
Bruce Maylath notes, the value of the partnership is exactly this student exchange—their efforts to negotiate
appropriate rhetorical choices for different audiences in different cultural contexts: “The value of this
partnership is what happens in-between; it’s the commentary between the students—what the students learn
from each other about their cultures and lifestyles.” And as he notes, the experiential nature of this learning
environment is key to facilitating this learning: “the cross-cultural collaboration is real.”
A similar emphasis on networked, experiential learning characterizes the Global Classroom
Partnership, a networked learning environment for graduate and undergraduate students in a course on digital
communication at the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of
Technology and in English courses at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the European University at St.
Petersburg (Russia), Volgograd State University (Russia), and the Blekinge Institute of Technology,
Karlskrona (Sweden). Piloted in 2000 after a Fulbright exchange at the European University in St.
Petersburg, the partnership is designed to provide an experiential learning environment for intercultural
digital communication. As TyAnna Herrington, one of the project’s co-directors notes, the project is
motivated by “the drive to connect people globally, to help them learn how to communicate with each other,
understand each other, and ultimately do whatever possible to strengthen peaceful relationships between
people from diverse cultural contexts.”
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Consequently, according to Herrington, the objective of the partnership project is “to teach students
how to examine issues in cross-cultural digital communication and more specifically to learn critical
reasoning from multiple perspectives. Students need to learn how to research and critically analyze
communication together.” For this purpose, the students collaborate in teams over the course of an entire
semester to research and report on digital and print communication strategies, e.g., those used by a TNC to
engage its diverse local stakeholders or those used by the local media in covering a particular current issue of
international significance. So far, roughly 500 students from the partner institutions have participated in this
project. Again, the success of the learning environment rests on its experiential design. As Herrington notes,
“the partnership allows students to experience intercultural digital communication; it provides a forum for
them to learn how to develop a critical cross-cultural literacy through negotiating multiple perspectives. This
is something that cannot be taught; it can only be learned and must be experienced.”
While some partnerships have begun focusing on systematically integrating global literacies into
their courses, others have begun working at the program level, likewise working to systematically integrate
such learning experiences into the curriculum for as many students as possible. For example, the Mechanical
Engineering Communications Program at Purdue University has developed partnerships with local
engineering companies as well as three universities: the Universität Karlsruhe (Germany), Jiao Tong
University in Shanghai (China), and the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay in Mumbai (India). As
one of those involved in shaping the partnership program, Dianne Atkinson notes that one of the key
objectives of the program is to “provide graduates for international companies who can interface among
diverse cultures and lead technical product development for a worldwide market.” For this purpose, the
partnership includes team teaching, faculty exchanges, joint course development (specifically a short course
in engineering communication), student exchanges, and internship placements, the first of which began in
2002. Many of these activities followed once the flagship program—co-located team work during capstone
projects—was put in place. For these projects, students spend a semester in Karlsruhe, Shanghai, or Mumbai
collaborating on an assigned engineering project with local fellow students, who then come to Purdue for
another semester to complete the project. These partnership activities are all designed to provide students
with a portfolio of intercultural learning experiences.
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According to Atkinson, the intercultural aspect of these experiences is key for technical
communicators: “For a technical communicator, the intercultural aspects are especially welcome as they
really put a spotlight on communication skills, at-a-distance communications as well as collaboration and
iteration for quality—really audience analysis writ large.” Students increasingly recognize the value of these
learning experiences as well; for example, a two-work communications course in Shanghai, which required
20 students to be feasible, had 42 applicants. Ten of those students had begun studying Chinese in high
school. The partnership program has also increased the students’ desire to learning foreign languages beyond
their high-school courses. For example, students now enroll in Chinese courses, which had almost no
enrolment from engineering students before. In fact, Purdue is now positioning itself as a school where
students can continue their investment in foreign languages. Again, the experiential design of the learning
opportunities and their systematic integration into the curriculum have been key to the success of the
program. As Atkinson notes, “Historically, engineering had almost no participation in study abroad because
the curriculum is already highly constrained and tightly sequenced. Growing our own programs means that
students do not have additional costs or delay in graduation date.”
A similar emphasis on systematically weaving a global perspective into the program curriculum
characterizes the partnership between the Humanities and Technical Communication Department at Southern
Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia, and the E-Commerce Department at Northeast Normal
University (NENU) in Chanchung, China. NENU had contacted the SPSU Department with a request for
technical communication program development based on the Web presence of the Technical Communication
Department, its reputation, its program description, and the international expertise of its faculty. Specifically,
the E-Commerce Department, which also offers a Bachelor’s program in English, wished to offer a joint
Bachelor’s degree program in technical communication, a field that is not yet very common in China, but
would fit well with the business and technical orientation of the Department. For SPSU, the program also
offers a number of benefits. As Ken Rainey, the Department Chair and partnership coordinator, states:
“Global business and global communication requires students who are trained in a global outlook. So, the
mission is very practical on one level, but also cultural, educational, social, enlightening on another level.”
