Chapter Two
Contents
Chapter Two 1
General education 2
Required Writing Classes and a Common Body of Knowledge 2
Desired Skills for Technical Communicators 3
Service courses 5
TC service courses 7
Differences between Academic and Non-Academic Writing 9
How do these differences relate to this study? 9
Revision 10
TC instruction 12
Relationship of TC instruction to non-academic work 12
Textbooks 12
For TCers 12
For Non-TCers 12
Contingent faculty? 12
Engineers 12
Engineering communication 12
TC working with engineering 12
Academic 12
Practitioner 12
Research methods 12
Methodology 12
TC research methods relevant to this study 12
Importance of speed, broad approach 12
General education
Required Writing Classes and a Common Body of Knowledge
The belief in a common body of knowledge needed for effective writing is evident in the history of Harvard’s composition program in the 1870s (Brereton, 1995). Faced with growing evidence of poor writing skills, Harvard began requiring coursework in writing along with entrance exams designed to test a student’s writing skills (Brereton, 1995). Harvard’s program required students to write essays on texts from the Western canon, such as works by Shakespeare and Milton (Brereton, 1995). The belief was that by linking the practice of writing to commonly-accepted masterpieces of fiction, student writing would improve. Exposure to the data, the applied body of knowledge, of those famous authors would naturally cultivate good writing.
Harvard’s program did not spring forth in isolation: they were facing a very real influx of students who were not writing the way the Harvard faculty expected. Even earlier, during the 1840s, the less standardized English of the American West led to increased emphasis on grammatical correctness (Connors, 1985). In fact, during that time correcting other peoples’ grammar became a common pedagogical strategy designed to improve written communication (Connors, 1985). The idea that critiquing grammatical constructions was a valid method of improving one’s own writing is based upon the very real fact that grammar, any grammar, is a set of guidelines created by a community of use: languages and their grammars are socially-constructed systems, the application of experience and data familiar to a specific populace. Without standards of syntax, grammar, and usage, communication is difficult at best. However, what those standards are, or should be, is the subject of often strident debate, evidence of which can be seen in Texas’ recent adoption of a new recommended reading list for public K-12 writing instruction (Heinauer, 2008). And writing instruction is an ongoing struggle due to the problems inherent in identifying the qualities of good writing and how those qualities may be taught.
In 1944, in response to the coming flood of World War Two veterans entering college, the American Council on Education issued a report describing general education at the college level to be “those phases of nonspecialized and nonvocational education that should be the common possession, the common denominator, so to speak, of educated persons as individuals and as citizens in a free society” (Bigelow, 1947). The list included items such as “emotional and social adjustment,” “family and marital adjustment,” “natural phenomena,” literature, music, “thinking about the meaning and value of life.” The second objective requires a student “[t]o communicate through his own language in writing and speaking at the level of expression adequate to the needs of educated people” (Bigelow, 1947, p. 258). The committee went on to recommend courses which could be adopted to help meet these objectives. While the committee did see communication as valuable enough to include in its own right, the overall tenor of the report suggests that knowledge. . .
Like the Harvard faculty a century earlier, the American Council on Education believed that exposure to fine, artistic writing would naturally improve students’ writing; however, neither the American Council on Education nor Harvard
Go bigger with this section: post-WWII education, GI Bill, technical and scientific advancement, Vannevar Bush, and all. . .that. . .jazz.
General education, at least from the standpoint of the 1840s through post-World War II America, was an act of conserving the knowledge and value of prior generations in order to ensure the continuation of life as we had come to know it. Regardless of whether educators felt, or continue to feel, that education is the attempt to broaden minds and free the nascent intellect, public education is in fact the attempt to preserve and protect existing knowledge and values. Arguments over reading lists (such as that mentioned above) and science curricula demonstrate that the battle over what is known and what is new continues to cause problems for teachers.
But the argument that there is a standard body of knowledge, a bucket of facts that every college-educated person needs to know, is compelling and not to be taken lightly. Because educators are tasked with passing along knowledge and skills which have proved fruitful in the past, we are tempted to reduce the experience of education to a demonstration of philosophical realism: The reality of the external world is codified and described by the teacher. The students, who exist in the same knowable world of phenomena, can learn about these phenomena through the teacher’s efforts because the phenomena exist independently of people. In other words, the world exists prior to us knowing about the world. In the classroom, realism pedagogy enjoins the teacher to speak about the knowledge and demonstrate the skills. The students learn by being in the right place at the right time and by paying attention. For classes in which a lot of information needs to be learned in order to master the ideas at the root of the subject, a realism-based approach is not necessarily a bad idea. The quantity of data required to understand such a subject requires that some method of mass-distribution be used, whether on site, online, or some hybrid combination of the two.
Many general education classes are based upon these assumptions, including courses in chemistry, calculus, literature, and political science, all of which rest on the bedrock faith that the “out-thereness” of the world (Law, 2003) is knowable, that it is possible for people to share this knowledge, and that the information about the world around us exists independently of our own existence.
The realist pedagogical approach is evident in the tangled history of TC service courses. Connors (1982) tells us that the beginnings of the technical writing service course are rooted in the engineering schools that grew out of the Morrill Act, and that by the end of the nineteenth century those engineering schools were graduating “competent engineers who were near-illiterates” (p. 331). The purpose of requiring TC instruction to engineering students was to convey the knowledge and skills (again, Law’s “out-thereness”) to the students who needed them. One problem with a realist approach to writing instruction is that the students in those classes already knew how to write; that is, they were already literate. They were also (presumably) already oriented to the physical sciences. Because the students already knew the facts they needed, a pedagogy based on realism would not fit their needs. In other words, if simply knowing enough information were the sole requirement to be a skilled writer, then all well-read individuals would be good writers.
Desired Skills for Technical Communicators
This is a proposal for the study of the differences between group revision in TC service courses and the group revision that takes place in engineering firms. In this section, I present some of the highlights of both recent and canonical literature on the subject of TC and TC education in order to then compare these ideals with service courses for undergraduates.
Researchers such as Johnson-Eilola, Whiteside, Hayhoe, Harner and Rich, and Rainey, Turner, and Dayton describe TC education with broad terms such as collaboration, context, emancipation, and technological change. According to Johnson-Eilola (1996), TC workers “rely on skills in abstraction, experimentation, collaboration, and system thinking to work with information across a variety of disciplines and markets” and that “symbolic-analytic work mediates between the functional necessities of usability and efficiency while not losing sight of the larger rhetorical and social contexts in which users work and live” (p. 245-6). While focused on professional technical communicators, Johnson-Eilola’s claim is true for almost any profession in which data is interpreted for multiple audiences; thus, his remarks are pertinent for any student in a service course.
With specific regard to TC curricula, Hayhoe (2005) wrote,
Academics need to work with our practitioner colleagues to identify in detail the body of knowledge and skills that technical communicators need to be competitive and effective on the job. We must then revise our curricula to focus on that knowledge and those skills to prepare future students. And we must work through our professional organizations with those in industry to ensure that our alumni and those without formal training in the field can learn what they need to know” (266).
In line with Hayhoe’s argument, the 2008 International Professional Communication Conference in Montreal featured a discussion entitled “Developing a Body of Knowledge for the Technical Communication Profession,” chaired by Hillary Hart. I mention this conference because its attendees are both academic and non-academic TC professionals, thus serving as evidence that a partnership between academics and practitioners is not an effort solely on behalf of the academics. Hart then went on to chair the STC’s Body of Knowledge project, still ongoing, which is an attempt at broadly defining areas of knowledge for technical communicators in a public, online venue. Taken together, Hart and Hayhoe indicate a growing desire to formalize what TC workers and researchers have been doing for almost a century.
Whiteside (2003), wrote that “[t]he global nature of today’s business economy spreads to additional challenges for technical communicators . . . including grant writing, usability, educational technology, user interface design, multimedia design, and knowledge management” (304). Whiteside’s statement holds true for those practicing TC as a profession or those who produce technical documents as part of another profession, such as medicine or engineering. Speaking more broadly, Rainey, Turner, and Dayton (2005), published a study which listed the following “most important competencies for technical communicators”:
• Skills in collaborating with both subject-matter experts and coworkers
• Ability to write clearly for specific audiences directed by clearly defined purposes
• Ability to assess and to learn to use technologies
• Ability to take the initiative (be a self-starter) and to evaluate one’s own work and the work of others (323).
While Rainey, Turner, and Dayton’s study is concerned primarily with professional technical communicators, their list of competencies can also be applied to students taking TC service courses. For instance, undergraduate engineering majors will someday routinely “collabora[te] with both subject-matter experts and coworkers” as well as “write clearly for specific audiences direct by clearly defined purposes.” TC researchers, for our part, must remember that some of the research intended to help our own colleagues can be applied to students enrolled in service courses.
David and Kienzler (1999) suggest that the “broad context” found when students “find clients for their work” may be a bridge between classroom and non-academic work. David and Kienzler also state that “students [in undergraduate service courses] are asked to find real-world problems to solve, and the work is frequently done collaboratively.” They go on to suggest that teachers of TC adopt an “emancipatory” pedagogy which will help “meet the call from industry.” By “emancipatory,” David and Kienzler mean an approach to teaching which encourages students to solve classroom problems (assignments) for the sake of solving “public” problems. They make note of “messy problems involving complicated relationships among multiple variables” and “action through knowledge translated across disciplines” for students in service courses. Those variables include ones found during research, but could also include the variables of people working collaboratively, rapid changes in writing technologies, and the relationship between service courses, “user departments,” and professional practice.
Harner and Rich (2005) claim that the changing nature of the TC profession is matched by the changing nature of academic program design, and that “it would be helpful to examine the state of many scientific and technical communication programs across the nation” so as to get an idea of what a common TC curriculum looks like as well as pedagogical strategies for meeting curricular goals. Like Hayhoe, Whiteside (2003) also called for professional and curricular standards for TC instruction, and both also indicate the need for increased communication from industry to help guide that standardization.
