Industry and the Academy: How Team-teaching Brings Two Worlds Together

While a multi-pronged approach to bridging the gap between academe and industry is necessary to break academic departments out of the traditional structures that hinder change and evolution, we think that one solution is to bring the working writer back into the classroom, with all of the experience and knowledge that person has acquired about how organizations operate, how communicators need to prepare for the demands of professional life, and what tools and processes are currently in use. We will detail one experiment in team-teaching a course on web information design and discuss how collaboration between industry and academia may be both feasible and necessary for the future of technical communication programs.