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Accordingly, as Rainey notes, the partnership program is meant to systematically integrate a global
perspective into the department, foster such a perspective for both students and faculty, and “provide
opportunities for learning from relationships with people from various contexts.” To achieve this purpose,
the two Departments are currently working on a 2+2 degree program in technical communication in which
the NENU students take the first two years of general education, ESL, and writing courses in China and the
last two years of specialized technical communication work at SPSU. For this purpose, SPSU and NENU
faculty are collaborating to develop a curriculum that is sensitive to the local needs of the E-Commerce
Department and meets the students’ needs in China. Since the field of writing, rhetoric, and technical
communication is new to China, the SPSU Department is currently involved in faculty development,
teaching workshops on various technical communication topics for Chinese faculty, inviting their Chinese
colleagues to study technical communication and the teaching of technical communication at SPSU,
designing teaching workshops to sensitize SPSU faculty to their new students, and preparing specialized
courses with the help of SPSU ESL faculty to assist Chinese students in making the cultural and linguistic
transition to life on a university campus in a U.S. city in order to ensure their success in their specialized
program work.
Research and Civic Engagement
While some partnerships begin with a focus on building relationships for teaching, learning, and
program development, others emphasize relationships for research development or civic engagement. The
partnership between the Technical Communication Department at the University of Washington and the
Department of Communication Studies at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, for example, has
developed joint research initiatives as a strong component of their partnership work. Begun in the spring
1997, the partnership developed as a result of a research sabbatical leave of a faculty member from the
University of Twente in the Technical Communication Department at the University of Washington. As Judy
Ramey, Chair of the Technical Communication Department and partnership coordinator, notes, the
partnership was originally designed as “a multidimensional relationship that would help all of our students to
have an international experience.”
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However, as the partnership evolved, joint scholarship has become a strong component of the
partnership, which has become an integral part of the curriculum of both departments as both of them have
Ph.D. programs and are therefore very active in training new researchers in the field. To develop their joint
research work, the program partners began by conducting several summer research institutes held either in
Europe or in the United States in which faculty and graduate students from both departments shared their
research and work on joint on publications. This collaborative work has resulted in several joint publications,
including a joint special issue of Technical Communication co-edited by Thea van der Geest and Jan
Spyridakis as well as a joint special issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication co-edited
by Judy Ramey and Menno de Jong . Accordingly, the criteria for success for this partnership are the
relationships the partnership helps facilitate for research and the scholarly output that results from these
relationships as well as student exchanges and faculty sabbaticals. As Ramey puts it, “the partnership
involves wonderful people, valuable colleagues, who are doing some of the best work that is being done in
the field on the empirical side. They raise the bar and are inspiring.”
Depending on department and institutional needs and visions, partnerships can also be guided by
civic engagement for social justice. For example, the social justice mission of Fairfield University in
Connecticut and the Universidad Centroamericana Nicaragua (UCA) in Managua, Nicaragua, guides all
partnership initiatives between the Fairfield Communication Department and the Professional Writing
Program of the English Department and the UCA Communication Department as well as other departments
involved in the partnership. As David Sapp, one of the partnership program’s coordinators, notes, “the
partnership fits very tightly with the mission of Fairfield University, with its strong focus on promoting
social justice. In fact, the university’s mission was the key reason for choosing the partner, UCA, which has a
similar mission.” The goal of the partnership is to promote social justice through collaboration, to advance
research in shared areas of interest, to share resources with those who are not as well as resourced, and to
integrate study-abroad opportunities into the curriculum to teach students social justice and responsibility.
Although Fairfield students have a long tradition of studying abroad with an average of 75% including an
international experience in their program, most of them have traditionally gone to wealthy Western countries;
few of them so far have specifically studied or worked in a social justice context.
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To pursue these goals, the partnerships consist of a range of activities and plans, including joint
research for social justice, which greatly enhances the research focus on Latin American Studies as well as
emerging issues of globalization and immigration in many Fairfield departments, including the
Communication Department and the Professional Writing Program of the English Department. The
partnership also includes educational technology workshops and access to Fairfield databases for UCA
faculty. In addition, the partnership includes joint teaching and program development initiatives. For
example, David Sapp is developing a course on “Business and Technical Writing in the Global Economy,”
which he will be teaching to both UCA and Fairfield students via the Internet and during his sabbatical work
in Nicaragua. Future plans include the joint development of a Master’s degree in health communication and
possibly extending the partnership to include NGOs working for social justice in Nicaragua as well.
UNICEF, for example, has expressed interest in sponsoring a health communication certificate with a focus
on HIV/AIDS.
