Friday, June 29, 2012

balancing acts

Selber, Stuart. “Beyond skill building: challenges facing technical communication teachers in the computer age.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 449-464.
I’m going to come back to Selber here to begin my departure from my major exam readings and finish up in transition to my first minor readings with Longo, Spilka, and Albers. With that, I like this statement from Selber as a framing claim to move away from technology-mediation: “The most significant pedagogical issues are not necessarily (and sometime not at all) tied to technological developments.”

Like Johnson-Eilola, Selber is imagining what we should be doing to prepare technical communication practitioners. Specifically, he is looking at how computer technologies influence and shape the discursive activities surrounding their use. “As writing technical communication teachers, we should concern ourselves with such changes and encourage computer literacies in our classrooms that consider the rhetorical, social, and political implications of computer-mediated communication and work” (450). How does this claim align with the “teaching tools vs. teaching writing” debate? Selber seems to be on the side of writing. “As we introduce and use computers in technical communications classrooms, our job is again complicated by the need to consider our humanistic goals or preparing responsible students with critical and rhetorical, as well as technical, skills” (451).

Selber lays out three challenges facing Technical Communication. Not surprising, the discipline (and the field of practice) continue to wrestle with these challenges half a decade later.
  1. Balancing technological literacy and humanistic concerns – this goes deeper than the teaching tools vs. teaching writing debate; this speaks directly to the call for a more humanistic and less objectivist/positivist curriculum.
  2. Re-envisioning our computer-related curriculum – reinforcing my own claim that Computers & Writing / Writing with Technology pedagogies are located within the core of Technical Communication’s pedagogies.
  3. Educating teachers who use computers in their classrooms – see above.
The first challenge Selber identifies is one I’m intimately familiar with, as I struggle to move my instruction in WRT 401/402 further away from common tropes, generic practices, typifications, and objectivism. “… if we spend a majority of our time narrowly preparing students for work in such environments, we thus diminish or even lose sight of the literacy and humanistic issues surrounding computer use” (460).

As a transitional reading, Selber leaves me wondering how the tool-heavy or “emancipatory” course align (or oppose) the courses that Brassuer and Hendl dissect?

tracings

Spinuzzi, Clay. Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Acting with Technology). The MIT Press (2003).
I’ll start with Spinuzzi’s framework – computer-mediated work. More succinctly, he is framing his research methodology (genre tracing) and claims with acts of technology-mediated work, not limited to computer-based technology. The application of Spinuzzi’s study to the practice of technical communication is obvious. So much of what the practitioner does is mediated by technology…

Spinuzzi draws on genre theory and activity theory to identify official and unofficial genres and to trace their development and transformation through an organizational system. He uses genre as a unit of analysis for studying how innovations are made and evolve in response to recurrent problems, tasks, and challenges in the workplace. He positions this method of analysis as an alternative to user-centered design analysis as a means of forefronting innovations “as organic and necessary ways that workers adapt information to support their own endeavors.” Ultimately, Spinuzzi is providing a method for evaluating and guiding information design.

At a practical level (and wow, does Spinuzzi talk about levels and scope), I see Spinuzzi making a case for requiring technical and professional communication courses across the curriculum. Symbolic-analytic workers are not waiting for professionally trained technical communicators and information designers to come along and solve their problems (which Spinuzzi describes as the worker-as-victim narrative). Rather, symbolic-analytic workers are creating innovative solutions using the tools and means available to them. They are performing work traditionally reserved for the technical communicator, documentation specialist, instructional designer, information designer, etc. What Spinuzzi is illustrating is the decentralized decision making environments in which workers develop unique and often personal solutions to recurrent work problems.

Artifacts (instruments, tools, etc.) regulate and transform the way workers perform tasks. In some cases, mediating artifacts qualitatively change the entire activity in which they are used – in which workers engage. I like this claim because it aligns with the more tangible definition of genre I was looking for after working through Miller and Bazzerman. But here is also the point that Spinuzzi deviates from earlier attempts to define genre as tools – as typifications. He argues that Miller, Bazzerman, and Russell do not account for the deeper socio-cultural qualities of genres. Spinuzzi draws from Bahktin when he states, “Genres are not discrete artifacts, but traditions of producing, using, and interpreting artifacts – traditions that make their way into the artifacts as a form shaping ideology” (41).

