moving toward me1

In preparing for minor exam 1, I'm recovering a Sullivan & Porter essay that considers how writers view and use usability information. I'm finding a constructive framing position in the following conclusion they draw from this and previous studies: "... the writer's use of information is guided by that writer's rhetorical orientation, particularly his/her view of the audience/user."

While this all may seem obvious, its a position that I can use to foreground my on the exam. I need be conscious of -- and describe -- my rhetorical orientation and how it will/does guide my interpretation of usability results. This is important, as the exam will not be the usability and IA analysis, it will only be a discussion of the results of the analyses.

My rhetorical orientation is going to filter the results. So how does one go about recognizing and describing one's rhetorical orientation? I can start by asking a set of questions that Sullivan & Porter presented to their study subject:

• What are my general beliefs about the way discourse works -- what is my model of communication?
• Where do I place priority in writing -- who do I measure effective writing?
• What are my attitudes toward authority -- who do I look to for validation of my perceptions an conclusions?
• To what degree am I an advocate for the texts/systems I will be evaluating?

The difficulty here is that we all observe from a particular rhetorical stance. There really isn't a neutral or objective stance, even if it is something occasionally babbled on about by an old-school technical writer.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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].

connors' history

Connors, Robert. “The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 12.4 (1982): 329-352.

I didn’t think that I would, necessarily, come back to Connors' seminal essay for a close reading. I’ve covered this historical ground already, but as I got back into it I was again drawn into the progress narrative. His reliance on written records and textbooks was what first attracted me to the piece. This time around, that reliance is helping me flesh out my taxonomy and map, specifically in the way Connors frames two disciplinary binary debates that continue within Tech Comm: 1) Being a writer of technical material or being a technician (or SME?) who writes; and 2) Being a technical writing teacher or being a teacher of writing in a technical discipline (WAC?) -- one debate addressing the practice of technical communication, the other addressing the teaching of technical communication.

I don’t want to revisit Connors' history lesson here. I have always like how he cleanly identifies the early 1920s as the point at which “technical writing was becoming more self-aware” (18). Then noting how it would be another 20 years before the discipline of Technical Writing (not necessarily Technical Communication) would begin a forty-year emergence (1940-1980) from English.

Some 30+ years later, Connors’ optimism speaks to the very essence of my exams: “… technical writing is not without problems… There are still arguments being made that the technical writing course should be taken out of the hands of English teachers, but these arguments are as old as technical writing instruction itself and will likely prove no more effectual now than they were in 1920” (17).

tech comm's humanistic value

Miller, Carolyn. “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.” College English 40 (1979): 610-617.
Miller’s essay is a seminal work in Tech Comm’s disciplinary progress narrative, and a noted point of departure from current-traditionalism. “I wish to argue that the common opinion that the undergraduate technical writing course is a skills course with little or no humanistic value is the result of a lingering but pervasive positivist view of science” (610). This positivist lens reduces technical and scientific discourse to “the skills of subduing language so that it most accurately and directly transmits reality” (610).

The issue Miller wrestled with in 1979 was complicated by the fact that Tech Comm was (and still is) a rhetorical discipline founded on positivist theory; hence the narrow view of rhetoric having only to do with symbols and emotion, and the narrower view of science as having only to do with observation and logic. Miller was attempting to distance Tech Comm from its (and Comp’s) history of emergence from current-traditionalism and the foundational humanist curriculum of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

As I’ve stated before, I have a bias toward Tech Comm pedagogies that privilege the objective, impartial, and unemotional. This is the positivist tradition I came up through as a practitioner, and it has clearly shaped my teaching. “Objectivity on the part of the [technical writer] minimizes personal and social interference, reducing observation to the accurate recording of the self-evident…” (612). I have stated as much in class, particularly in regard to laboratory notebooks and system testing documentation.

Having recognized my own biases, I do see that Miller’s call thirty-plus years ago has been embraced by the social constructionist camp within Tech Comm, and clearly lead to a more reflective and reflexive discipline. Of the four primary disciplinary problems Miller identified, only the first – a lack of a coherent definition of what technical writing is – is still hotly debated. The emphasis on style and form, characteristics of tone, and audience analysis in terms of levels have been dismissed and recast through an infusion of WAC, expressivist, rhetorical, process, and collaborative pedagogies in the Tech Comm classroom.

