This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly continues the work of the winter 2004 issue of gathering information and reflecting on the state of technical communication in its academic context. The two issues together provide some historical background on the ATTW as well as data on current academic members of the field and their jobs, their teaching and research, and their programs. The narrow goal of the issues is to help ATTW plan for the future by identifying needs, interests, and responsibilities of members, but the broader goal is to define for anyone with an interest the values and current practices as well as the gaps and visions of technical communication in its academic context. The articles in this issue continue discussions begun in the winter issue. Stuart Selber's article on the outstanding dissertation award provides important information about the award, but it also extends the inquiry into research that Ann Blakeslee and Rachel Spilka reported on in the winter issue. Both articles raise questions about what we study, the methods we use, and the gaps in our research. Nancy Allen and Steve Benninghoff provide a comprehensive look at undergraduate teaching. Their research into teaching practice confirms and extends some of the data from a survey of ATTW members reported in the winter issue by David Dayton and Steve Bernhardt. Laura Gurak and Ann Hill Duin address the central issue of technology and point out opportunities for teaching and research that we should consider with the introduction of new technologies, new expectations of students, and competing providers. The final two articles in this issue address programmatic issues as they relate to teaching and that might be read in conjunction with Jo Allen's article on assessment in the Winter 2004 issue. Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Charles Paine discuss the practical and theoretical problems of separate administrations for first-year composition and technical and professional writing. They present four models from different universities of shared administration of writing programs with rhetoric as the bridge joining two related but often separated programs. Kenneth Rainey and Roy Turner provide the history of more than two decades of investigations into certification of technical communicators. They also describe certification schemes in other countries, discuss ethical and theoretical arguments for certification, and offer the outline of a certification process for the United States.
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