As these examples illustrate, technical communication faculty and programs have developed a great
variety of creative and innovative partnerships to position their programs amid globalization by partnering
with programs and organizations for research, teaching, and service work. Despite this variety, however,
these emerging partnerships share a number of characteristics: They build relationships and networks that
link their students and faculty to contexts that provide enriched collaborative learning, research, and civic
engagement opportunities. In particular, they provide students and faculty with new opportunities for
collaborative inquiry into diverse and distant perspectives and practices of communication, thus facilitating a
better understanding of how local practices contribute to and are increasingly influenced by emerging global
networks of relationships (Suárez-Orozco and Qin-Hillard, 2004). The partnerships that are emerging are not
leaving such opportunities up to chance but are designing experiential learning environments for this purpose
and are systematically integrating them into technical communication curricula, research, and service work
for the benefit of as many students, faculty, and citizens as possible.
In addition, the partnerships reflect Marginson’s (2004) call for long-term partnerships that are
characterized by cultural respect and a deep concern for equality and reciprocity. This concern may be
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particularly important for partnerships in technical communication because as an emerging discipline, field
of study, or degree program, technical communication has developed unevenly and is therefore positioned
differently in different countries (Hennig & Tjarks-Sobhani, 2004). In some countries, for example, technical
communication is approached from a more linguistic rather than rhetorical perspective, or only technical
degrees or certificates may be available with a focus on the technicalities of Web development. In yet others,
technical communication is absent, while in others, it is just now emerging. In this way, the field differs
decidedly from long established fields such as biology, chemistry, or physics, which have long traditions in
many countries. Our early snapshot indicates that emerging global partnerships are eager to respond to
requests for technical communication program development that meet local needs and enrich programs for
all participating partners as well as to work with other programs in interdisciplinary ways.
The emerging nature of the field may contribute to the deep concern by those who engage in global
partnerships about ensuring equal contributions, mutual benefits, and shared control over the partnership. All
our interviewees expressed such concerns. To provide only a few examples, Ken Rainey, whose partnership
involves extensive faculty development both in China and in his Department, notes, “we greatly value the
contributions of our Chinese partner—faculty and students—to our program culture.” TyAnna Herrington
also notes that “equality is a guiding principle of the partnership” and that sometimes ensuring this equality
involves counteracting cultural stereotypes, including for example “the stereotype of U.S. Americans to
impose their wishes on others and to dominate.” Similarly, David Sapp notes that UCA and Fairfield make
important contributions to each other’s research and curriculum development in pursuing their missions
jointly. As Sapp (2004) notes, this emphasis on mutual benefit is particularly important when one partner is
less well resourced.
These partnerships thus also advance the field of technical communication in a number of ways. For
example, they directly support the development of technical communication programs in other countries and
thus the field as an important area for scholarly inquiry. In addition, partnering faculty and programs develop
innovative pedagogies that reflect and take advantage of the global-network nature of communication in the
context of globalization. They also use technologies to take advantage of interdisciplinary learning and
research opportunities, thus advancing the interdisciplinarity of the field of technical communication on a
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global scale. Finally, in the context of globalizing higher education as a whole, these partnerships reflect a
vision of globalization in higher education that is characterized by innovative pedagogies, cultural sensitivity,
mutual learning, and equality—a vision that differs decidedly from the global trade vision of higher
education characterized by the one-way sale of higher education unconstrained by local cultural needs or
policies.
CHALLENGES—QUESTIONING ASSUMPTIONS
Despite their important contributions, as an emerging phenomenon, these partnerships face a number
of challenges. To glean some early insights into these challenges, we asked survey respondents engaged in
partnerships to identify them (figure 4), and we also asked those not yet engaged in partnerships to identify
the challenges that kept them from doing so (figure 5). Again, given the exploratory nature of our study, we
did not provide a set of possible categories to check, but rather invited open comments, grouped them around
emerging themes, and counted the frequency with which a particular type of challenge was mentioned.
INSERT FIGURES 4 AND 5 ABOUT HERE
Those engaged in global partnerships face a wide range of challenges (table 1), including—in the
order of frequency—lack of resources, logistical challenges, quality assurance concerns, cultural differences,
language issues, organizational issues, and a political climate that can make the development of partnerships
with colleagues and departments in some countries difficult. Those not yet engaged in partnerships similarly
identified resources most frequently as a challenge. Interestingly, the additional challenges that keep faculty
from engaging in global partnerships differ from the actual challenges encountered by those already engaged
in such partnerships. While concerns over logistics and quality occupy those engaged in current partnerships,
concerns regarding local institutional and disciplinary cultures largely keep faculty and programs from
initiating such partnerships. The key areas of concern for such partnerships, then, may well be resources and
the role of local disciplinary and institutional cultures.
INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
Resources: Questioning Budget Allocations around Traditional Learning Models
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Resources are the most frequently mentioned challenge by both those who are engaged in
partnerships and those who are not. Those who are engaged in global partnerships consistently mentioned the
large time investment that is required to build and sustain a partnership, to maintain the daily commitment to
make it succeed, especially if regular interactions or a large number of stakeholders are involved. Resources
are needed for release time to develop partnership initiatives; to support student and faculty travel in the case
of exchange programs; to pay for technologies, e.g., for videoconferencing; to fund travel to the partner site;
to plan events, such as research workshops; or to develop networked learning environments and shared
curricula.
At first sight, it may indeed seem that there are simply insufficient resources for partnership
development. As survey respondents mentioned, the public disinvestment in higher education has reduced
budgets, increasingly replaced full-time tenure-track faculty with non-tenure-track part-time faculty lecturers,
and intensified the struggle over resources. As one respondent noted, “we are a relatively small program with
approximately 80 students and 2 tenure/tenure track faculty along with several excellent lecturers. The time
and effort it will take to build the program—combined with a lack of institutional benefits—is a bit
daunting.” Similarly, another respondent observed, “there would be some interest, but severe time constraints
due to state funding cutbacks don't allow attention in this area.” Another respondent emphasized the need for
funding to reduce faculty teaching loads: “Small program = only a minor and emphasis right now. No time!
We teach 4/4 and have not even discussed the idea of partnerships in our program. Still...one day we might
consider it.”
A deeper look, however, suggests that the resource challenge may well be indicative of the ways in
which these partnerships question assumptions about learning and about institutional processes (CargileCook & Grant-Davie, 2005). First, since one of the central goals of these partnerships is to systematically
and consistently integrate global learning into local classrooms and program curricula, they run into
budgeting and other institutional processes that are built around the traditional model of learning according to
which such learning is an “add-on,” occasional experience that is considered separate from the regular
curriculum. Accordingly, institutional resources in support of global initiatives often reside in a Central or
Collegiate office of Global Learning or Learning Abroad. While such offices largely support faculty and
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student exchanges, these as well as curriculum development efforts are typically considered a separate, addon expense and are consequently funded as such for limited terms—through external and/or university
grants. In the same way that distance education efforts are often seen as a “bolt-on” or overload effort, global
partnerships have rarely been an embedded part of a curriculum and assigned hard funding.
Second, these emerging partnerships differ from institutional partnerships especially with regard to
their origin, which is often the grassroots level. As a result of easy communication facilitated by the Internet,
such partnerships are commonly formed by faculty based on personal relationships that go back to college
friendships or on conversations at conferences or other networking activities. Or they are initiated by
potential partners via the Internet. As Bruce Maylath puts it, “our partnerships are established at the
grassroots between interested instructors with little to no funding.” As such, they begin as what Ken Rainey
calls “handshake partnerships.”
On the one hand, for the purpose of shared curriculum and program development, research, and civic
engagement, this grassroots theme is important because trust built through personal relationships is the key to
the successful negotiation of the many boundaries—institutional, national, professional, disciplinary,
cultural—across which partners work on a daily basis. Their grassroots origin also ensures faculty ownership
and commitment to their development. As Herrington and Tretyakov (2005) explain, “recognizing that the
budding project began at a grassroots level is essential to understanding its nature and its development. Many
international or inter-institutional projects begin with a cooperation agreement signed by the heads of two
institutions and slowly wither for lack of enthusiasts willing to work along lines directed by others.” As the
authors observe, the grassroots origin of the partnership “ensured a broad ‘popular’ foundation for the
ongoing work and eventually made the project credible enough to qualify for institutional support” (p. 268).
On the other hand, to be sustainable in the long term, these partnerships must be integrated into local
institutional planning processes. As bottom-up, faculty-driven initiatives, however, these partnerships often
do not fall within an institution’s plan for strategic top-down inter-institutional partnerships. As a result,
these emerging, faculty-driven partnerships may not be considered in institutional processes, procedures, and
mechanisms for planning and associated resource allocation. However, it is these partnerships that provide
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thousands of students with experiential learning opportunities that are specifically designed for global
literacies and systematically integrated into their curricula.
Disciplinary and Institutional Cultures
While resources were identified as the main challenge in partnership development both by those who
are engaged in partnerships and by those who are not, other challenges identified differed between the two
groups (see figure 5 and table 2). Interestingly, the next most frequently mentioned challenge that keeps
faculty from developing global partnerships was the local institutional culture and disciplinary situatedness
of technical communication programs.
INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE
With regard to their local institutional culture, respondents mentioned a lack of understanding of
global influences and global literacies. As one respondent put it, “the vision of my department is restricted to
local influences. Even though we have major global businesses within five miles of the campus, college
officials do not see or care to see any advantage to building partnerships with any aspect of the global
community.” Similarly, another respondent observed, “while our program is certainly an effective one, the
faculty are still defining the program and its priorities, [with] global literacy coming near the bottom of the
list. Personally, I think it's a touch short-sighted as even though we're located in a small and landlocked
state, our state is home to a number of large and small global companies.”