In sum, then, these sources demonstrate that TC is, or can be, a field of great depth and breadth. However, there is little evidence in the literature that provides insight into TC regarding how it’s taught to non-TC majors. There is also the further question of what should be taught, and whether there is a method for discovering the writing skills and knowledge in the workplace and getting it into the service course classroom in usable form.
Service courses
A service course is a course offered by one department to non-majors from other departments. For the purposes of this proposal, which suggests that TC service courses are an important site of research into group revision practices, understanding the difference between service courses and courses for majors within a discipline is important. For instance, the required course in Texas history that all students enrolled in Texas public colleges and university must take is offered by history departments as a service course. The word “service” indicates that the department is serving the campus at large by providing instruction in a specialized topic for those who are not necessarily majors in that department. Service courses are rooted in the notion of a “general education” curriculum which ensures that all students are exposed to the same pieces of knowledge.
In 1946, the American Council on Education issued a report describing general education at the college level to be “those phases of nonspecialized and nonvocational education that should be the common possession, the common denominator, so to speak, of educated persons as individuals and as citizens in a free society” (Bigelow, 1947). In their list of ten objectives, which included items such as “emotional and social adjustment,” “family and marital adjustment,” “natural phenomena,” literature, music, “thinking about the meaning and value of life,” the second objective states, “To communicate through his own language in writing and speaking at the level of expression adequate to the needs of educated people” (Bigelow, 1947, p. 258).
Connors (1982) outlines the history of just such a course in technical writing: classes offered through English departments for the benefit of engineering students. But while we have this history, we also have articles that comment upon service courses without defining them. For instance, a number of articles discuss various aspects of service courses, such as choosing a textbook for teaching intercultural communication (Barker & Matveeva, 2006), changes in pedagogy (David & Kienzler, 1999), measuring transfer of rhetorical skills into other classes (Ford, 2004), and positioning required communication courses as writing-in-the disciplines courses (Russell, 2007). Despite the lack of definition, Barker and Matveeva go so far as to make broad claims, such as “we all know that a certain amount of skill instruction occurs in the course” (198). Yet at least one study indicates that a great many service courses are taught in the United States each year (Reave, 2004). Surely, it is time to get a handle on things.
Dobrin, trying to impart a feel for the trials of the technical writing teacher, laments that “[i]ndeed, technical writing is probably taught in more different ways—inside more different departments—than any other ostensibly humanistic course” (1982). Even at individual institutions, it is sometimes the case that “no systematic evaluation has been conducted on the effects of the current technical communication service courses” (Scott & Plumb, 1999).
But it is inaccurate to say that there are no sources of information concerning service courses. Course descriptions, for one, can provide claims of course content and purpose. For instance, out of course descriptions for 70 higher education institutions, TC service course descriptions claim to offer students practice in “basic genres and topics” (University of Alabama), “patterns of writing” (TTU), oral presentations (15 different institutions), and an avalanche of reports, proposals, and letters. While these course descriptions are obviously generic, often for the sake of allowing instructors some freedom to develop class-specific assignments and readings, they do point to coherence of purpose. Simultaneously, that coherence is disrupted by long-standing debate within the field of TC concerning the very definition of TC itself (Allen, 2004; Dobrin, 1985; Miller, 1979) or the nature of TC research (Blyler, 1995; Charney, 1996).
Research into what is taught in service courses is difficult in part because there are so many service courses offered. According to the Texas Common Course Numbering System, in Texas alone there are 66 colleges and universities offering a TC service course and each school, department, and individual instructor doubtless has differing interpretations of the terms mentioned in the course descriptions above. Another reason for difficulty in researching TC service courses is that while academic and non-academic publishing venues exist in abundance, there are few large repositories of information about service courses. Reasons may include a lack of emphasis on service courses with regard to tenure and promotion for professors, lack of trained instructors (and therefore lack of sustained research because these same instructors might be untrained in TC, or may be encouraged to carry out research judged more appropriate for future tenure-track positions), and the already-mentioned generic nature of course descriptions. As mentioned earlier, Barker and Matveeva claim that many TC service course instructors are likely working with “set syllabuses that do not allow much flexibility” (192). As cited earlier, Dobrin’s view is contrary to Barker and Matveeva’s, since he claims that “technical writing is probably taught in more different ways—inside more different departments—than any other ostensibly humanistic course” (1982). Despite the chronological gap between these two sources (2006 and 1982, respectively), they serve as a reminder that there may yet be a lack of consensus about what is taught, and even by whom, in TC service courses.
If our service courses are to fulfill their stated functions, then we must be more diligent in performing practical research that allows for some confidence that we are teaching writing which is similar to actual workplace writing. Furthermore, we must be willing to make this information widely available so that other researchers can continue to build upon what is already known.
TC service courses
Knievel (2007) suggests that “the service course is a particularly rich site of contention, promise, and crisis—a bellwether of the field” (1), and I would further argue that service courses are a logical place to study whether academic instruction is keeping up with workplace practice. While much research is devoted to studying students who will become professional technical communicators both inside and outside of academia (Harner & Rich, 2005; Hart-Davidson, 2001; Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2001; Rainey, Turner, & Dayton, 2005), studying the instruction we provide those students (such as engineers) who will not be employed directly in our field is also critical. Studying service courses for engineering students who will not be professional technical communicators is important because that body of students is headed into a market which requires detailed, technical knowledge, and which also requires regular communication with multiple audiences, including fellow engineers, engineers in other fields, supervisors, employees, and potential clients. Engineering students come to the service course because they need training in genres, audience analysis, and the rhetorical and technological tools needed for getting information from those who know it to those who need to know it. Thus, it is our obligation to inform our service courses with workplace practice.
Faculty who teach TC service courses are almost overwhelmingly contingent (84%), non-tenure track faculty (Meloncon & England, forthcoming). Faced with heavy teaching loads and perhaps teaching TC for the first time (or without training, or both), those contingent faculty members might not have a wide range of contacts outside academics. While engineering departments across the nation maintain non-academic contacts through professional licensure of faculty, advisory councils, and ABET-mandated quality improvement initiatives, liberal arts programs often have little contact with the non-academic workplace. Even TC programs, which we might assume to have close ties with practice, often face cultural barriers that work against collaboration with their non-academic colleagues (Dicks, 2002). Thus, liberal arts faculty members might have few resources for developing and implementing new content for a TC service course.
With such a large contingent labor force, we can guess that many service course instructors simply are not versed in TC or TC research methods, and may not be able to carry out research designed to answer the question of what to teach in the service course. Contingent faculty are also among the most poorly funded in terms of professional development and research, and so even if they are able they may not have the money or facilities in order to conduct research. Lastly, it’s important to mention that many faculty members simply do not have the breadth of contact with the professional world necessary to find out what writing skills and practices are needed outside of classroom walls.
Technical communication (TC) is taught to a large number of undergraduates as part of a required service course for non-majors. A rough estimate based on Reave (2004)places the nationwide number of undergraduate students in TC service courses at around 700,000 in the academic year 2007. Thus, TC service courses affect a large number of future professionals, both in terms of those students’ future practice as well as how they perceive TC as a discipline. As those students move into the professional realm where TC is part of their everyday work, they will inevitably encounter situations for which their service courses should have provided some level of preparation. Ten years have passed, however, since service courses appear to have occupied the interest of TC researchers by way of a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly. None of the articles in that issue addressed service course content nor a method for keeping those same courses updated. In the meantime, the ethnographic approach seems to have maintained its popularity with writing researchers.
Part of the disjuncture between writing for the humanities (and thus the approach that humanities-based textbooks take) and writing in the scientific and engineering fields has to do with the mission of technical communication itself: clarity reigns supreme. Over and over, engineers are rightly taught that clarity is the goal of good writing (Boyd & Hassett, 2000; Lengsfeld, Edelstein, Black, Hightower, & et al., 2004; Leydens & Schneider, 2009). Indeed, ABET criterion 3(g) states that "Engineering programs must demonstrate that their students attain. . .an ability to communicate effectively” (ABET, 2007). The humanities, though, often approach writing as an art in itself, and that the act of writing (rather than its product) is worth studying. And as with the engineers who argue the opposite, the humanities scholars are indeed correct. These two approaches are both utterly logical, and yet incompatible.
Joanna Wolfe (2009) points out that textbooks for introductory TC service courses actually fail to serve a huge chunk of their clientele: engineering and science students whose rhetorical and epistemological approach do not mesh with those of the humanities scholars who produce the textbooks. To be fair, there are textbooks written by engineers or by humanities scholars who work closely for engineers. Hillary Hart’s Engineering Communication is such a book, created by a humanities scholar whose position and experience aligns her with an engineering college. But those books are few and far between, and their level of adoption does not even begin to approach those of the humanities-driven textbooks. As Wolfe bluntly puts it, “the most popular technical communication textbooks on the market focus on rhetorical situations that are far more likely to be encountered by someone with a job title of technical writer rather than one of engineer” (353, emphasis in original).
The contrast between what engineers and employers seem to want can be seen in Blyler’s argument in favor of a pedagogy of social action, urging teachers and students to take a rhetorical approach to the construction of power in both textual and graphical narratives (Blyler, 1995). In an earlier article, Blyler takes a humanities-based stance when arguing against a “formulaic” view of genre and purpose for business communication courses (Blyler, 1993). But formulaic is exactly what many engineers would like, and is often exactly the approach needed for effective engineering communication. In the humanities, we argue that texts are social artifacts constructed to meet the needs and expectations of (frequently) tightly-knit groups with a level of discourse contingent upon their workplace activities and needs. But Blyer’s argument suggests that teaching should take the opposite approach, and that we should not train students to write genres within such a specific context. Taking a broad approach to audience analysis and textual production would help student writers think more globally about writing and perhaps more critically about the purposes of genre. But to teach that broader view of rhetoric means we’re not responding to the stated needs of our client departments and are in fact working more pragmatically according to our own Jamesian “cash value.”