While I don’t think earlier attempts to define genre can be recast that easily, I do appreciate how Spinuzzi stretches genre as a sort of “social memory”. Genres embody a “galaxy of assumptions, strategies, and ideological orientations that the individual speaker may not recognize. [A genre] represents others’ thinking out of problems, whose dialogue has been preserved in the genre” (43). This definition and differentiation is necessary for Spinuzzi to frame his research methodology – genre tracing – and the methods it employs.
Specific to my purposes and my mapping efforts, Spinuzzi’s treatment and definition of genre helps solidify the relationship of genre theory to rhetorical theory, activity theory and technical communication practices – practices served by Technical Communication’s core pedagogies (around which rhetorical theory and activity theory are clustered). And while Spinuzzi provides the researcher with a useful methodology, he doesn’t move the study of genre theory any closer to the Tech Comm core. In fact, he illustrates how difficult it would be teach genre as he defines it; in such a way as to address genre’s socio-cultural characteristics – of introducing the idea of genre ecologies and demonstrating all of the “interconnected and dynamic sets of genres that jointly mediate activities” (63).

I move again to the practical level. I find ready application of Spinuzzi’s (and Zachary’s) treatment of open-systems design to technical documentation activities. In such systems, writers and information designers “recognize and design for workers’ tendency to adapt artifacts… This awareness of compound mediation leads us to explore design approaches that make it possible for workers to consensually modify the system’s genres and add their own genres to the system” (204).

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

genre, divergence, and intersection

Bazzerman, Charles. “Genre as Social Action.” Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Routledge.
Genres are the “available and familiar patterns of utterances [that] provide clues that allow people to make sense of each other’s utterances and to frame utterances meaningful to ones interlocutors … genre identifies the recognizable utterances we believe we are producing and receiving.”

Bazzerman picks up nicely with Miller’s typification. For Bazzerman, genres are “the resources of language that are socially and culturally available and that have been typified through histories of social circulation… the process by which language users create order and sense so as to align with each other for mutual understanding and coordination.”

Bazzerman’s definition and treatment of genre aligns with Miller’s in that he has us place the “object” of genres in socially constructed spaces – mediated by specific conventions of language – to understand how and why genres work to help users (writers, readers, speakers) make meaning through particular actions.

Bazzerman, like Miller, addresses how genres align the intent of the author with the meaning created by the reader (how genres work to correct the “thinness of the written sign”). “Meaning is not fully available and imminent in the bare spelled word. Interactants’ familiarity with domains of communication and relevant genres make the kind of communication recognizable: established roles, values, domains of content, and general actions which then create the space for more specific, detailed, refined utterances and meanings spelled out in the crafted words.”

Specific to Bazzerman’s “pragmatism” – he reveals one intersection of Composition and Technical Communication, without identifying it as such. In both classrooms, Bazzerman illustrates how an understanding of genre as a social (inter)action can help students read and write in “situations with which they are less familiar…” The use of genre in the classroom allows the instructor to expose the explicit nature of the communicative situations, organizations, activities, and contexts in which the students are (and will be) writing. “Making explicit the organization and dynamics of communicative situations helps students know more concretely what their options are and how they might frame their goals, enhancing potential for communicative success.”

In relating Genre theory to Language theory (two of the principals theories I’ve clustered around Technical Communication’s core pedagogies), Bazzerman proposes: “… words are effective within the situation to align participants and achieve local actions. This view is consistent with theories or reading that suggest we make hypotheses about the meaning of texts based on our previous knowledge and experience, the encounter with the text prior to the current moment.”

