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).