Bushnell argues that preparing students simply for their future jobs based on expectations provided solely by employers undermines the role of the university in producing writers who “shape knowledge” and who acknowledge bias rather than avoid it (Bushnell, 1999). However, for students in technical majors who take the service course as part of a communication requirement, the expectation to “shape knowledge” may be too great a leap: engineering students, for example, are taught to create knowledge (design structures, conduct tests) and then to report it. To introduce the idea of shaping knowledge in the form of a one-semester course, or to encourage students to take a rhetorically-bound epistemological stance, may be asking too much. Bushnell’s take on university education is also a bit dated: we no longer (always) aim to broaden minds and further intellectual horizons. Instead, it seems the more common goal is to train students for specific professions, which more and more commonly require even further specialization after college.
Academics and practitioners in TC have an ongoing conversation about how we can increase the perceived value of our profession (Hughes, 2002; Johnson-Eilola, 1996; Redish, 2003). Much of that discussion has to do with conversations about licensure, re-positioning TC in accordance with added value, defining TCers as knowledge workers, and the like. One practical place to start increasing the value we add, and are perceived as adding, is to offer higher-quality courses to non-majors. Our course descriptions say the TC service course is intended to give students practice writing for "business” and “industry,” for their “future careers in writing and business,” “writing for [the] professions,” and writing in a “business environment.” If that’s the case, then the service course is a logical place to begin introducing students to the value that good writing can add to the workplace.
Unfortunately, a faculty member wishing to update the content of service course has few resources other than his or her ability to gather new information. The TC literature barely discusses service courses, and there is little information on what content should be included. Popular textbooks, such as Johnson-Sheehan’s Technical Communication in the 21st Century and Markel’s Technical Communication do a good job of discussing genres and writing practices; however, an introductory text of any sort will necessarily have large gaps and will not address the specific writing needs of students from various majors.
Differences between Academic and Non-Academic Writing
How do these differences relate to this study?
Bosley contends that documents types represent a connection between academic and workplace writing, listing “proposals, grants, reports, procedures, white papers, user manuals, tutorials, online material, memoranda, meeting minutes, letters, promotional and public relations material” (Table 2.1, 29) as document types used by both (Bosley, 2002). For academics, however, most of these document types represent administrative work taken on by tenured and tenure-track faculty. Contingent faculty rarely have need to write public relations material, proposals or meeting minutes because their jobs are largely relegated to teaching. Bosley’s argument therefore applies only to a minority of TC faculty teaching the service course, since the majority of service courses are taught by contingent faculty.
Bosley indicates that academics and practitioners alike write and work collaboratively on committees and teams. However, Dicks indicates that this is in fact a difference due to the difference with which individual initiative is treated by both academics (publication and tenure) and practitioners (teamwork, collaboration and increased corporate value) (Dicks, 2002).
But perhaps one of the most important distinctions between workplace writing and college writing is the end, or goal, of the document. In school, everything a student does is for his or her direct benefit. Students work as individuals and are graded as individuals. Even in group work, students receive individual grades, and savvy instructors have policies in place for the student who does not contribute as much as is expected. Upon graduation, students receive a personalized diploma recognizing their efforts. Students own their writing, and thus their grades.
Dicks’ claim is that the differences between academic and workplace writers move beyond the generic and into the realm of cultural divides. Dicks enumerates five cultural differences which contribute to the disconnection between academics and practitioners, including “perception of information,” “language and discourse styles,” “views of collaboration versus individual effort,” assumptions about employment,” and “reward structures” (Dicks, 2002). In workplace writing, documents frequently do not list an author but instead bear the name of the company or institution for which the employee works. The end of the workplace document is to increase the value of the organization, not the individual. Individual benefits such as paychecks, raises, and promotions come only as the result of work which increases the value of the company.
Writing in the classroom means the student owns the document and has produced all of the work within it. When a student cites information, it is for the purpose of acknowledging outside help, such as quoting a source of information. But in the workplace, documents are frequently used and re-used, and even kept as templates for later work. A single paragraph may contain the words of five or six employees, but those words are not attributed individually; instead, the document is taken to be literally the work of the corporate body. Ownership of that text goes to the organization, and plagiarism takes a backseat to corporate identity and profit. Our service courses, however, likely do not (and perhaps cannot) reflect the for-profit approach to group writing. If they cannot mimic those goals, then we can at least investigate and acknowledge those differences in meaningful ways.
The lack of recognition of the difference between classroom writing and workplace writing is largely transparent, and often detrimental, to the service courses designed upon the assumption that classroom writing and business writing are the same thing. In the next section, I discuss the academic definitions and perceptions of revision in order to provide some context for why group revision is an important aspect of this study.
Revision
Within academic culture, attempts to define revision offer microcosms of insight into researchers’ attempts to define an activity which resists definition. Ethnographic methods often get at the social (Katz), rhetorical (Winsor) or physical (Jones) aspects of revision; however, it’s clear that like almost any other writing activity revision takes place within specific (mixed) contexts. Haar (2006) provides examples of “deliberately wrought” (11) descriptions of revision offered by revision scholars, ranging from metaphorical (“internal” and “external,” “up” and “down,” revising “out” and “in”), cognitive (“a turn, a change of direction or attention, a step, a transformation from a writer-centered to a reader-centered mode of writing,” according to Flower), duration (“quick” and “thorough,” according to Elbow), and a literal definition by Fitzgerald that says “revision means making any changes at any point in the writing process.”
Revision involves as much technological expertise as any other variety of the writing process. Yet there is much less scholarship dealing with the technological aspects of revision than with writing (either writing in general or the writing of a first draft). Artemeva, Logie, and St-Martin (1999) use an interface between students posing assignments and revising, encouraging written interaction between students, and developing a community within the course itself. Even in 1999, such newsgroups were not new technology, and now ten years later they are one of the more antiquated online technologies.
Within non-academic, workplace culture revision takes on a different dynamic than in the classroom because writing often serves different social purposes. For example, workplace writers often do not get credit for their individual efforts; rather, the company gains value and recognition. In the workplace, writers often work together with little regard for plagiarism since the company, or the group itself, is considered the author. Since revision takes place in response to an audience, I argue that revision is when the work of the individual becomes the work of the group, and that work always takes place with the use of some tool, whether analog or digital. Uncovering that process and how the group works with technology to attain the group’s goals is a worthwhile goal for anyone trying to improve TC service courses.
Katz’ study, which places revision as an activity between co-workers (“writing review”), explicates the socialization of employees into the rhetorical commonplaces and practices of the workplace. Employees frequently get their writing reviewed, voluntarily or not, by a supervisor who has some power over the employee. For Katz, the interactions between employee and supervisor are just as important as changes made to the document: employees are working to improve the image of the company rather than writing for individual achievement like students in a classroom environment (39). This change, from writing as an individual to working with others to achieve a common goal, and which necessitates a cognitive shift on the part of the writer, needs demystification for both service course instructors as well as students.
Winsor claims that this shift in cognition occurs within an “environment [that] includes a complex of readers, purposes those readers have, history they share, expectations under which they operate, and a host of other factors that are relevant for rhetoric” (8). Unlike a classroom, a work environment de-emphasizes the needs and goals of the individual and emphasizes those of the group. How, then, can a service course instructor know the conditions and interactions that take place when writing as a team rather than a person, particularly when the students in the service course will primarily not be students of English, rhetoric, or technical communication (other than in the broadest sense)? Winsor’s answer is that it cannot happen until the individual is aware of the culture of that profession (9). Thus, if students are to learn effective revision practices for their desired profession, at least part of that profession’s culture must exist within the classroom experience and that part of that replication of culture must include the technologies with which revision are performed.
TC instruction
Relationship of TC instruction to non-academic work
Technical communication theorists struggle, and sometimes fight, to find a place to “fit” technical communication curricula. Carolyn Miller’s “What’s Practical about Technical Writing” addresses this problem head-on. She writes, “In its eagerness to be useful—to students and their future employers—technical writing has sought a basis in practice, a basis that is problematic. I do not mean to suggest that academics should keep themselves ignorant of nonacademic practices [. . .] But technical writing teachers and curriculum planners should take seriously the problem of how to think about practice. The problem leads one to the complex relation between description and prescription” (Miller, 1989). The relation(ship) she describes is whether the classroom or the cubicle should lead, whether academics are in the business of “vocational preparation” or “cultural awareness” (18). As she and others acknowledge, the question is part of a larger debate in American colleges and universities, and one which is “infected by the assumptions that what is common practice is useful and what is useful is good (21), clearly putting herself at odds with the Jamesian pragmatism which argues not only that “what is useful is good,” but that what is useful is true. While arguing for both academics and non-academics having a role in curricular development, Miller eventually stands firmly on the side of academics having the ultimate responsibility: “If technical writing is the rhetoric of ‘the world of work,’ it is the rhetoric of contemporary praxis. In teaching such rhetoric, then, we acquire a measure of responsibility for political and economic conduct” (24).
Dicks
Blakeslee
Dobrin
Dobrin writes, “The teacher of technical writing is teaching the student to perform for his or her peer in a particular technical community, a community of which the teacher is not himself a member. It is as if he were teaching Balinese dancing in Bali” (137).
Dobrin’s mistakes here are manifold: the students will, quite often, not be “performing” for their community at all, and instead will be “performing” for clients, co-workers, and supervisors who are not technical professionals, or at least not professionals within the same field. Next, Dobrin assumes that technical writing instructors do not belong to the same community to which the student belongs; however, the instructor should at least be able to recognize that the act of writing itself is of course a communal act and that therefore teacher and student do have a connection. Lastly, Dobrin’s immediate retreat to the world of the humanities by making a reference to culturally-based dances shows that, at least in this article, he is out of his realm. He should have included a reference to a technical field, such as “teaching a chemical engineer how to use a gas chromatograph,” particularly since the major example used in his essay is from a student majoring in chemical engineering. Granted, Dobrin’s text is quite outdated and TC has changed a great deal since then in terms of academic recognition. On the other hand, Dobrin’s text is still included in TC anthologies.