Bazzerman claims that genre typifications result from a process of pyscho-social category formation. Here I see Spinuzzi’s departure point and the application of Genre theory in his later work: “Genre taxonomies can be useful to define wide-spread functional patterns in robust social systems.” As a segue into Activity Theory: “What provides for communicative stability is not the genre itself, but the activity system it is part of… material, social, and textual universes surrounding each document are indexed and made relevant in the document by explicit representation or implicit assumption, establishing knowledge to be mobilized in reading the document. Thus we can say that knowledge is created and reside within specific genre and activity systems.”

Bazzerman proves useful for my efforts by placing genre at the intersection of social constructionism and activity theory – at the point where individuals (students) learn to participate and contribute in specific genres, activities, and knowledge systems.

Monday, June 25, 2012

the ever-evolving map

A note about the theory/pedagogy map as it stands tonight:

After working through Miller and Bazzerman (notes forthcoming), I have a cluster of theories (Genre, Action, Language, and Social Constructionism) surrounding what I perceive are Technical Communication's core pedagogies: Collaborative, Process, WAC, and Computers & Writing / Writing with Technology.

This is my view -- and my biases.

Outlier pedagogies (Transactional pedagogies) that serve to shape the core and emerge in various instructional spaces in the Composition and Technical Communication classrooms include Rhetorical, Expressivist, and Radical (Feminist, Marxist, Dissensus, etc.).

genre and pragmatic forces

Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, no. 70, (1984) 151-167.
A well-suggested segue from Berkenkotter to another seminal essay. In 1984 Miller was clearly probing the fringes of Composition and Rhetoric for a tangible space in which to work through aspects of both disciplines that were dismissed or under attack from English. I wasn’t aware until just this past re-reading that this essay was based on Miller’s dissertation. That fact illustrates her standing and tenure as a scholar deeply interested in technical communication as an academic discipline AND field of practice.

Here Miller is reacting to Rhetorical Criticism’s failure to define “genre” as something more than a category or a kind of discourse. She is looking at the relations of genre to situation. She wants to limit genre to a specific type of discourse classification “based in rhetorical practice … open … and organized around situated action” (155). As an extension of this typification, Miller is interested in the knowledge created by and through these situated actions and associated practices. “Because human action is based on and guided by meaning, not by material causes, at the center of action is a process of interpretation. Before we can act, we must interpret the intermediate material environment… the new is made familiar through the recognition of relevant similarities; those similarities become constituted as a type” (156-7) – as a genre.

Genre associated with a typified reaction to a typified situation. Specific to my exams, Miller is “proposing how an understanding of genre can help account for the way we encounter, interpret, react to, and create particular texts” (151). This is important for my mapping effort because it sets up later scholarship (some already noted across this space) that considers the role of genre in the actions performed by technical communicators. At the same time, Miller’s argument exposes some of the difficulties of teaching genre in the Comp and Tech Comm classrooms.

While I don’t see any direct relationships (yet) to activity theory, Miller is emphasizing the activities surrounding the creation, use, and re-use of genres – of genre’s role in the rhetorical relationship between situation and discourse. “… a genre [is] a complex of formal and substantive features that create a particular effect in a given situation” (153).

This is a departure from the rule-bound prescriptive treatment of genre found in positivit/current-traditional pedagogies. “… a closed set, usually consisting of few members – a neat taxonomic system that does not reflect rhetorical practice so much as an a priori principle” (153).
Implications for Composition: Genre is typically treated as a means to, “describe a closed, formal system based nominally on intention but described according to form: exposition, argumentation, description, narration” (155) – a simple means to classify discourse.

Miller is casting genre theory through a social constructivist lens. She is working with Burke’s ideas of exigence as rhetorical motive; carrying the actions of these motives – and the circumstances surrounding them – forward to describe genres as, “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations … of discourses that are incomplete … circumscribed by a relatively complete shift in relational situation” (159).

As I attempt to place genre theory within my map, I’m finding a gap between it and Rhetorical pedagogies – the bridging element – the generic fusion – I think lies within Social Constructionist theories concerned with the production of knowledge. “The understanding of genre that I am advocating is based in rhetorical practice, in the conventions of discourse that a society establishes as ways of acting together … genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a community” (163-65).