As a part of institutional cultures, the disciplinary situatedness of technical communication programs
is particularly important given that technical communication is an emerging discipline and perhaps more of
an interdiscipline rather than a discipline. As Herrington and Tretyakov (2005) point out,
Technical communication … is taught in departments across a broad spectrum, including
Engineering, Medicine, Communication, English, Mass Communication, Language,
Literature and Culture, Communication Planning and Information Design, Multimedia,
Texts and Technology, Computing, and Human Computer Interface, among others. Not only
does the influence of the fields in these varying departments affect instructors’ choice of
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research and pedagogy, but the administrative support for course content, technology access,
space provision, and tenure processes mediates the kind of research and teaching that is done
under the umbrella of ‘technical communication.’ (p. 278)
It is not surprising then that the disciplinary situatedness of technical communication programs also
influences the development of global partnerships. While some respondents found, for example, that their
location in English departments, especially those with a strong focus on comparative literature, inspired a
global perspective, others found that English and Humanities departments may present a particularly
challenging environment for the development of global partnerships. As one participant observed,
“Generally, English departments are ethnocentric—don't care about any culture other than U.S.A. Mine is
no exception. We need to foster in rhetoric and professional communication a sense of need for global
literacy; then maybe departments will support better this work.” Another respondent suggested that “[On] an
engineering campus, these partnerships are well understood institutionally. Being in the humanities,
however, leaves junior faculty in TC … in an awkward position pushing towards the institutional norm but
with senior departmental colleagues baffled.” Finally, the disciplinary situatedness of technical
communication also involved concerns about the status of the field, which deterred some faculty from
developing partnerships: “Technical writing has a low esteem factor among English department faculty.”
Indeed, our interviews confirmed the importance of a visionary institutional or departmental culture
that is supportive of such partnerships in the context of globalization. Bruce Maylath, for example,
mentioned that he participates in a university-wide initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Stout called
“global perspectives requirement,” which actively supports this type of work. Similarly, TyAnna Herrington
mentioned a strong focus of her university on global partnerships for various purposes. Along similar lines,
Dianne Atkinson noted the consensus at her university and in her Department that such partnerships are
crucial to engineering education. Ken Rainey explained that his partnership falls on fertile ground in his
Department, which teaches courses in World, Western, and Japanese literature. Another department on his
campus has begun offering a major in global and international studies. Rainey’s Department as well has
begun offering a Bachelor’s degree in international technical communication, which is coupled with a
30
foreign-language minor and will benefit greatly from Department partnerships. Likewise, Judith Ramey
pointed to the great priority her university assigns to integrating teaching, research, and service into a global
context. Their location in the Pacific Rim makes this priority particularly important. David Sapp is located in
a University environment that has traditionally focused its mission beyond local concerns with a traditional
emphasis global justice work and 70% of its students participating in study-abroad programs. A supportive
environment at one level or another, then, may be a critical factor in facilitating such partnerships.
LEADERSHIP FOR PARTNERSHIP CAPACITY BUILDING
Since global partnerships expose and question numerous assumptions about local institutional
cultures, the institutional separation of local and global learning, and the disciplinary situatedness of
technical communication programs, they call for leadership in Wahlstrom and Clemens’ (2005) sense of
overcoming “the way our discipline thinks of itself and permits itself to be constrained by tradition” (p. 302).
As Wahlstrom and Clemens suggest, partnerships can play an important role in overcoming various kinds of
institutional barriers (p. 312).
Rethinking leadership and building partnership capacity is particularly important for the kinds of
partnerships that are emerging in technical communication programs. These partnerships often are facilitated
by the Internet as a communication medium that can instantly connect faculty and classrooms across
distance. As a result, they often emerge from the bottom up. On the one hand, therefore, departments who
wish to position themselves in a global higher education context must find ways to support the integration of
these partnerships into the program and into the institution. On the other hand, faculty who wish to develop
and sustain these partnerships and to embed them into departmental and institutional cultures, require
conditions that support such faculty leadership roles. Such distributed leadership and support is particularly
important if these partnerships are to extend beyond individuals with a particular passion for this kind of
work.
To facilitate this process, programs must find ways to build leadership capacity and foster the ability
to partner among its faculty. This includes building partnering competencies, authenticity, and the ability of
faculty to manage polarity (Duin, Baer, & Starke-Meyerring, 2001). Partnering competencies include
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developing the ability to understand various cultures and enter into two- and multiple-way interactions; using
emerging technologies to facilitate communication and increase accessibility; and functioning effectively
within multiple partnerships at multiple stages. Authenticity in partnering is less a set of specific skills and
more an internal locus of control that demonstrates that a person values collaboration, teamwork, and
relationships by working “as equals” with partners and by sharing information and basing decisions on the
greater vision or greater good. Last, managing polarity refers to the need for those involved in global
partnerships to integrate global thinking and global literacies into local classrooms and curricula. To build
global partnership capacity, one must simultaneously envision both poles; that is, one must integrate existing
local curricula with the somewhat disruptive nature of global partnerships.
CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK
Technical communicators in the workplace face numerous changes as a result of globalization. For
example, they increasingly work in globally distributed teams, directly engage diverse customers and other
stakeholders in digital networks, and experience the influence of local and global policies, agreements, and
corporate practices on their work as well as on their roles as citizens both in their communities and in their
work with TNCs. These changes have a number of important implications for learning environments and
curricula in technical communication. Specifically, they call for learning environments that—like corporate,
customer, and public communication—are increasingly globally networked and are systematically designed
to provide experiential learning opportunities that facilitate the kinds of literacies technical communicators
need to develop for global work and citizenship. Because of the nature of globally networked
communication, such learning environments increasingly require the development of program partnerships.
In building such partnerships and addressing these changes in their curricula, technical
communication programs find themselves in a fundamentally changed globalizing higher education
environment. Most importantly, higher education has become subject to global trade agreements that advance
a vision of higher education as a tradable commodity to be sold for profits around the world in local markets
without local constraints. In contrast, partnerships offer faculty and programs alternative opportunities for
participating in the globalization of higher education by emphasizing cultural sensitivity, equality, and
32
mutual benefit for the greater good. They thus provide faculty and programs with an important tool not only
for designing globally networked learning environments, but also for taking an active role in current
processes of globalization in higher education. In short, partnerships play a key role in how technical
communication faculty and programs position themselves amid globalization.
To understand how technical communication faculty and programs develop and maintain such
partnerships, we conducted an exploratory study examining the priorities faculty and departments assign to
them, the missions and activities they pursue with these partnerships, and the challenges they face. From this
study, we now conclude with an initial description of emerging trends in partnership development in
technical communication, implications for programs, and implications for the field as a whole to facilitate the
development of these partnerships, support their development of innovative pedagogies, and advance these
partnerships as important sites of continued research.
Description of Global Partnership Trends in Technical Communication
Our study found a high level of activity and interest in such partnerships. We found that technical
communication faculty and programs have developed a great variety of creative and innovative partnerships
to provide enriched collaborative opportunities for learning, research, and civic engagement. Despite this
diversity, however, these partnerships share a number of characteristics: they focus on the systematic
integration of experiential opportunities for these purposes into technical communication curricula for as
many students as possible. Most important for their success, they also share a deep concern for cultural
sensitivity, equality, and mutual benefit among partners. They thus extend well beyond traditional models of
separate, “add-on” student and faculty exchanges, and they also differ decidedly from emerging global-trade
visions of higher education.
Our findings suggest that these emerging global partnerships may be described as collaborative
initiatives between faculty, programs, institutions, companies, civil society organizations, government
agencies, community organizations, and other entities that are systematically integrated into the curriculum
in order to help technical communicators prepare for global work and citizenship. These partnerships,
therefore, include such activities as creating globally networked experiential learning environments and
33
pursuing program development opportunities that foster global literacies, creating enriched research
opportunities for faculty, and/ or fostering civic engagement on a global scale. Because these partnerships
play a critical role in positioning students, faculty, and programs in a global context, we suggest the term
global rather than international partnerships. The term emphasizes their vital role in the context of
globalization and particularly in facilitating the literacies that allow technical communicators to take an
active role as professionals and as citizens in a globalizing world.
Implications for Programs
There is much to be learned from these emerging partnerships in technical communication programs.
Programs considering such partnerships, for example, can learn from their focus on a shared mission; their
creativity in pursuing that mission; their innovation in pedagogy; their attention to cultural respect, shared
control, equal contributions, and mutual learning; and their many ways of advancing technical
communication as a field.
In developing their partnerships, technical communication faculty and programs encounter a variety
of challenges, most importantly challenges related to resources as well as local disciplinary and institutional
cultures. To some extent these challenges result from the ways in which these emerging global partnerships
question assumptions about learning and institutional cultures. As our exploratory study suggests, global
partnerships question assumptions about departmental priorities, which often do not yet include an awareness
of the intricate link between globalization and local programs, institutions, and communities. Designed to
facilitate this link, global partnerships also question traditional models of international education as an “addon” learning experience that often only few students can take advantage of.
Moreover, because they are often developed by faculty from the bottom up, they question leadership
models, requiring conditions that allow faculty to take on leadership roles and that support the institutional
integration of these partnerships. Global partnerships rekindle questions about the disciplinary situatedness of
technical communication programs and the ways in which these disciplinary locations influence how
technical communication programs can position themselves in a globalizing world.
