We’ve received a call for proposals from Pam Brewer of the Academic SIG of STC for the Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization.

Call for Papers: Special Issue

You are invited to consider submitting proposals for researched papers or best practices pieces in a special issue of the Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization entitled “Navigating the Global Training Terrain: New Literacies, Competencies, and Practices.” This issue, to be published in fall 2011, will focus on training in global contexts from the perspective of both those who train and those who learn. We seek submissions from a variety of perspectives including business, science, humanitarian practice, health, social advocacy, education, and government.

The Background

Navigating the Global Training Terrain: New Literacies, Competencies, and Practices
(to be published in September/the Fall of 2011)

The twenty-first century has been characterized by rapid transformation—technological, social, cultural, environmental, economic, and scientific. In this changing milieu, organizations and individuals must continually acquire new knowledge and abilities or be left behind. Influential entities such as the United Nations strongly advocate the pursuit of lifelong learning for individuals, while leading companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations seek to become what scholars such as Peter Senge have called “learning organizations” that can transform themselves through the learning of their members at all levels.

Training, or the structured development of skills, competencies, and up-to-date knowledge, is an increasingly important element in these pursuits. The shape of training may vary—formal or informal, face-to-face or technologically mediated, short-term or long-term—but the end purpose is always the same: to facilitate learning by individuals or groups, usually with the larger purpose of enhancing organizational quality.

Training is vital to the success of globally connected organizations and individuals, but success requires the trainers’ effective bridging of linguistic, cultural, and social distances. Only teams and individuals with facility in navigating diverse languages, cultures, technologies, educational practices, and rhetorical traditions will be able to successfully provide training to global audiences.

Professional communicators, whose discipline claims expertise in several areas relevant to training—including oral, written, and visual rhetoric, usability, information architecture, electronic collaboration, intercultural communication, and collaboration with translators—are well positioned to contribute to global training efforts or take on the role of trainers themselves. Yet, despite these advantages, the pool of research on training in global audiences is limited, especially within the field of professional communication.

The Focus of the Special Issue

This special issue of the Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization seeks to address this need by providing a space for scholarly research and best practices on the topic of global, organizational training. The issue, entitled Navigating the Global Training Terrain: New Literacies, Competencies, and Practices will focus on training in global contexts from the perspective of both those who train and those who learn, including current research and best practices. The special issue will also cast an eye toward organizational training as it is evolving towards the future.

The editors of the special issue welcome submissions from a variety of perspectives including business, science, humanitarian practice, health, social advocacy, education, and government.

Possible topics pertaining to the theory, teaching, and practice of training in global contexts include the following, among others:

• Intercultural considerations in the design and delivery of training
• Training and the social web
• Cultural intelligence for trainers and training audiences
• Language use and translation in training contexts
• Meta-communication and training
• Communities of practice
• Legal issues in global training
• Economic aspects of global training
• Assessment of global training
• Training from a distance

Submitting Proposals

Proposals (up to 500 words) for research papers, short best practices pieces [*], and tutorials are due by October 10th, 2010. Review criteria can be found on the Journal’s website at www.rpcg.org. Proposals should be sent as an email attachment to one of the guest editors of the special issue:

• Pam Brewer, Appalachian State University: brewerpe @ appstate.edu
• Jim Melton, Central Michigan University: james.melton @ cmich.edu
• Joo-Seng Tan: Nanyang Technological University: ajstan @ ntu.edu.sg

[*] We strongly encourage practitioners to submit best practices pieces on any of the topics identified in this CFP or on related topics. Best practices describe the training strategies, approaches, or methods that work in a particular situation or environment.

• What has worked and why?
• What has not worked so well, and what could work better?

Authors may use the following optional framework for best practices pieces: title, description, methods used, results, technologies used, and lessons learned. While the proposal and review process is the same for research papers, tutorials, and best practices pieces, final manuscripts for best practices should be shorter: approximately 1000 to 3000 words in length.

Production Schedule

The schedule for the special issue is as follows:

• 10 October 2010 — 500-word proposals due
• 15 October 2010 – Guest editors return proposal decisions to submitters
• 10 January 2011 – Draft manuscripts of accepted proposals due
• 1 July 2011 — Final manuscripts due
• September 2011 — Publication date of special issue

About the Journal

The Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication and Globalization publishes articles on the theory, practice, and teaching of technical and professional communication in critical global and intercultural contexts such as business, manufacturing, environment, information technology, and others. As a global initiative, the Journal welcomes manuscripts with diverse approaches and contexts of research, but manuscripts are to be submitted in English and grounded in relevant theory and appropriate research methods. The Journal is peer reviewed with an editorial board consisting of experienced researchers and practitioners from over 20 countries.

The Journal is free or “open access,” using PKP open source software and housed at East Carolina University.

The first edition is planned for September 2010, and it will be published thereafter on a quarterly basis. For more information, see www.rpcg.org.

Please feel free to share this CFP with others who may be interested. We hope that this special issue will represent academic and practitioner perspectives as well as multiple disciplines.