Miller reviews Speech Act theory and hierarchical relationships of form, substance, and context to create meaning – as action. I think I understand why and how she uses this to substantiate her argument, but it seems a bit too abstract here. I feel like the bridging element I’m look for needs to be more substantial – “… a coherent pragmatic force” (164). Miller refers to this pragmatic component as a way to understand genre as action. Bazzerman and Spinuzzi, writing much later, deliver some of this pragmatism.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Berkenkotter, Carol. “Genre Systems at Work.” Written Communication, vol. 18 no. 3, (2001) 326-349.
Berkenkotter is looking at genre as a means to expose meaning about organizations, human activity, and the “systems” in which certain genres are called into being – institutional genres.

Genre theory addresses the processes by which texts are produced and mediated through their relationship with prior discourse. Consider the simple specification templates used by many software development organizations -- a genre system within the specific domain of a larger institutional system – a particular configuration of genres (specifications, use-cases, test scripts, etc.) in particular relationship to each other.
Berkenkotter is claiming that professions are organized by genre systems, and that their work is carried out through genre systems. “Genre systems play an intermediate role between institutional structural properties and individual communicative action” (329).

Genres and their systems instantiate structures of social and institutional relations… Again, let’s consider the specification template used in a software development organization. Who created the initial template and for what purpose? Who is it used by and why is it used? The intertextual aspects of the specifications produced using the template are transformed by the template – the prior text – and used to restructure existing specs when the template changes.

I’m intrigued by Berkenkotter’s description of meta-genres – genres around which professional activities (and their genres) are organized. Back to the specification example: We have the spec itself (a particular genre), which contains and is based on a series of meta-genres (use-case analysis, risk assessments, project constraints, etc).

Genre theory (and activity theory) are complicating my mapping effort. Where do they fall in relation to other theories and pedagogies?
Brasseur, Lee. “Contesting the objectivist paradigm: gender issues in the technical and professional communication curriculum.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 475-489.
Brasseur ties in nicely to Herndal at this point. Her principle concern: The rationalist and objectivist traditions of technical communication neglect “othered” voices. Specific to feminist theory – “These critics hope to replace a discourse model which emphasizes expediency at the expense of social and cultural awareness with one that speaks to multiple positions…” (477).

Brasseur’s argument is similar to Herndal’s – “… while traditional discourse models … may contribute to successful communication within an organization, they may also promote enculturation … which diminishes peoples’ voices…” (478).

That’s the extent of what I’m finding here. Brasseur does bridge this argument between Herndal and Berkenkotter, whom looks at this issue of enculturation from (for me) a more material and tangible perspective – that of the physical information product (re)produced by the technical communicator.

Friday, June 15, 2012

what's radical about technical communication?

Herndal, Carl. “Teaching discourse and reproducing culture: a critique of research and pedagogy in professional and non-academic writing.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 220-231.
What’s immediately important in Herndal’s essay are his references to (and perhaps reliance on) Faigley’s theory of the composing process: expressive, cognitive, social. Like Berlin, Faigley identified the epistemological functions of theories as their unifying features.

Herndal wants to see a pedagogy that describes “the social, political and economic sources of power which authorize [the production of meaning] or the cultural work such discourse performs” (222).

A radical pedagogy, as placed on my mapping of the fields. “The problem with the largely descriptive focus of professional writing research from the perspective of the radical pedagogy is that in teaching discourse we may be merely reproducing the social structures, ideologies and subjectivities of the various communities we study” (224).

Herndal is reacting to the persistence of current-traditional rhetoric in the technical communication classroom – expressing a disdain for its neutrality and apolitical expression. He argues for connecting pedagogy to social and institutional practices to “learn to participate in professional discourse [and] also recognize it as contingent and ideologically interested” (225). Yet I don’t see how to do this. How do we expose, illustrate, and demonstrate dominant ideology? How do we then teach students to create and apply informed oppositional structures? In reality, there is no time or context in which to do this in the technical writing classroom. “The difficulty, of course, lies in getting students to recognize the connections between discourse and structural properties… to see how this relationship conditions their rhetorical choices” (228).