Textbooks
For TCers
For Non-TCers
Contingent faculty?
Engineers
Engineering communication
TC working with engineering
Academic
Practitioner
ABET. (2007). Criteria for accrediting engineering programs: effective for evaluations during the 2008-2009 accreditation cycle. Baltimore, MD.
Allen, J. (2004). The case against defining technical writing. In J. M. Dubinsky (Ed.), Teaching Technical Communication: Critical Issues for the Classroom (pp. 67-76). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Barker, T., & Matveeva, N. (2006). Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Technical Writing Service Course: Real Instructors' Practices and Suggestions for Textbook Selection. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(2), 191.
Bigelow, K. W. (1947). General Education. Review of Educational Research, 17(4), 258-265.
Blyler, N. R. (1993). Teaching Purpose in a Business Communication Course. Bulletin of the Association for Business Communication, 56(3), 15-20.
Blyler, N. R. (1995). Research as Ideology in Professional Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 4(3), 285.
Bosley, D. S. (2002). Jumping Off the Ivory Tower: Changing the Academic Perspective. In B. Mirel, Spilka, Rachel (Ed.), Reshaping Technical Communication: New Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century (pp. 27-39). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Boyd, G., & Hassett, M. F. (2000). Developing critical writing skills in engineering and technology students. Journal of Engineering Education, 89(4), 409.
Brereton, J. C. e. (1995). The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Bushnell, J. (1999). A Contrary View of the Technical Writing Classroom: Notes Toward Future Discussion. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(2).
Charney, D. (1996). Empiricism Is Not a Four-Letter Word. College Composition and Communication, 47(4), 567-593.
Connors, R. J. (1985). Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction. College Composition and Communication, 36(1), 61-72.
David, C., & Kienzler, D. (1999). Towards an emancipatory pedagogy in service courses and user departments. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(3).
Dicks, R. S. (2002). Cultural Impediments to Understanding: Are They Surmountable? In B. Mirel, Spilka, Rachel (Ed.), Reshaping Technical Communication: New Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Dobrin, D. N. (1985). What's The Purpose of Technical Communication. Technical Writing Teacher, 12(2), 146-160.
Ford, J. D. (2004). Knowledge transfer across disciplines: tracking rhetorical strategies from a technical communication classroom to an engineering classroom. Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on, 47(4), 301-315.
Harner, S., & Rich, A. (2005). Trends in Undergraduate Curriculum in Scientific and Technical Communication Programs. Technical Communication, 52(2), 209-220.
Hart-Davidson, W. (2001). On Writing, Technical Communication, and Information Technology: The Core Competencies of Technical Communication. Technical Communication, 48(2), 145.
Heinauer, L. (2008, March 26, 2008). State board of education struggling to decide how best to teach reading and writing. Austin American-Statements. Retrieved from http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/03/26/0326sboe.html
Hughes, M. (2002). Moving from Information Transfer to Knowledge Creation: A New Value Proposition for Technical Communications. Technical Communication, 49(3), 275.
Johnson-Eilola, J. (1996). Relocating the value of work: Technical communication in a Post-Industrial Age. Technical Communication Quarterly, 5(3), 245.
Johnson-Eilola, J., & Selber, S. A. (2001). Sketching a Framework for Graduate Education in Technical Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 10(4), 403-437.
Law, J. (2003). Making a Mess with Method. Retrieved from http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/law-making-a-mess-with-method.pdf
Lengsfeld, C. S., Edelstein, G., Black, J., Hightower, N., & et al. (2004). Engineering Concepts and Communication: A Two-Quarter Course Sequence. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(1), 79.
Leydens, J., & Schneider, J. (2009). Innovations in Composition Programs that Educate Engineers: Drivers, Opportunities, and Challenges. Journal of Engineering Education, 98(3), 255.
Miller, C. R. (1979). A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing. College English.
Miller, C. R. (1989). What's Practical about Technical Writing? In B. E. Fearing, and Sparrow, W. Keats (Ed.), Technical Writing: Theory and Practice. New York: Modern Language Association.
Rainey, K. T., Turner, R. K., & Dayton, D. (2005). Do Curricula Correspond to Managerial Expectations? Core Competencies for Technical Communicators. Technical Communication, 52(3), 323-352.
Reave, L. (2004). Technical Communication Instruction in Engineering Schools A Survey of Top-Ranked U.S. and Canadian Programs. Journal of Business & Technical Communication, 18(4), 452-490.
Redish, J. (2003). Adding Value as a Professional Technical Communicator. Technical Communication, 50(4), 505-518.
Russell, D. R. (2007). Rethinking the Articulation Between Business and Technical Communication and Writing in the Disciplines: Useful Avenues for Teaching and Research. Journal of Business & Technical Communication, 21(3), 248-277.
Scott, C., & Plumb, C. (1999). Using portfolios to evaluate service courses as part of an engineering writing program. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(3), 337.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
KM and the group revision assignment - Alavi's two points
Knowledge management
Alavi, Maryam, and Leidner, Dorothy E. “Knowledge Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Benefits.” Communications of the Association for Information Systems. Vol 1, article 7. February 1999.
From page 6:
Two major points emerge from this [definition of knowledge]:
1. Because knowledge is personalized, in order for one person’s knowledge to be useful to another individual, it must be communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.
2. Hoards of information are of little value: only that information which is actively processed in the mind of an individual through a process of reflection, enlightenment, and learning can be useful. Knowledge management, then, refers to a systemic and organizationally specified process for acquiring, organizing and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.
Questions to address:
Point 1:
Does this mean that group revision in a classroom isn’t likely to involve the conveyance of knowledge?
Undergrads reviewing each other’s work might not be looking at information which has been “communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.” I think we can logically posit more than one reason for this assertion:
- The classroom writing assignment, whatever it is, likely has a college instructor as the stated audience. If that’s the case, then the readers are not the intended audience: they lack the education and the experience.
- My own experience with such assignments indicates that they are frequently directed toward someone other than the instructor (a local business owner, a professor within another discipline, or a fictional supervisor or future employer). Again, whether real or imagined, the intended audience is someone other than the student readers; thus, the group work might not qualify as knowledge work if they are incapable of interpreting, or providing their own intellectual framework, for the information presented by the author.
- The student author might not have sufficient experience within the discipline in order to understand the information presented within the paper as “knowledge.”
These claims are dependent upon a number of assumptions which I’ll try to lay out. For one, they assume that students are still novices concerning their chosen field. While likely to be true, it’s only fair to point out that some non-traditional students include those who have experience in their field and who are returning in order to obtain a diploma or certification. A second assumption is that there is no other communication taking place: that, in fact, the information (non-contextualized data, thus, not knowledge) contained within the writing assignment in question is the only information or data being exchanged. However, anyone who has taught such a class knows that this cannot be the case. Any group of students will naturally share knowledge simply in exchanging papers: a look, a comment, question, or statement undoubtedly means that there is transfer of knowledge. In short, the writing assignments and their subject matter are not the only possible conveyances of knowledge.
A third assumption, and this one is pretty serious with regard to TC service courses, is that groups of students within a single class are likely to be made up of different majors. A TC service course of 20 students is likely to have at least 10 or a dozen majors represented by those students, meaning that a group of two or more students will mostly likely represent more than a single field of study. Furthermore, I have course descriptions from 82 different schools offering TC service courses. Of those course descriptions, 23% contain the word “field” or “discipline” used to indicate that more than one major is serviced by this course, and that the work within the course may well be (some state it outright) tailored to each student’s field of study. Thus, we have added support for the claim that students in separate majors participating in group revision may not be engaging in the sharing of knowledge due to disparate levels of experience within those separate fields.
Point 2 –
Alavi’s second description does seem to indicate that knowledge management takes place within the context of classrooms, however stridently I may seem to object above in the specific case of group revision projects. Classrooms, and in particular writing classrooms, are indeed set up to enable “systemic and organizationally specified process[es] for acquiring, organizing, and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.”
The point of group revision exercises, and I’ll know more about what others think once I get my IRB paperwork finished, seems to be to expose writers to the feedback of others, and to expose readers to the approach used by other writers. The process of feedback, regardless of what form it takes, certainly seems to be both “systemic” and “organizationally specified” (particularly if the instructor has gone to the trouble of using assignment descriptions, prompts, peer review prompts and instructions, and assigned peer reviewers tasks to complete during the peer review process. Thus, the system of knowledge management is at least IN PLACE in the TC service course classroom, whether it’s in use or not or whether knowledge is exchanged.
So, given Alavi’s two points and given my own critique, I might wind up arguing that the system necessary to support knowledge management exists in the TC service course; however, the participants might not be capable of carrying it out. Regardless, I think knowledge management is turning out to be a convenient way of categorizing and comparing group revision in the workplace and group revision in the classroom.
Alavi, Maryam, and Leidner, Dorothy E. “Knowledge Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Benefits.” Communications of the Association for Information Systems. Vol 1, article 7. February 1999.
From page 6:
Two major points emerge from this [definition of knowledge]:
1. Because knowledge is personalized, in order for one person’s knowledge to be useful to another individual, it must be communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.
2. Hoards of information are of little value: only that information which is actively processed in the mind of an individual through a process of reflection, enlightenment, and learning can be useful. Knowledge management, then, refers to a systemic and organizationally specified process for acquiring, organizing and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.
Questions to address:
Point 1:
Does this mean that group revision in a classroom isn’t likely to involve the conveyance of knowledge?
Undergrads reviewing each other’s work might not be looking at information which has been “communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.” I think we can logically posit more than one reason for this assertion:
- The classroom writing assignment, whatever it is, likely has a college instructor as the stated audience. If that’s the case, then the readers are not the intended audience: they lack the education and the experience.
- My own experience with such assignments indicates that they are frequently directed toward someone other than the instructor (a local business owner, a professor within another discipline, or a fictional supervisor or future employer). Again, whether real or imagined, the intended audience is someone other than the student readers; thus, the group work might not qualify as knowledge work if they are incapable of interpreting, or providing their own intellectual framework, for the information presented by the author.
