ATTW 2010 call for papers

Just forwarded to me. Comments below:

ATTW 2010
Synergies: The Intersections of Research and Teaching

13th Annual Conference
March 17, 2010
Louisville, KY

The Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) invites proposals for papers, poster presentations, and workshops to be given at its annual conference immediately preceding the CCCC. The thirteenth annual conference will be held in Louisville, KY, on Wednesday, March 17, 2010. The full-day event includes concurrent sessions, poster presentations, workshops, book exhibits, and opportunities for exchanging ideas, working on projects, and networking in a supportive and challenging academic environment.

This year's conference will highlight ways that research informs teaching and teaching informs research. It will challenge researchers, teachers, and practitioners of technical and professional communication to push beyond the generic "implications for teaching" section appended to research articles to explore the synergies and questions available when we place research and teaching into conversation.

Submissions on all topics are welcome, but we especially encourage proposals that examine topics such as the following:

* the effectiveness of established or innovative pedagogies,
* a research question sparked by an observation in the classroom,
* pedagogical experiments sparked by research findings,
* the needs of the workplace, the university, the field, or the community and ways to meet or challenge these needs in service, major, or graduate courses,
* the roles, challenges, and benefits of instructional technologies,
* the implications of existing research for the design of programs and curriculum,
* pedagogies that can be used to teach research in the university and in the workplace,
* research methods that can be used to examine pedagogies,
* the relationships between teaching and research as they play out in different contexts within our discipline,
* directions for future research on pedagogy or questions raised by classroom experiences.

Proposals, limited to 300 words, are due October 5, 2009. All proposals will be peer reviewed. We offer three formats:

1. Regular Sessions: Individuals may submit proposals for 15-minute talks that will be placed on panels by conference organizers. Groups may submit proposals for 45-minute panel presentations. To submit proposals, follow the conference links at www.attw.org after September 21, 2009.

2. Poster Presentations: Posters will be on display throughout the day with special times dedicated for conversations about this work. Follow the same process for submission as for a regular session.

3. Workshop Sessions: The conference will include two 90-minute workshops overlapping with the regular sessions. Workshops that would help newcomers integrate into our field are especially encouraged. Please submit workshop proposals directly to Summer Taylor (slsmith@clemson.edu).

For additional information, contact the conference chair, Summer Taylor at Clemson University (slsmith@clemson.edu). New teachers of technical and professional communication are particularly invited to attend the conference, as are graduate students and CCCC attendees interested in technical and professional communication.

Just two comments. One is that although I highly encourage people to go, I won't be there this year. (I've decided to take a break from traveling, and only plan to go to SXSWi.)

The other is that although I understand the urge to "push beyond the generic 'implications for teaching' section appended to research articles," I've generally done that by not including implications for teaching. I don't have anything against implications for teaching, but not every study has those implications, and too often I see that subsection jammed into the end of TCR article manuscripts when implications for theory or methodology would be much more apt. I don't see that same tendency in any of the social sciences or most of the humanities, and I wonder if it's a generic convention left over from composition's emergence as a subfield.