So where do I situate radical pedagogies on my map? Are they an extension of or related to collaborative pedagogies or to Marxist theories, feminist theories, dissensus – collaborative pedagogies based on these theories that lead students not to conformity, but to explanations of how people differ? Perhaps there is a more appropriate relationship to Cultural Studies? “When it is successful, this [radical] pedagogy will allow students to participate in [professional discourse] with a degree of self-reflexivity and ideological awareness necessary for resistance and cultural criticism” (229).

Thursday, June 14, 2012

a broader definition of practice

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 175-193.
I’ve always like Johson-Eilola’s writing – it’s accessible and practical. In relation to my reading and exam prep, he provides a nice segue out of the disciplinary debates into a discussion about the shape and nature of technical communication as a practice.

Here, Johnson-Eilola is departing from earlier efforts to (re)define the role of the modern practitioner, while reiterating many of the common themes he works into his scholarship. Specifically, he is expanding the role of the technical communicator beyond that of a “documentation wrangler” to something more reflexive; technical communicators as experts at manipulating information for specific audiences and purposes (which provides a nice alignment with Dobrin’s description of writing technically).

I also like Johnson-Eilola’s alignment with Spinuzzi’s “symbolic-analytic worker” – of the non-trained worker required to perform tasks that are traditionally considered the domain of the technical writer. “They rely on skill in abstraction, experimentation, collaboration, and system thinking to work with information across a variety of disciplines and markets.” Without claiming as much, Johnson-Eilola is making a case for an expanded Composition curriculum – one that subscribes to pedagogies and instructional activities commonly found in the technical communication classroom. Here I see a potential point of intersection between the disciplines.

As the essay relates to pedagogy, Johnson-Eilola is placing technical communication instruction within the area of transactional pedagogies – somewhere between process and collaboration. He wants to make clear that objective current-traditional approaches to technical writing instruction cannot address the expanded role of the modern technical communicator. “Documentation teaches how to use a drop-down menu, but it does not instructor nor inform about the basics of rhetoric and page design … focusing primarily on teaching skills [objectivist/positivist] places technical communicators in a relatively powerless position: technical trainers rather than educators.” Pedagogies that reinforce this limiting position encourage industry to “view technical communication as something to be added onto the primary product” (178). This limitation, in turn, affects the user of the information – “Thinking of communication as an auxiliary tool ignores the constructive role that users play in the process [audience invoked]… the support model frequently becomes articulated around the technology and technology systems [technical writing vs. writing technically], with the user subordinated to an external part” (179-80).

Johnson-Eilola is moving the information products produced by technical communicators beyond task/function instruction to helping “users learn how to understand the complexity of issues so they [can] make intelligent, informed decisions…” (179). He wants to see documentation produced as the primary product. “Rather than a manual supporting the use of a tool, the manual helps a user create conditions in which he or she undertakes more general forms of work. Technologies are still involved, but they are not the primary focus.”

Back to the pedagogical implications of Johnson-Eilola’s argument… he is identifying a range of skills required of the modern technical communicator. What are the implications of teaching experimentation, collaboration, abstraction, and system thinking? What Comp or Tech Com pedagogies accommodate teaching students to “discern patterns, relationships, and hierarchies in large masses of information?”

I see Johnson-Eilola arguing for an emancipatory pedagogy – one that connects practice to education. Perhaps emancipatory pedagogies are not aligned with objectivist/positivist pedagogies, as I earlier assumed.

“Technical communication education has traditionally centered on teaching practical, immediately useful skills at the expense of broader forms of learning… By re-articulating technical communication as symbolic-analytic work, we might use our professional diversity and flexibility to empower ourselves and technology users… shifting the focus on communication beyond technology and toward social contexts and processes” (190).