- The student author might not have sufficient experience within the discipline in order to understand the information presented within the paper as “knowledge.”
These claims are dependent upon a number of assumptions which I’ll try to lay out. For one, they assume that students are still novices concerning their chosen field. While likely to be true, it’s only fair to point out that some non-traditional students include those who have experience in their field and who are returning in order to obtain a diploma or certification. A second assumption is that there is no other communication taking place: that, in fact, the information (non-contextualized data, thus, not knowledge) contained within the writing assignment in question is the only information or data being exchanged. However, anyone who has taught such a class knows that this cannot be the case. Any group of students will naturally share knowledge simply in exchanging papers: a look, a comment, question, or statement undoubtedly means that there is transfer of knowledge. In short, the writing assignments and their subject matter are not the only possible conveyances of knowledge.
A third assumption, and this one is pretty serious with regard to TC service courses, is that groups of students within a single class are likely to be made up of different majors. A TC service course of 20 students is likely to have at least 10 or a dozen majors represented by those students, meaning that a group of two or more students will mostly likely represent more than a single field of study. Furthermore, I have course descriptions from 82 different schools offering TC service courses. Of those course descriptions, 23% contain the word “field” or “discipline” used to indicate that more than one major is serviced by this course, and that the work within the course may well be (some state it outright) tailored to each student’s field of study. Thus, we have added support for the claim that students in separate majors participating in group revision may not be engaging in the sharing of knowledge due to disparate levels of experience within those separate fields.
Point 2 –
Alavi’s second description does seem to indicate that knowledge management takes place within the context of classrooms, however stridently I may seem to object above in the specific case of group revision projects. Classrooms, and in particular writing classrooms, are indeed set up to enable “systemic and organizationally specified process[es] for acquiring, organizing, and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.”
The point of group revision exercises, and I’ll know more about what others think once I get my IRB paperwork finished, seems to be to expose writers to the feedback of others, and to expose readers to the approach used by other writers. The process of feedback, regardless of what form it takes, certainly seems to be both “systemic” and “organizationally specified” (particularly if the instructor has gone to the trouble of using assignment descriptions, prompts, peer review prompts and instructions, and assigned peer reviewers tasks to complete during the peer review process. Thus, the system of knowledge management is at least IN PLACE in the TC service course classroom, whether it’s in use or not or whether knowledge is exchanged.
So, given Alavi’s two points and given my own critique, I might wind up arguing that the system necessary to support knowledge management exists in the TC service course; however, the participants might not be capable of carrying it out. Regardless, I think knowledge management is turning out to be a convenient way of categorizing and comparing group revision in the workplace and group revision in the classroom.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Knowledge Management as Codification Tool?
The data gathered for my dissertation will, eventually, have to be codified (organized in a meaningful way). Rich Rice suggested I use communications theory as a way of understanding what I find, whereas Fred Kemp (my dissertation chair) suggested systems theory. I’ve only looked preliminarily into those, but so far there’s nothing that suggests to me I could use them productively; however, there is one thing I’d like to comment upon.
Most theories I’ve encountered seem to try to account for static and dynamic, sameness and change, in some way. The communications theory I’ve read so far (and that’s not much) offers various metaphors for understanding communications between and among organizations: circle, star, etc., each figure accounting for power relationships and the supposed flow of information within that network. But there’s also an attempt to account for a change in state—what happens when the information is received, or how we can determine whether that information has been received and that therefore some sort of communication has taken place—that leads to speculation on the difference between organizations and individuals who stay the same and those that change, and what forms that change takes.
Systems theory (wherein I’ve read a bit more) is often an extended discourse on little but change itself: how the parts shape the whole, or the actions of the whole, or how understanding a system can change the system itself. . .on and on about static and dynamic systems. So, at the very least we can speculate that sameness and change are important to theorists in more than one area.
I’ve just read over Andrew P. McAfee’s “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” (http://bit.ly/ddzslZ) in which he defines Enterprise 2.0 along with six characteristics he’s identified as belonging to any technology that works as Enterprise 2.0. So, to begin, Enterprise 2.0 is "those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers" (McAfee 23). Earlier in the piece, he defines “platform” as a source of information in which “content is generated, or at least approved, by a small group, but then is widely visible” (22). So, to combine these two ideas, we might conclude that an Enterprise 2.0 platform is a method of communicating whereby a smaller group of people could distribute information to a larger group in such a way that the knowledge workers involved—whether the distributers or recipients—could see what others were doing and how they were doing it.
Into the mix goes McAfee’s SLATES acronym, which stands for the six components of such a system:
Search – “page layouts and navigation aids can help, but users are increasingly bypassing these in favor of keyword searches”
Links – “works best when there’s a dense link structure that changes over time and reflects the opinions of many people”
Authoring – “most people have something to contribute, whether it’s knowledge, insight, experience, a comment, a fact, an edit, a link, and so on. . .”
Tags – “don’t try to impose an up-categorization scheme; they instead let one emerge over time as a result of users’ actions.”
Extensions – computers using algorithms to suggest other content based on user behaviors. “Amazon’s recommendations were an early example of the use of extensions on the Web.”
Signals – pushed content
Each of these six components is based upon the idea of change: “bypassing,” “changes over time,” “something to contribute,” “emerge,” and then my own words “suggest” and “push.”
So, as a baseline, we can confidently claim that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are those which enable workers to (a) create, and (b) make visible not only what they’ve created but how they created it.
This model can be seen in how engineers communicate in the workplace: design reports, in particular, or even construction bids and statements of qualifications, almost never get their beginnings as a blank document. Engineers are always building (figuratively as well as literally) upon past documents and knowledge that others have created. Even beyond the rather simplistic view that engineering is based upon well-known characteristics of physics and chemistry, we can point to more subtle building blocks such as design projects done in the past which are similar to the one currently in the development stage. Building standards, such as LEED certification, ADA compliance, and EPA compliance exist prior to the design project, and thus the project itself is only part knowledge creation: it is in even larger part an effort at knowledge sharing and knowledge application.
In the technical writing class we use to prepare engineers for their future as knowledge workers who need to communicate with others, however, the knowledge is largely created (a) for that class as assigned by the instructor, and (b) by individual students. Thus, the knowledge management paradigm we see in writing in the workplace does not exist, or does not exist to the same extent, in the classroom.
Most theories I’ve encountered seem to try to account for static and dynamic, sameness and change, in some way. The communications theory I’ve read so far (and that’s not much) offers various metaphors for understanding communications between and among organizations: circle, star, etc., each figure accounting for power relationships and the supposed flow of information within that network. But there’s also an attempt to account for a change in state—what happens when the information is received, or how we can determine whether that information has been received and that therefore some sort of communication has taken place—that leads to speculation on the difference between organizations and individuals who stay the same and those that change, and what forms that change takes.
Systems theory (wherein I’ve read a bit more) is often an extended discourse on little but change itself: how the parts shape the whole, or the actions of the whole, or how understanding a system can change the system itself. . .on and on about static and dynamic systems. So, at the very least we can speculate that sameness and change are important to theorists in more than one area.
I’ve just read over Andrew P. McAfee’s “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” (http://bit.ly/ddzslZ) in which he defines Enterprise 2.0 along with six characteristics he’s identified as belonging to any technology that works as Enterprise 2.0. So, to begin, Enterprise 2.0 is "those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers" (McAfee 23). Earlier in the piece, he defines “platform” as a source of information in which “content is generated, or at least approved, by a small group, but then is widely visible” (22). So, to combine these two ideas, we might conclude that an Enterprise 2.0 platform is a method of communicating whereby a smaller group of people could distribute information to a larger group in such a way that the knowledge workers involved—whether the distributers or recipients—could see what others were doing and how they were doing it.
Into the mix goes McAfee’s SLATES acronym, which stands for the six components of such a system:
Search – “page layouts and navigation aids can help, but users are increasingly bypassing these in favor of keyword searches”
Links – “works best when there’s a dense link structure that changes over time and reflects the opinions of many people”
Authoring – “most people have something to contribute, whether it’s knowledge, insight, experience, a comment, a fact, an edit, a link, and so on. . .”
Tags – “don’t try to impose an up-categorization scheme; they instead let one emerge over time as a result of users’ actions.”
Extensions – computers using algorithms to suggest other content based on user behaviors. “Amazon’s recommendations were an early example of the use of extensions on the Web.”
Signals – pushed content
Each of these six components is based upon the idea of change: “bypassing,” “changes over time,” “something to contribute,” “emerge,” and then my own words “suggest” and “push.”
So, as a baseline, we can confidently claim that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are those which enable workers to (a) create, and (b) make visible not only what they’ve created but how they created it.
This model can be seen in how engineers communicate in the workplace: design reports, in particular, or even construction bids and statements of qualifications, almost never get their beginnings as a blank document. Engineers are always building (figuratively as well as literally) upon past documents and knowledge that others have created. Even beyond the rather simplistic view that engineering is based upon well-known characteristics of physics and chemistry, we can point to more subtle building blocks such as design projects done in the past which are similar to the one currently in the development stage. Building standards, such as LEED certification, ADA compliance, and EPA compliance exist prior to the design project, and thus the project itself is only part knowledge creation: it is in even larger part an effort at knowledge sharing and knowledge application.
In the technical writing class we use to prepare engineers for their future as knowledge workers who need to communicate with others, however, the knowledge is largely created (a) for that class as assigned by the instructor, and (b) by individual students. Thus, the knowledge management paradigm we see in writing in the workplace does not exist, or does not exist to the same extent, in the classroom.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Humanities Instructors and Technical Students
The last couple of weeks have served to emphasize more subtly the differences between an object-oriented approach in a field like engineering and the people-oriented approach in a field like English studies. I saw “more subtly” because so many of those differences have been hammered home in the past, but my recent experience has been far more subtle.