Miller wrote of a new disciplinary epistemology that held, “whatever we know of reality is created by individual action and by communal assent … we bring to the world a set of innate and learned concepts which help us select, organize, and understand what we encounter” (615). This is clearly a transactional perspective, which complicates my placement of humanism (or more precisely, the humanist curriculum) within the region of Berlin’s subjectivism. Does technical writing have humanistic value? Absolutely, although this was not so obvious in 1979.

mcleod's WAC

Susan McLeod - WAC pedagogies
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) has always interested me because of its focus on teaching the content of a discipline and the discourse features used in writing about that content. This instructional strategy has afforded Tech Comm a long history with various Engineering disciplines, as well as the social sciences (as C. Miller has addressed in her seminal essay). McLeod illustrates this focus when she discusses WAC as a transformative pedagogy aimed at, “moving away from the lecture model of teaching to a model of active student engagement with the material and with the genres of the disciplines through writing” (150). Nothing is more common to the Tech Comm than this.

WAC is really about writing to communicate. Again, this is essential to the practicing technical writing (it is her livelihood) and the central emphasis of most Tech Comm instruction. “… it focuses on writing to an audience outside the self in order to inform that audience, and the writing therefore is revised, crafted, and polished. Writing to communicate is reader based rather than writer based, and uses to the formal language of a particular discourse community to communicate information” (153).

I have a high comfort level with this type of teaching (not to be construed as boasting), which is why I think we’ve been so successful with WRT 407. “Writing as writing to communicate… focusing on helping students to learn the discourse of the discipline; the relationship is … not the composition teacher, but the teacher who is already grounded in the content of the field and who is fluent in the disciplinary discourse” (154).

I see WAC pedagogies situated somewhere in the area of rhetorical and process pedagogies –- aligned with other transactional theories and perhaps an off-shoot of social constructionism because of the way students objectify their knowledge in ungraded papers to help them discover both what they know and what they need to know. This is writing to learn. This is Tech Comm instruction. Consider an engineering student’s design document – “an expressive document that helps her explore and assimilate new ideas, create links between the unfamiliar and familiar, mull over possibilities, explain things to the self before explaining them to others” (152). More illustrative, consider the engineering student’s laboratory notebook. “It is not a polished work intended for an outside audience; sometimes it is comprehensible only to the writer” (152).

more on tate, et al - rhetorical pedagogy

William Covino - Rhetorical Pedagogy
I find some comfort in Convino’s discussion of rhetorical pedagogy, primarily because this is the pedagogy I was exposed to in my graduate program. I’m now assuming this is why I have such an affinity for objectivism and prescriptive instruction in my technology writing classes. I’m developing a better appreciation for the alternatives, but I am now more comfortable in my teaching skin.

Convino claims that, “… rhetorical pedagogy consists in encouraging writing that is not restricted to self-expression or the acontextual generation of syntactic structures or the formulaic obedience to rules, but instead keep in view the skills and contingencies that attend a variety of situations and circumstances” (37). This, it seems, is exactly why Tech Comm would take up rhetorical pedagogy as a valid instructional lens and approach.

To generalize as I often do, the need for self-expression (or a sense of writer presence) is not often found in technical communication activities and information products. I’m not surprised then to see that rhetorical pedagogy was taken up in reaction to expressivism at a time (the 1970s-1980s) when Tech Comm was maturing as a discipline separate from English and Composition. As Convino notes, rhetorical pedagogy was a response to what some saw as self-expressive writing’s constraint upon the range of discourses available to student writers.

I also appreciate and identify with modern rhetorical pedagogy as an effort to restore the 5 cannons – invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery – but most importantly, invention (which had been lost in current-traditional objectivity). I note this appreciation having long dismissed invention in the technical writing process as something external and arbitrary to the writer. Modern rhetorical pedagogy exposes Tech Comm instruction to classical rhetoric by confronting “post-modern theory that calls into question the possibility of stabilizing a set of values without enacting cultural oppression” (46) Tech Comm instruction thrives on stability and structure. Oppression (cultural or otherwise) that may occur as a result of those structures can and has occurred. But teaching technical communication as a post-modern activity obliterates any sense of structure and stability, returning the writing activity to some more akin to self-expressive free writing.

