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.
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