I’ve been working with some ocean engineering students who are writing a methods section for a technical report. One of the lessons we’ve had to discuss has to do with passive voice. They’ve been told, over and over, never to write in the passive voice. They avoid it pretty consistently. They’ve also been told that a methods section is like a set of instructions for someone who wants to duplicate your work. Both pieces of advice are, in this case, incorrect and can serve to illustrate some of the challenges involved with teaching technical communication.
Writing instructors frequently tell their students to avoid the passive voice and use the active voice. There’s more focus on the doer of the action, and less focus on the objects of that person’s actions (which is presumably “better” because people are more important than objects). But engineering, and many of the sciences, in fact, are focused on things rather than people. Keeping in mind that the audience for a technical report is technical by default, writing with an object-oriented approach is the logical choice. Audience awareness is in fact a humanities-based approach, and if we humanities folks are going to work honestly alongside more technical disciplines, then we need to keep their audience firmly in mind.
Next, the purpose of a methods section is not so that the first person who reads your document can rush into the lab and duplicate the process. Instead, the purpose of a methods section is to create community (this is a hard one for the technical folks to swallow, but it’s true). Science is, methodologically speaking, a community project. Science assumes that there is a world external to each of us, that that world is shared in common by everyone, and that measuring that world can teach us something valuable. All of these assumptions mean that a good methods section should tell a precise story: what was done in the lab, how it was done, why it was done, and whether there were any variances in standard procedure (the word “standard” itself implies community knowledge creation). The methods section is a way for the engineer or scientist to become transparent to the larger community of technical activities, thus playing an important role in the ongoing conversation of scientific discovery. Without that methods section, the report separates itself from the transparency that makes science possible.
In explaining the purpose of a methods section, both technical and humanities personnel have a tendency to underestimate its role, and simply describe it as a set of instructions; thus, students often written in the present tense, as though they are telling someone what to do. This is, of course, a failure, since the point of the methods section is to build the author’s ethos and establish connections to the community, and that therefore the methods section should be past tense: the story of what was done in the lab.
Reading through an engineering writing assignment described in some FIE conference proceedings, I was able to clearly see the humanities influence in the design of the assignment itself. That humanities influence is often powerful and works well in an engineering communication course: there’s no reason to cut out audience analysis, rhetorical training, document design, and the like. However, the goal is to help technical professionals become better technical professionals. For the assignment description I read, the genre was listed as “research paper,” which from the start grounds the entire endeavor in the humanities. Much of the assignment, however, seemed like a good idea (again—using the humanities to teach engineering communication isn’t necessarily a bad idea): groups used individual critical analyses of sources to determine which topic would be their focus; groups used affinity diagrams to narrow their focus; groups were composed of both students and faculty; individuals were assigned tasks by the group; groups merged and revised documents together.
But the whole assignment is flawed from the beginning. The authors indicate that the engineers need training working in groups because as professional engineers they will be required to work in groups. But what the authors fail to do then is to find out what kinds of things engineers do in groups. For instance, when writing, engineers rarely start with a blank page or are allowed to decide upon a topic (or project) all on their own. Instead, engineers almost always have projects handed to them, and their writing almost always starts with boilerplate material based on building codes, specifications and standards, and written materials from past projects; thus, the brainstorming and individual research that went into this research paper does not, in fact, mirror the professional engineering writing experience.
I am not (yet) advocating engineering communication classes wherein students actually work with boilerplate material provided by previous classes (though that does sound intriguing) or that the above assignment is entirely wrong-headed. Rather, I’m proposing that humanities instructors who teach future technical professionals be aware of the differences in working environments and in disciplinary conventions that make technical professionals—often, though not always—so very different from the humanities.
I’ve been working with some ocean engineering students who are writing a methods section for a technical report. One of the lessons we’ve had to discuss has to do with passive voice. They’ve been told, over and over, never to write in the passive voice. They avoid it pretty consistently. They’ve also been told that a methods section is like a set of instructions for someone who wants to duplicate your work. Both pieces of advice are, in this case, incorrect and can serve to illustrate some of the challenges involved with teaching technical communication.
Writing instructors frequently tell their students to avoid the passive voice and use the active voice. There’s more focus on the doer of the action, and less focus on the objects of that person’s actions (which is presumably “better” because people are more important than objects). But engineering, and many of the sciences, in fact, are focused on things rather than people. Keeping in mind that the audience for a technical report is technical by default, writing with an object-oriented approach is the logical choice. Audience awareness is in fact a humanities-based approach, and if we humanities folks are going to work honestly alongside more technical disciplines, then we need to keep their audience firmly in mind.
Next, the purpose of a methods section is not so that the first person who reads your document can rush into the lab and duplicate the process. Instead, the purpose of a methods section is to create community (this is a hard one for the technical folks to swallow, but it’s true). Science is, methodologically speaking, a community project. Science assumes that there is a world external to each of us, that that world is shared in common by everyone, and that measuring that world can teach us something valuable. All of these assumptions mean that a good methods section should tell a precise story: what was done in the lab, how it was done, why it was done, and whether there were any variances in standard procedure (the word “standard” itself implies community knowledge creation). The methods section is a way for the engineer or scientist to become transparent to the larger community of technical activities, thus playing an important role in the ongoing conversation of scientific discovery. Without that methods section, the report separates itself from the transparency that makes science possible.
In explaining the purpose of a methods section, both technical and humanities personnel have a tendency to underestimate its role, and simply describe it as a set of instructions; thus, students often written in the present tense, as though they are telling someone what to do. This is, of course, a failure, since the point of the methods section is to build the author’s ethos and establish connections to the community, and that therefore the methods section should be past tense: the story of what was done in the lab.
Reading through an engineering writing assignment described in some FIE conference proceedings, I was able to clearly see the humanities influence in the design of the assignment itself. That humanities influence is often powerful and works well in an engineering communication course: there’s no reason to cut out audience analysis, rhetorical training, document design, and the like. However, the goal is to help technical professionals become better technical professionals. For the assignment description I read, the genre was listed as “research paper,” which from the start grounds the entire endeavor in the humanities. Much of the assignment, however, seemed like a good idea (again—using the humanities to teach engineering communication isn’t necessarily a bad idea): groups used individual critical analyses of sources to determine which topic would be their focus; groups used affinity diagrams to narrow their focus; groups were composed of both students and faculty; individuals were assigned tasks by the group; groups merged and revised documents together.
But the whole assignment is flawed from the beginning. The authors indicate that the engineers need training working in groups because as professional engineers they will be required to work in groups. But what the authors fail to do then is to find out what kinds of things engineers do in groups. For instance, when writing, engineers rarely start with a blank page or are allowed to decide upon a topic (or project) all on their own. Instead, engineers almost always have projects handed to them, and their writing almost always starts with boilerplate material based on building codes, specifications and standards, and written materials from past projects; thus, the brainstorming and individual research that went into this research paper does not, in fact, mirror the professional engineering writing experience.
I am not (yet) advocating engineering communication classes wherein students actually work with boilerplate material provided by previous classes (though that does sound intriguing) or that the above assignment is entirely wrong-headed. Rather, I’m proposing that humanities instructors who teach future technical professionals be aware of the differences in working environments and in disciplinary conventions that make technical professionals—often, though not always—so very different from the humanities.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Problems with TC service courses at research universities, pt 1
At most universities, and certainly at most research-intensive doctoral institutions, service courses are not taught by tenure-line faculty. These lower-level courses are often seen as not offering the opportunity for research and publication that upper-level or graduate courses would, and thus there is little incentive in the form of pay raises, tenure, or promotion, for teaching such courses. At four-year baccalaureate institutions, this practice isn’t so prevailing, but is nonetheless common. Thus it is that an overwhelming percentage, some 84%, are taught by contingent faculty (“contingent” meaning faculty who will not gain tenure and who are employed on a yearly, often part-time, basis).
The majority of technical writing service courses are offered by English Departments, and for a more thorough explanation of how this came about you should read Robert Connors’ “The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America” (Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 12(4), 1982). The main plot points of this sad tale have to do with an increasing number of technical colleges producing an increasing number of graduates who were perceived as lacking in writing ability. The seemingly-logical solution was to ask the local English faculty to “fix” the problem. Thus it is that in departments whose primary tenure and promotion focus was literature and cultural studies we nonetheless see the rise of lecturers hired to teach technical writing. Some colleges recognized that technical communication was a fertile field of study, sometimes lucrative, too, and developed their own successful TC programs. We see evidence of such success at RPI, Texas Tech, and Michigan State.
Commonly, though, literature departments simply continued on in the money- and time-saving practice of hiring adjunct lecturers to teach technical writing, thus playing a starring role in some of the most common problems in technical writing service courses today.
Problem: Contingent Faculty are not Paid Well, Supported Well, or Treated Well
The going yearly salary rate for full-time contingent writing faculty in the state of Texas is half of what the tenure-line faculty make. This is true for colleges with or without strong TC programs. Thus, the people teaching the classes which (a) are in highest demand and (b) are the classes the tenured faculty do not wish to teach, are the people paid the least.
Vacation and Sick Leave
In Texas, it’s not unusual for contingent faculty to not accrue any vacation leave. For instance, at Texas A&M I taught in the English Department year-round. I taught fall, spring, and summer, teaching a total of 12 sections per academic year. I accrued sick leave on a monthly basis. As a long-time state employee, I should have also accrued vacation pay at the rate of 10 hours per month. However, the English Department does not consider adjunct faculty to be full-time, and thus they do not accrue vacation pay. This situation is, to my knowledge, fairly common across the state. I do not know if it is common in other states.
Contingent faculty layoffs
When tough economic times hit, it is common practice to lay off the contingent faculty first. For instance, the Bryan/College Station Eagle ran a story on February 18, 2010, entitled “A&M English lecturers advised to start job hunts.” The story states that around 30 lecturers (one-third of the department’s total faculty) were advised to start looking for jobs. Quite frankly, the English Department should be applauded for letting the lecturers know this early in the semester. It’s not unheard of for departments to wait until the end of the semester to make such announcements. Regardless, the classes taught by those lecturers are clearly the ones in highest demand at A&M; nonetheless, they’re the ones whose instructors are first to be laid off.