The historical trajectory from current-traditionalism is reassuring, as it clarifies Tech Comm’s progress narrative as I understand it. “… we have returned from the current-traditional compression of rhetoric to an expansive sense of its scope and a more fully inclusive appreciation for the range of backgrounds, needs, and desires that inform the teaching of reading and writing” (49).

more on tate - expressive pedagogy

Christopher Burnham – Expressive Pedagogy
Burnham starts with Berlin, which fits nicely into the topography I’m creating. Berlin claims that all pedagogy is ideological, using his rhetorical “triangle” to illustrate his four elements of the rhetorical act: writer, audience, message, and language. According to Berlin, placing one of the four items in the middle of the triangle illustrates it’s prominence to and mediation by the remaining three elements.

Expressivism and the pedagogies based on it place the writer in the middle of Berlin’s triangle – the writer and her ideology assume the greatest value in the rhetorical act. “Expressivist pedagogy encourages, even insists upon, a send of writer presence even in research-based writing. This presence – voice or ethos – whether explicit, implicit, or absent, functions as a key evaluation criterion when expressivists examine writing” (19). And it’s here that I immediately recognized a conflict for Tech Comm pedagogies shaped by other social constructionist theories; Tech Comm (I believe) almost always places the “writing” rather than the “writer” at the center of the triangle. Because of this placement, I see expressivism falling somewhere between subjective and transactional rhetorics, as per Berlin’s framework, moving away from current-traditionalism. “[Expressivism] originated in the 1960s and 1970s as a set of values and practices opposing current-traditional rhetoric” (21).

Only after considering Burnham’s description of the theoretical background of expressivism could I begin to see some fit – some application – the Tech Comm classroom. Burnham points to Britton’s expressive function of language and Kinneavy’s expressive discourse as the major theories that shape expressive pedagogies. Upon breaking down Britton’s description of expressivist theory, I identified a clear association to Tech Comm activities inside and, more importantly, outside the classroom.

“In the participant role, writers produce transactional writing, in which language is used to accomplish the business of the world. Transactional writing is divided further into informative [exposition], regulative and conative writing persuasion]… Informative writing makes information available, regulative writing impels or commands action, and conative writing moves readers from inaction or ambivalence to specific action” (26).

The application to Tech Comm pedagogy and practice are obvious here. I also see Britton’s influence on process-based pedagogies – again due to the clear association of these rhetorical and pedagogical strategies to the activities of the profession technical communicator.

My mapping continues, but I’m again left questioning my own affinity (or afflication?) to current-traditionalist approaches to teching Tech Comm. Perhaps it’s more or a starting point – a position from which to move toward more transactional pedagogies, such as those based on theories of expressivism.

tate et al. and process pedagogy

Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick (Eds.) A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Lad Tobin – Progress Pedagogy
I’m starting to develop a map of disciplinary arguments, positions, and claims. What I’m rediscovering is that there are a lot of dichotomies that cloud the central issue, which is our understanding or writing. Lad Tobin details one such dichotomy in his progress narrative about process pedagogy.

To oversimplify Tobin’s narrative, process pedagogy (as defined by Elbow, Murray, and others) was, and perhaps still is, seen as a response to the “rules, conventions, standards, quality, and rigor” located within current-traditional approaches to writing instruction (4). And yet within this oversimplification I find myself in a cloud of self-assessment.

I tend to associate what I’ll call “traditional” Tech Comm pedagogies with Berlin’s objectivist rhetorics – those based on positivism and the resulting current-traditional approaches to writing instruction. I attribute this to my personal emphasis on the role of objectivity in effective technical communication. (I do tend to teach technical communication from a position of prescriptive rules and standards). But I also recognize aspects of my own teaching in Tobin’s narrative of his adoption of process pedagogies. For example, “… students are writers when they come to the classroom and the writing classroom should be a workshop in which they are encouraged through supportive response of teachers and peers to writing as a way to figure out what they think and fee…” (7). I like to believe that my technical communication class room provides this type of freedom and encouragement. What I do know for sure is that I’ve undervalued the active role of process in my approach to teaching writing.