34
Perhaps more so than ever before, technical communication program directors need to work closely
with their faculty and their administrations to overcome the traditional institutional divide between local and
global learning and to foster a culture of distributed leadership and support for the kind of integrated vision
for experiential learning in global contexts that these partnerships advance. In many ways, global
partnerships rest on local partnerships with different stakeholders that help to integrate and support the
partnerships into local contexts. The more stakeholders are involved in emerging partnerships, the easier
programs will find it to sustain and grow them into the future.
Implications for the Field of Technical Communication: Toward a Partnership Network
While some of these challenges are best addressed by the departments and institutions that maintain
such partnerships, on a larger scale program partnerships may also benefit from partnership network in which
faculty and program chairs can exchange experiences and develop support structures in the field. As Ken
Rainey notes, for example, “I believe that if we are to make much progress on these matters that we would be
more successful if we worked through a consortium of universities that would pool resources for fund
raising, data collection and archiving.” Such a network could build on joint CPTSC and ATTW initiatives
already underway such as the International Roundtable initiated by Bruce Maylath and others at international
conferences. In building on this foundation, such a network might possibly facilitate partnerships in the
following ways:
Facilitating Partnership Development. As our exploratory study indicates, partnerships encounter
a number of challenges that could be overcome more easily in collaboration, for example by:
-
Developing a shared space for faculty and programs interested in partnership development, perhaps
with information about course descriptions, objectives, target audience, time frames, materials, and
other information relevant to partnership development;
-
Coordinating and facilitating meeting opportunities for interested faculty at technical communication
conferences;
-
Sharing information about international funding opportunities for partnership development as well as
faculty, and student exchanges;
35
-
Facilitating collaboration in pursuing funding opportunities.
Advancing Professional Communication Pedagogy. Our study also shows that global partnerships
are often the site of innovative pedagogy, which could be shared and advanced more easily through
collaboration, for example, by:
-
Sharing best pedagogical practices, assignments, instructional strategies;
-
Building a repertoire of instructional materials designed specifically for learning in globally networked
learning environments;
-
Sharing best practices and assessments of shared virtual learning environments;
-
Facilitating opportunities for collaboration on teaching materials, textbooks, and other learning
materials online, in print, and other media.
Advancing Research on Partnerships and Networked Learning Environments. Our research
indicates that these partnerships present new, innovative sites for research regardless of the particular aspect
of the mission with which they begin. There is also still much to be learned about these partnerships. For
example, now that they have emerged, what makes these partnerships sustainable? What policies best
facilitate their development? How do partners negotiate a shared vision for their partnerships? What impact
do they have in quantitative and qualitative terms on students, faculty, programs, and their local
communities? Again, a collaborative initiative such as a partnership network could facilitate such research in
a number of ways, for example, by:
-
Facilitating opportunities for collaborative intercultural research projects on intercultural
communication, teaching, and learning in globally networked learning environments
-
Sharing information about international funding opportunities for research into intercultural
communication
-
Developing a bibliography of research on various aspects of global curriculum and program
partnerships
-
Facilitating the development of research forums, colloquia, and symposia
36
Support for these partnerships is important as they advance the field of technical communication in
many ways. For example, in addition to advancing pedagogy, internationalizing research, and providing new
opportunities for civic engagement on a global scale, they directly support the development of technical
communication programs in other countries and thus the development of the field as an important area for
scholarly inquiry. Finally, in the context of globalizing higher education as a whole, these partnerships reflect
a vision of globalization in higher education that differs decidedly from the global trade vision of higher
education characterized by the one-way sale of higher education unconstrained by local cultural needs or
policies. Instead, the vision advanced by these partnerships is characterized by innovative pedagogies,
cultural sensitivity, mutual learning, and equality.
Given their important contributions to students, faculty, and programs around the world, to the field
of technical communication, and to higher education, we anticipate that global partnerships will become a
major cornerstone of technical communication programs. Programs will increasingly be called upon to revise
curricula and design research and civic engagement opportunities to reflect the global context that now
surrounds technical communication, higher education programs, and citizenship.
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Figures
Figure 1: Survey Respondents
Survey Respondents
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
66
28
4
Administrator
Faculty
Graduate Student
9
Other
Figure 2: Percentage of technical communication programs that currently maintain one or more global
partnership initiatives, plan one, are interested in developing one, or have no partnerships and no interest in
developing one.
Current Partnership Situation
One or more
partnerships
24%
Planning
12%
Other
6%
No partnership;
no plans
28%
Discontinued
3%
Interested
27%
41
Figure 3: Average individual and perceived department priority assigned to global partnerships.