Is he imagining a broader type of technical communication instruction that includes aspects of objective, subjective, and transactional pedagogies – an all-inclusive approach to teaching technical writing? How realistic is this?

I like that Johnson-Eilola focuses his discussion on “the manual” and “user documentation,” but I wonder if it’s a limiting move – if it narrows our understanding of technical communication practices too much to support his calls for a broader education, acceptance, and treatment of technical communication in the field.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

what's technical?

Dobrin, David. “What’s technical about technical writing?” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 107-123.
I used to have undergraduate students read this essay. After coming back to it these years later, I’m left wondering how painful it must have been for them.

In Dobrin’s opening claim I find serious application to what we’ve been trying to do in WRT 407: The reports, specs, guides and manuals “appear when there is a technology, a writer, and readers who want to use the technology. When the pieces succeed, they act as a kind of membrane that lets understanding leak through at a controlled rate. Once the understanding gets through, the membrane disappears [audience invoked?]. This is not great literature; once the readers get the technology, they drop the documentation” (107).

Dobrin is extending the definition of technical writing beyond the mundane “technology writers write about technology” mantra echoed by old-school practicing tech writers. Dobrin is really trying to drill down to the essence of the activities performed by practitioners (technical writing or writing technically, re: Connors’ binary). For Dobrin “technical writing” is all about the text; “writing technically” is all about the encounter which produces the text. It is the social-constructivist nature of writing technically that moves the definition into any number of transactional pedagogies – process and collaborative pedagogies being the most obvious.
Ultimately, Dobrin is making a case against the current-traditional remnants that continue to surface in the technical writing classroom. Specifically, he is pushing back against reliance on the scientific method and its associated documentation processes. “Scientific writing makes a truth claim; technical writing does not. In technical writing… the individual statement can be certain because the whole is unconcerned with the truth” (110).

While I’m not sure I fully agree with Dobrin’s position, I agree with assessment that we need to treat knowledge and language as a whole (“there is no way of knowing without language”), and not separate the two through positivist/objectivist instruction in the tech writing classroom. “I’m suggesting that the injunction of clarity, precision, logic, and objectivity … are not absolutes but axiomatic functions of a particular group. What is technical about technical writing is technology, to the extent that technology defines certain human behaviors among certain human beings…“ (118).

Thus, technical writing is writing that accommodates technology to the user. “People come to technical writing from two directions; either they are technicians who are asked to write [WRT 407 pre-professional engineers] or writers asked to gain technical skills [Spinuzzi’s symbolic-analytic worker].

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

audience invoked

Johnson, Robert. “Audience involved: toward a participatory model of writing.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 91-106.
Johnson is extending a rhetorical perspective of technical communication by moving audience theory into a type of transactional lens. He is looking at audience as “users” of information products (similar to moves made by Johson-Eilola and Spinuzzi) – claiming that “audience” is missing from collaborative writing pedagogies that are increasingly popular across technical communication curricula. “The audience has been marginalized by a preponderance of scholarship that hegemonically places the receivers of discourse at a distance…” (91).

I see Johnson extending the contemporary conceptions of “audience addressed” and “audience invoked” – as “audience involved” is an “actual participant in the writing process who creates knowledge and determines much of the content of the discourse” (93). For Johnson, the user is viewed from a socially constructed perspective; able to negotiate and work with technologists. This focus on the production of knowledge is increasingly relevant, as organizations turn to employees and customers to generate content. The users of the organization’s various information products are called on to be active participants in the knowledge production cycle.

Johnson identifies usability testing as an obvious location for active audience involvement. Again, as the information product “interfaces” become more ubiquitous, it is a logical and practical move to involve the audience (the user) in testing and evaluation activities. The writer of the user documentation is not calling the interface or the process for using the interface into reality by documenting it; the user is realizing and continually re-realizing the interface by their interaction with it. “Audiences who actually receive the intended document can have interesting effects on a writer’s conception of what need to be produced.” (101).
Yet another transactional theory to add to the map.