The self-assessment aside, I want to continue to relationship mapping exercise. There is a clear association of process pedagogy (and the process movement) to Berlin’s transactional rhetorics – specifically those based on social constructionism (the creation of knowledge through social interaction). This places instructional activities, such as Breuch’s virtual peer review, within an overall instructional approach that values process, student-constructed knowledge, and practice-centered learning.

There is a linage here that I’m still teasing out. I’m finding that the dichotomies and binaries I create are complicating the relationships through and among the arguments. It’s never as clear and clean as you want it to be.

More on Tate, et al to come.

tebeaux, back to breuch and words of caution

Tebeaux, Elizabeth. “Technical Writing by Distance: Refocusing the Pedagogy of Technical Communication.” Technical Communication Quarterly (1995).

I’m going to start with Tebeaux but finish with a loop back to Breuch. In Tebeaux’s definition of distance education theory, we find a clear association with social constructionism, technology-mediated instruction, and a further extension of Breuch’s virtual peer review, specifically in regard to pedagogies based on computer-based writing and network theories.

“We now realize that students, instead of being passive recipients of knowledge, are and must be capable of constructing their own knowledge with guidance from the teacher. Technology enables teachers to offer part of this tutorial guidance by setting up an environment that will provide student with the resources necessary for independent exploration” (369).

Tebeaux's claim here lies on the same social constructionist --> student-constructed knowledge --> practice-centered learning trajectory laid out in Breuch’s definition of virtual peer review and the relationship to the sub-field of computers in writing. When Breuch refers to computer pedagogy -- computer-based writing – she is suggesting that virtual peer review actualizes the guidelines that pedagogy must drive technology (Breuch 20).

Tebeaux makes a similar suggestion when she discusses the independence offered to the writing student and teacher by technology. “The system should free students and teachers from the need to inhabit the same physical space, allow students choices in learning formats, incorporate use of proven teaching methods… to provide for dialog between student and teacher” (368).

Breuch showed how traditional and virtual peer review have long histories in Composition and important pedagogical assumptions, such as writing as a process, writing as a social act, and student-centered approaches (Breuch 22). Tebeaux makes a similar claim of historical association when wrapping technical writing instruction with distance theory, writing as a social act, theories of practice-centered learning, and “guided didactic conversation."

Both Breuch and Tebeaux are basing their claims on assumptions that writing is a social act. I’m not disagreeing, but I am left wondering how other constructions of knowledge making would or could complicate both claims. Breuch, for example: "Writing instructors have a responsibility to integrate computer technology into their writing courses... virtual peer review can play a transitional role: it can help instructors transition to computer-based classrooms, especially since it has grounding in peer review and pedagogical assumptions important to writing pedagogy" (Breuch 130). And yet regardless of the theoretical lens, I find Breuch and Tebeaux both identifying areas of pedagogical intersection between Tech Comm and Comp. In booth virtual peer review and teaching writing online, I find Tech Comm’s logical predisposition toward technology-enhanced instruction (Comp has relied on computers in writing to make this extension).

There is a caution, however, to slide toward a conclusion that Tech Comm is about the technology. This caution traces back to Cynthia Selfe's argument that computer-based writing instruction (technology mediated writing) often places the technology before the teaching. To avoid the slide, we need to draw from Breuch and Tebeaux their emphasis on pedagogy and the distinctions between collaboration and technology in the writing classroom.

kastman breuch's practical definition

Breuch, Lee-Ann Kastman. Virtual Peer Review: Teaching and Learning About Writing in Online Environments. SUNY Press, 2004.

It’s only because I picked Breuch’s texts out of the stack before I left for a conference that I’m addressing her at this point. It’s been a positive happenstance.

Breuch is claiming that virtual peer review (“the activity of using computer technology to exchange and respond to one another’s writing for the purpose of improving writing”) is a different enough activity from face-to-face peer review (traditional peer review – my term) that it warrants a closer examination by writing teachers. The principle difference between traditional peer review and virtual peer review is that “computer technology must be used to interact with peer reviewers” (11). Bruech goes onto to refine the activity by claiming that computer technology must be used in three specific ways: 1) to write documents; 2) to exchange written documents electronically; and 3) to converse with reviewers about those documents through synchronous or asynchronous electronic comments.