Attitude of Tenure-line Faculty Towards TC Instructors and TC
A tenured administrator once told me I’d be able to still work on my dissertation while teaching four classes because they were technical writing, which can be taught “with the brain turned off.” Within the comments appended to the BCS Eagle story above, one commenter (identified as “englphdmom”) wrote
“The much-touted technical writing . . .is about nothing more than rhetorical evaluation of audience, formulaic templates, and communication of ideas in grammatically correct, straightforward language. Any English major will be able to apply these concepts in teaching technical writing.”
Any practitioner or researcher in the field of TC will of course see the problems with that statement. In fact, it’s ironic that englphdmom indicates that all writing—including, presumably, poetry, novels and other forms of fiction—is merely the end result of audience analysis and grammatical construction. But of course this attitude towards TC is also not uncommon; however, it’s important to note that I have only run into it within English departments whose primary focus was literature. It’s also important to note that if effective communication were only the sum of what the commenter listed above, then effective communication would still be quite difficult.
Taken together, the problems listed above make the expectation of quality technical writing instruction at a research university almost laughable. And at many schools, laughable is certainly what we get.
So what’s the solution? Many research intensive universities are already forming TC departments, sometimes within the existing English department and sometimes not. For instance, some TC programs are called “engineering communication” and are housed within a college of engineering. At others, the TC program exists as its own department, fighting for classroom space and money just like all the others. I’m not sure what my own inclination is. For one thing, colleges of engineering tend to be quite sympathetic to the need for quality writing instruction, and thus they often make for a good home for TC. But its nature, though, TC is encompasses more subject matter than simply communicating about engineering, and thus constraining a TC program to engineering doesn’t make much sense. What about schools of business and law, or medical schools, or all the technical communication that happens within the social sciences or humanities? Given that TC is seen as a service—and in many ways, it is—that exists to help other disciplines, it seems likely that TC may never settle into its own department. But that subjugation of the word “service”—implying that one who serves another is less than the one served—is logically flawed. A parent who serves a child is nonetheless the parent, and doctors serve patients all the time.
The majority of technical writing service courses are offered by English Departments, and for a more thorough explanation of how this came about you should read Robert Connors’ “The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America” (Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 12(4), 1982). The main plot points of this sad tale have to do with an increasing number of technical colleges producing an increasing number of graduates who were perceived as lacking in writing ability. The seemingly-logical solution was to ask the local English faculty to “fix” the problem. Thus it is that in departments whose primary tenure and promotion focus was literature and cultural studies we nonetheless see the rise of lecturers hired to teach technical writing. Some colleges recognized that technical communication was a fertile field of study, sometimes lucrative, too, and developed their own successful TC programs. We see evidence of such success at RPI, Texas Tech, and Michigan State.
Commonly, though, literature departments simply continued on in the money- and time-saving practice of hiring adjunct lecturers to teach technical writing, thus playing a starring role in some of the most common problems in technical writing service courses today.
Problem: Contingent Faculty are not Paid Well, Supported Well, or Treated Well
The going yearly salary rate for full-time contingent writing faculty in the state of Texas is half of what the tenure-line faculty make. This is true for colleges with or without strong TC programs. Thus, the people teaching the classes which (a) are in highest demand and (b) are the classes the tenured faculty do not wish to teach, are the people paid the least.
Vacation and Sick Leave
In Texas, it’s not unusual for contingent faculty to not accrue any vacation leave. For instance, at Texas A&M I taught in the English Department year-round. I taught fall, spring, and summer, teaching a total of 12 sections per academic year. I accrued sick leave on a monthly basis. As a long-time state employee, I should have also accrued vacation pay at the rate of 10 hours per month. However, the English Department does not consider adjunct faculty to be full-time, and thus they do not accrue vacation pay. This situation is, to my knowledge, fairly common across the state. I do not know if it is common in other states.
Contingent faculty layoffs
When tough economic times hit, it is common practice to lay off the contingent faculty first. For instance, the Bryan/College Station Eagle ran a story on February 18, 2010, entitled “A&M English lecturers advised to start job hunts.” The story states that around 30 lecturers (one-third of the department’s total faculty) were advised to start looking for jobs. Quite frankly, the English Department should be applauded for letting the lecturers know this early in the semester. It’s not unheard of for departments to wait until the end of the semester to make such announcements. Regardless, the classes taught by those lecturers are clearly the ones in highest demand at A&M; nonetheless, they’re the ones whose instructors are first to be laid off.
Attitude of Tenure-line Faculty Towards TC Instructors and TC
A tenured administrator once told me I’d be able to still work on my dissertation while teaching four classes because they were technical writing, which can be taught “with the brain turned off.” Within the comments appended to the BCS Eagle story above, one commenter (identified as “englphdmom”) wrote
“The much-touted technical writing . . .is about nothing more than rhetorical evaluation of audience, formulaic templates, and communication of ideas in grammatically correct, straightforward language. Any English major will be able to apply these concepts in teaching technical writing.”
Any practitioner or researcher in the field of TC will of course see the problems with that statement. In fact, it’s ironic that englphdmom indicates that all writing—including, presumably, poetry, novels and other forms of fiction—is merely the end result of audience analysis and grammatical construction. But of course this attitude towards TC is also not uncommon; however, it’s important to note that I have only run into it within English departments whose primary focus was literature. It’s also important to note that if effective communication were only the sum of what the commenter listed above, then effective communication would still be quite difficult.
Taken together, the problems listed above make the expectation of quality technical writing instruction at a research university almost laughable. And at many schools, laughable is certainly what we get.
So what’s the solution? Many research intensive universities are already forming TC departments, sometimes within the existing English department and sometimes not. For instance, some TC programs are called “engineering communication” and are housed within a college of engineering. At others, the TC program exists as its own department, fighting for classroom space and money just like all the others. I’m not sure what my own inclination is. For one thing, colleges of engineering tend to be quite sympathetic to the need for quality writing instruction, and thus they often make for a good home for TC. But its nature, though, TC is encompasses more subject matter than simply communicating about engineering, and thus constraining a TC program to engineering doesn’t make much sense. What about schools of business and law, or medical schools, or all the technical communication that happens within the social sciences or humanities? Given that TC is seen as a service—and in many ways, it is—that exists to help other disciplines, it seems likely that TC may never settle into its own department. But that subjugation of the word “service”—implying that one who serves another is less than the one served—is logically flawed. A parent who serves a child is nonetheless the parent, and doctors serve patients all the time.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
More Methodology Problems
John Law –
From "Networks, Relations, Cyborgs: on the Social Study of Technology"
Rich Rice suggested that the real value of my dissertation won’t be in identifying what the differences are between TC service courses and the ways people write in non-academic settings (civil engineering firms, for my purposes). Instead, the real value will lie in determining how TC service courses got to be different in the first place. What happens in the service course classroom—what happens in the committee meetings, the syllabus writing, the program reviews (assuming the average academic program review even takes service courses into account)—such that there would be any difference at all between what happens in the classroom and what happens the boardroom, cubicle, corner office, or workstation?
More formally, I might identify that difference by way of finding out how service course instructors perceive the writing tasks of workplace writers. Simple as that. How do the people who teach service courses think writing happens in the workplace? From there, make a recommendation.
But I foresee some difficulties. For instance, let’s assume that the data all points to roughly the same answer. Of a survey pool of (let’s say) 50 service course instructors, 70-some-odd percent say they perceive writing to be a more individualized activity (not in a classroom, no group work, no chatting before and after class) with more cutting-edge technology (iPhones instead of three-year-old PCs). Fair enough. What action, thought process, or methodology can be recommended which will get faculty more in tune with what happens off campus?
The barriers in place to service course improvement have little to do with ignorance, I think, but more to do with institutionalized barriers difficult for faculty to mitigate. For one thing, these service courses are by nature very generalized in their scope. If all students at a single university are required to take a particular course, then that course cannot be narrow in scope. At Texas A&M, not all students are required to take technical writing. But there are more than enough such that those service courses fill up months before the new semester begins. If there were enough instructors, then there would still be a problem meeting the need due to a shortage of classrooms. In short, while not all 48,000 students at Texas A&M are required to take a TC service course, there are still too many to serve.
Part of the problem is that while TC service courses aren’t required, they are strongly encouraged. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board requires all public university students to take 6 credit hours of “communication” courses. At A&M, there are 9 classes which meet that requirement. For practical purposes, however, most departments require that their students take technical writing, particularly if that student is in a technical or science major (like civil engineering or chemistry). If only the students from the colleges of science and engineering take technical writing, that nonetheless means the classes would have to either be quite generic or try to cater to a number of different writing needs.
Service course instructors are also overwhelmingly adjunct and underpaid. Thus, any attempt at changing service course curriculum should be done in such as way as to place as little burden on adjuncts as possible. Additionally, it’s not unusual for adjunct TC instructors to not have much training in TC; thus, any imperative to change should not be expected to come from inside the classrooms themselves. Therefore, the burden for change would come from above (or outside). But Huot (2002) indicates that change initiatives (in this specific case he’s talking about assessment and assessment tools) should come from faculty rather than administration due to a increased sense of buy-in on the part of the faculty as well as the idea that faculty will have a better sense of what to ask and how to ask it in their own courses. Fair enough.
But if TC instructors are largely unpaid and untrained adjuncts, and if top-down change initiatives aren’t as effective as those that are homegrown, how can TC service courses be changed?
For my own purposes, perhaps it will be enough to simply suggest a possible methodology for change. My dissertation, after all, doesn’t have to solve the world’s problems (as Fred’s pointed out a number of times). And I could potentially suggest a methodology cobbled together out of current theories (the quote above from John Law sounds like a good start) which deal with the nature of research itself. Embracing Law’s statement above, for instance, means I could easily argue that no real answer will ever really present itself, and that since service courses deal with ongoing changes in human behavior then perhaps the only definitive answer is that there’s no definitive answer. Changes in practice make for changes in research methods necessary to examine and describe those changed practices. Fair enough.