Individual vs. Department Priority
30
25
25
22
2019
18
20
19
15
10
11
9
8
My Priority
11
Department
Priority
5
0
1 (low)
2
3
4
5 (high)
Figure 4: Challenges encountered by existing and planned partnerships
Key Issues in Existing and Planned Partnerships
0
5
10
15
20
25
21
Resources
14
Logistics
12
Quality
6
Cultural Differences
Language
5
Organizational Issues
3
Political Climate
3
Figure 5: Challenges anticipated by respondents without partnerships
What Prevents Programs from Engaging in
Partnerships? (Why not?)
0
5
10
15
Lack of Resources
25
30
27
Disciplinary and Organizational Culture
11
5
Different Priorities
3
National Culture
Logistics
20
2
42
Tables
Table 1: Challenges Encountered by Those Engaged in Global Partnerships
Category
Resources
Logistics
Quality
Description
-
Student travel
-
Assistance for visiting students
-
Event planning (staff time, rooms, supplies)
-
Travel to partner site
-
Staffing
-
Technology (e.g. videoconferencing)
-
Workload reduction (faculty development time)
-
Need for leadership and administration
-
Involving a donor
-
Different academic calendars
-
Different time zones
-
Different credit systems
-
Different tuition systems
-
Different salary systems for faculty exchanges
-
Tuition payment (in case of consortium or 2+2 arrangements)
-
Timing of student exchanges
-
Finding and choosing an appropriate partner
-
Staying on track of partnership activities
-
Keeping track of exchange student credits
-
Offering clear products and deliverables
-
Finding a client project for collaborative course projects
-
Effect on time to degree completion (e.g., in the case of student exchanges)
-
Appropriate supervision / mentorship for exchange students
-
Quality of international students (English skills)
43
-
Curriculum approval of home component in case of 2+2 arrangements
-
Encouraging irresponsible students to say in contact with their partners
-
Common knowledge sets among students in course partnerships
-
Impact of international students on curriculum and courses
-
Are deeper experiences possible for all students?
-
How to ensure rigor at participating institutions (in the case of a
consortium)
Cultural
-
Sense of time
Differences
-
Bureaucratic systems
-
Teaching and learning styles
-
Lack of understanding and importance of tech communication in partner
country
Language
Organi-
-
Different legal and contract system
-
Monolingualism of U.S. students in host country
-
English proficiency of visiting or collaborating students
-
Moving from grassroots ("handshake" partnership) between faculty to
institutional integration
zational
Issues
-
Identifying the necessary system-wide approvals
-
Obtaining waivers from the university for certain requirements to
accommodate partner needs.
Political
-
Maintaining trust (especially with partners in developing countries) during
times invasion and war
Climate
-
Obtaining student visa
-
Ensuring student safety during exchanges
44
Table 2: Challenges Preventing Faculty and Programs from Engaging in Global Partnerships
Challenge
Description
Lack of
-
Severe time constraints due to state funding cutbacks
Resources
-
Full teaching loads prevent new initiatives
-
Lack of personnel, release time, and other forms of support
-
Small size of the program
-
Heavy teaching load
-
Too expensive for students
-
Lack of support from international office
-
No readily identifiable person to lead such an effort
-
Economic downturn in partner country
Local Culture
-
Internal culture
(disciplinary,
-
Disciplinary culture
institutional)
-
Limited view of the purpose, usefulness, or rewards that might come
from such partnerships
Logistics
-
Shifting faculty interests
-
Limited mission of program
-
“short sighted” department culture
-
Low esteem for technical communication in English Departments
-
Not a "strong instinct/ culture" for engaging in global partnerships
-
“Have to get over activation barrier”
-
Monolingual students
-
Other priorities
-
"Hard to do"
-
Difficult articulation of course credits
45
Appendix: Survey Questions
1. Please provide the name and institutional affiliation of your program:
2. What is your role in the program?
a. Administrator
b. Faculty
c. Graduate Student
d. Other (please specify)
3. On a scale from 1 to 5, with five indicating the highest level, what priority do you and your
department assign to global partnerships?
4. Please choose the description that best characterizes the situation in your program
a. My program currently has one or more of such partnerships.
b. My program is planning to develop such partnerships.
c. My program does not have such a partnership, but would be interested in developing one.
d. My program used to have such a partnership, but discontinued it.
e. To my knowledge, my program has never had such a partnership and does not plan to
develop one.
f.
Other. Please describe:
5. If your program has a partnership or is planning to develop one, please briefly describe the
partnership initiative (e.g. with what type of partner, where, and for what purpose).
6. If your program has a partnership or is planning to develop one, which two or three key issues have
arisen?
7. If your program discontinued such a partnership, what do you think might be the reason(s)?
8. If your program does not have and does not plan to have a partnership, please provide the main
reason(s) why your program may not engage in such a partnership.
9. Is there any additional information you might provide to help us better understand your position
regarding partnerships?
10. Would you allow us to contact you for a follow-up interview?
46