I’m immediately struck by the similarity of virtual peer review activities to those of the modern knowledge worker (see Spinuzzi), and specifically to the fundamental activities of the modern technical communicator. Breuch notes as much in her examples of the frequently mis-identified activity of virtual peer review in professional and classroom contexts. “These examples demonstrate that virtual peer review has begun to appear in classrooms, online writing centers, workplaces, and even daily lives… Several other writing practices may already include virtual peer review; it is just that we have not recognized it in any consistent or formal way” (12).

I’m early yet into the text, so at this point I want to situate Breuch’s claim within the theoretical and pedagogical framework I’m building. She begins with Depardo and Freeman’s four categories of collaborative writing: 1) responding to writing (peer review); 2) thinking collaboratively; 3) writing collaboratively; and 4) editing student writing. She extends their first category to Ruggles Gere’s definition of peer review – of “writers responding to one another work.” Breuch also draws on Kenneth Bruffee’s interchangeable definitions of “peer criticism” and “peer evaluation” to further refine her definition of virtual peer review.

And it’s at this point that I found myself looping back to how I saw Berlin’s epistemic transactional rhetorics in opposition to objectivist theories -- those most closely related to positivistic pedagogies, the current traditional, and common Comp and Tech Comm pedagogies based on objective rhetorics. In Bruffee, in particular, we have social constructivist who claims that “knowledge is created through social interaction … peer review can be defined as responding to another’s writing for the purposes of improving writing” (10). Through Brufee, Depardo, Freeman, and others, Breuch is making a claim for a pedagogy that aligns with Berlin’s epistemic transactional rhetorics, where "all truths arise out of dialectic, out of the interaction of individuals within discourse communities” (Berlin 16-17). I now see transactional rhetorics as not oppositional to objectivist theories, but yet another useful type of rhetoric in the Comp and Tech Comm classroom. In Breuch I’m seeing that I can’t create an artificial Comp vs. Tech Comm binary in which to consider my major exam. I have to locate the principle claims and debates, and find out how and where they’ve been taken up by either discipline.

It’s likely that this early into the text I’m oversimplifying Breuch’s claim, but I see the pedagogical implications of her definition of virtual peer review on Comp and Tech Comm. More to come, I’m sure, but it seems that the ubiquity of technology-enhanced writing practices would require Com and Tech Comm teachers to employ pedagogies shaped by of inclusive of virtual peer review activities.

progress at any pace

I had the opportunity yesterday to attend an online teaching and learning prep session hosted by the SU Writing Program (WP). The WP has shown extraordinary vision in this regard, as they’ve been hosting these events at least once a year for the past six or so years. The sessions are now required for any Professional Writing Instructor (adjunct) or doctoral student interested in teaching an online writing course.

This year, a scholar who I’ve long admired as a teacher’s teacher gave a terrific overview of her strategy for engaging students in an online course. It was interesting to see how someone who is keenly aware of pedagogical moves in the writing classroom was challenged to make her online course less about technology and more about learning. By that I mean selecting specific tools and technologies based on pedagogical requirements, rather than the other way around. If I can convince her to deliver a version of her presentation to faculty outside the WP, it would go a long way toward moving antagonistic faculty beyond the problem of conflating the concepts of online teaching/learning and instructional technology.

I also found during this year’s session that the small group in attendance expressed the same valid concerns we’ve been wrestling with for a long time. For example, there remains a concern about the lack of more rigorous or formalized options for preparing faculty (and others) to teach online. This may be changing here on the iceberg – stay tuned.

communicating engineers

Last weekend was the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science open house. My WRT 407 students presented and demonstrated their year-long projects to visitors, guests, and an IEEE review team. Once again I came away from the event amazed by the creativity, talent, and genius of these pre-professional engineers. It is both a humbling and energizing event.

I spend much of the afternoon reviewing the project teams' documentation suites. While the format is not required, they typically take the shape of tabbed three-ringed binders. The suite consists of the following documents, which the teams have developed and revised over the course of the two semesters:

• Formal Project Proposal
• Individual Technical Descriptions
• Technical or Demo Presentation
• System Requirement Specification
• Test Plan/Test Scripts
• User or Implementation Guide
• Status Report
• Draft Research Paper/Article 

When I look at the range and quality (yes, quality) of the documents, I inevitably wind up questioning the outcomes of the course. I focus my instruction on genre and the communicative and rhetorical requirements of different types of documents in different contexts. Filtered down, that really mean that I'm teaching production. I don't really see that as a bad thing, but I do wonder how the production of technical engineering texts s in alignment with the course outcomes.

I have some improvements to make, particularly in regard to managing 40+ students in a class that meeting only once per week. Aligning activities and products to goals and outcomes will drive those improvements.

tech makes us dumb

The other day my mother-in-law was talking about how kids are smarter today -- that they seem so plugged in and aware. I commented that I don't think kids are necessarily smarter than earlier generations, but I do think they are clearly more comfortable with communication, instructional, and entertainment technologies.

A couple of days later I read a short article on the definition of modern literacy by Susan Metros. She claims that the skills necessary to successfully using technology (analyzing, visualizing, communicating, and innovating) will require everyone to be technologically literate (on a continuum that moves from stimulated to novice, novice to literate, and literate to fluent). This does not, however, equate to literate in the traditional sense. As Metros notes, "They know how to upload a movie to YouTube...they know how to text, and they are constantly connected to something digital. But my argument is they are not literate; they are just basically stimulated."

I find in these distinctions of literacy the same tension that exists in the technical writing classroom. How technically literate does a technical writer have to be? It's really more than the decades old debate about do we teach tools or do we teach writing. It has more to do with the technical writer's ability to comprehend complex topics and concepts, and to produce usable and original information products with an array of tools, technologies, and skills. In co-opting Metros' argument, the modern technical writer's "literacy" must be less about the tools and technologies and more about "ways of thinking and seeing, and of crafting narrative."

thicker threads

I've long proposed that the relationship between technical communication and instructional design needs to be explored more deeply than it has been. In fact, it's an area of my yet-to-be-taken qualifying exams. As an extension of that relationship, I've recently started pulling on the thread that runs through online course design (as a generic practice) and technical communication.

We covered some of this ground in Krista's class last year -- specifically the relationships among information architecture, information design, and technical communication. In a current online course design project, I'm finding that understanding these relationships helps me better describe and illustrate to faculty what they have to do when creating an online course.

For example, technical communication is all about content. Online courses are all about the content. Structuring that content in a logical, meaningful, and usable way is sometimes difficult for faculty new to online course design. Technical communicators, on the other hand, intuitively understand how to do this. By introducing basic concepts of information architecture to faculty -- even rudimentary folder/item metaphors -- I've been able to show them the connection between instructional content and instructional sequence.

Similarly, technical communicators have long struggled with presenting content in usable, useful, and effective designs. On the successes and failures of these struggles, it's easy to introduce faculty to basic concepts of information design -- working with the options (and limitations) of the interfaces through which their course content will be served. After faculty understand the role of heuristics in the online course space, they are always less intimidated by multi-layered content and web-based instructional technologies.

About twelve years ago my little technical writing department was making a case to be positioned as the information hub within a software development company. It seemed a bit of a stretch at the time, but now I think we may have been on to something. The (rapidly changing) nature of technical communication places the TCer in a unique position to weave together threads of a wide range of disciplines, practices, and theories. Maybe this is what makes it so hard to define technical communication. Maybe it's what makes practicing technical communication so much fun.

common threads

I had my classroom observation conducted a few days ago. We’re required to have an observation prior to our contract renewals. I’ve always seen it as an opportunity to get a fresh perspective from real composition instructors.

This year’s observation was extremely enlightening in that it helped me better understand the threads that run through the lower- and upper-division writing curriculum. I’ve never taught WRT 105 or 205, so I’m always basing my instruction in WRT 407 on assumptions about what the students should already know or should be capable of doing.

In discussing this with my observer (a seasoned and extremely talented writing instructor), we determined that because WRT 407 is content-rich and highly contextualized, I have ample opportunity to address rhetorical aspects of technical communication. By coming back to rhetoric (as a discipline and practice), I can draw on what the students have already experienced in their lower-division writing courses.

Of course, I’m feeling a little sheepish for not identifying this opportunity myself. For all of my emphasis on the distinctiveness of technical communication, I lost the forest among the trees.