Kind of Ouroborous in nature, but fair enough.
But regardless of how much I differentiate personally between methodologies and methods, it’s only fair to point out that methodologies mean little without implementation. After all, we have explanations for why we do things (methodologies) because we do things. Without that thing, that action, that method, there’s little reason to have a philosophy undergirding it.
“My first point is quite simple. It is, as I hope I have implied, that there no single answer, no single grand narrative. For the world is, the worlds we live in are, messier than that. There are many possible narratives. This means that any way of imagining technologies is partial, not simply in a technical sense, (though it is certainly, and also, a technical point) but also politically: we have what Donna Haraway describes as the privilege of partial perspective (9). This, then, is one of my themes, a leitmotif. That there is no single answer. But that, instead, there are partial answers. Partial possibilities.”
From "Networks, Relations, Cyborgs: on the Social Study of Technology"
Rich Rice suggested that the real value of my dissertation won’t be in identifying what the differences are between TC service courses and the ways people write in non-academic settings (civil engineering firms, for my purposes). Instead, the real value will lie in determining how TC service courses got to be different in the first place. What happens in the service course classroom—what happens in the committee meetings, the syllabus writing, the program reviews (assuming the average academic program review even takes service courses into account)—such that there would be any difference at all between what happens in the classroom and what happens the boardroom, cubicle, corner office, or workstation?
More formally, I might identify that difference by way of finding out how service course instructors perceive the writing tasks of workplace writers. Simple as that. How do the people who teach service courses think writing happens in the workplace? From there, make a recommendation.
But I foresee some difficulties. For instance, let’s assume that the data all points to roughly the same answer. Of a survey pool of (let’s say) 50 service course instructors, 70-some-odd percent say they perceive writing to be a more individualized activity (not in a classroom, no group work, no chatting before and after class) with more cutting-edge technology (iPhones instead of three-year-old PCs). Fair enough. What action, thought process, or methodology can be recommended which will get faculty more in tune with what happens off campus?
The barriers in place to service course improvement have little to do with ignorance, I think, but more to do with institutionalized barriers difficult for faculty to mitigate. For one thing, these service courses are by nature very generalized in their scope. If all students at a single university are required to take a particular course, then that course cannot be narrow in scope. At Texas A&M, not all students are required to take technical writing. But there are more than enough such that those service courses fill up months before the new semester begins. If there were enough instructors, then there would still be a problem meeting the need due to a shortage of classrooms. In short, while not all 48,000 students at Texas A&M are required to take a TC service course, there are still too many to serve.
Part of the problem is that while TC service courses aren’t required, they are strongly encouraged. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board requires all public university students to take 6 credit hours of “communication” courses. At A&M, there are 9 classes which meet that requirement. For practical purposes, however, most departments require that their students take technical writing, particularly if that student is in a technical or science major (like civil engineering or chemistry). If only the students from the colleges of science and engineering take technical writing, that nonetheless means the classes would have to either be quite generic or try to cater to a number of different writing needs.
Service course instructors are also overwhelmingly adjunct and underpaid. Thus, any attempt at changing service course curriculum should be done in such as way as to place as little burden on adjuncts as possible. Additionally, it’s not unusual for adjunct TC instructors to not have much training in TC; thus, any imperative to change should not be expected to come from inside the classrooms themselves. Therefore, the burden for change would come from above (or outside). But Huot (2002) indicates that change initiatives (in this specific case he’s talking about assessment and assessment tools) should come from faculty rather than administration due to a increased sense of buy-in on the part of the faculty as well as the idea that faculty will have a better sense of what to ask and how to ask it in their own courses. Fair enough.
But if TC instructors are largely unpaid and untrained adjuncts, and if top-down change initiatives aren’t as effective as those that are homegrown, how can TC service courses be changed?
For my own purposes, perhaps it will be enough to simply suggest a possible methodology for change. My dissertation, after all, doesn’t have to solve the world’s problems (as Fred’s pointed out a number of times). And I could potentially suggest a methodology cobbled together out of current theories (the quote above from John Law sounds like a good start) which deal with the nature of research itself. Embracing Law’s statement above, for instance, means I could easily argue that no real answer will ever really present itself, and that since service courses deal with ongoing changes in human behavior then perhaps the only definitive answer is that there’s no definitive answer. Changes in practice make for changes in research methods necessary to examine and describe those changed practices. Fair enough.
Kind of Ouroborous in nature, but fair enough.
But regardless of how much I differentiate personally between methodologies and methods, it’s only fair to point out that methodologies mean little without implementation. After all, we have explanations for why we do things (methodologies) because we do things. Without that thing, that action, that method, there’s little reason to have a philosophy undergirding it.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Is Revision Separate from Writing?
Revision as Writing
In thinking and writing about groups working on revising a document, I’ve become increasingly convinced that “revision” may be an artificial separation. There is a substantial, though not insurmountable, body of research that indicates revision is indeed something different than writing, or that revision is at least something which it is possible to distinguish from writing even if it is not separable from writing.
Haar (2006) claims that revision “doesn’t have a well-developed history of theorizing and study” (3). I might suggest that revision doesn’t have a body of study or academic theoretical framework because it’s so very difficult to separate revision from simply writing. I cannot imagine any circumstance under which I would write without some modification of the text—spelling, organization, word choice, rhetorical strategy—before the text hits the screen. My son, all of 8 years old, is at the beginning stages of writing. He prints letters, frequently not distinguishing between lower- and upper-case into words, and makes sentences of those words. But he’s already revising in his head before he begins printing. He speaks softly, mouthing the words to himself, making corrections and emendations, before beginning to write. And as he writes, he makes little corrections (rounding out a “c,” perhaps, or getting the downward stroke on the correct side of a “d”). Those physical corrections, of course, are simply the end result of the revision process already in place in his head. His writing, in fact, is indistinguishable from his revision. They are coterminous, sharing the leading edge of his thought plane.
But as important as writing is, it seems foolish for me to simply dismiss revision as the focus of serious study. For one thing, writing, and any aspect of writing we care to identify, is simply too important to ignore. That argument has been made too many times by too many people for me to go into it here. Suffice to say that writing’s important; therefore, research into revision must also be important. Haar indeed states that that “revision touches every part of the writing process” (7), and then goes into various academic definitions of revision, some focusing on the time scale during which revision happens, others identifying the mechanical aspects of revision (proofreading as opposed to organization, for instance). Haar provides us with examples of “deliberately wrought” (11) descriptions of revision offered by revision scholars, ranging from metaphorical (“internal” and “external,” “up” and “down,” revising “out” and “in”), cognitive (“a turn, a change of direction or attention, a step, a transformation from a writer-centered to a reader-centered mode of writing,” according to Flower), duration (“quick” and “thorough,” according to Elbow), and a literal definition by Fitzgerald that says “revision means making any changes at any point in the writing process.” Fitzgerald’s distinction seems to me to be the least helpful. Writing itself is, for me at least, an act of change, the most insignificant portion of which takes place on the screen and the most profound of which takes place within myself or my readers. In other words, I’m not sure but what revision is so closely related to writing that distinguishing between the two is simply an academic exercise.
Fortunately, I’m in the business of academic exercises.
And separating revision from writing does indeed allow for some advantages: for one thing, the perception that revision is different than producing, say, a rough draft, is helpful in locating a particular event or process to investigate. Another advantage to separating revision from writing is that revision is almost always in response to your audience, whether you are serving as your own audience (and editor) or whether you are revision in response to someone else’s input, revision is a response to the reader. For my purposes, the group action—two or more people changing a workplace document—is important in that group revision and peer review have become more important to composition theory in the last ten years as we see the de-emphasis on the individual as author and the emergence of recognition that writing is the result of living and working with others—friction, if you will, which is both positive and negative. There never was an author who wrote out of a vacuum, creating something from nothing (no matter how long it’s taking that idea to die, it was never true). But the teaching of revision in TC service courses (and I think we could expand this to freshman comp, too, as well as others) is still often a limited-interaction exercise.
I’ve received some very good, thoughtful responses from posting the following query to the ATTW-L:
But the preliminary information I’ve received from civil engineers answering basically the same questions is that group revision is frequently an activity wherein the group offers feedback as a group: in other words, everyone talks about what needs to happen as a group rather than as individuals working silently. Furthermore, there’s a wide range of technologies that gets used for this revision process: Google Docs, Google Sketchup, paper, Words, and PDF docs.
So, as Rich Rice pointed out the other night, the real value of my dissertation will be to figure out how service courses get their information about group revision, and to then suggest a process by which service courses could get more accurate and timely information about workplace writing (in other words, try to offer some solution).
In thinking and writing about groups working on revising a document, I’ve become increasingly convinced that “revision” may be an artificial separation. There is a substantial, though not insurmountable, body of research that indicates revision is indeed something different than writing, or that revision is at least something which it is possible to distinguish from writing even if it is not separable from writing.
Haar (2006) claims that revision “doesn’t have a well-developed history of theorizing and study” (3). I might suggest that revision doesn’t have a body of study or academic theoretical framework because it’s so very difficult to separate revision from simply writing. I cannot imagine any circumstance under which I would write without some modification of the text—spelling, organization, word choice, rhetorical strategy—before the text hits the screen. My son, all of 8 years old, is at the beginning stages of writing. He prints letters, frequently not distinguishing between lower- and upper-case into words, and makes sentences of those words. But he’s already revising in his head before he begins printing. He speaks softly, mouthing the words to himself, making corrections and emendations, before beginning to write. And as he writes, he makes little corrections (rounding out a “c,” perhaps, or getting the downward stroke on the correct side of a “d”). Those physical corrections, of course, are simply the end result of the revision process already in place in his head. His writing, in fact, is indistinguishable from his revision. They are coterminous, sharing the leading edge of his thought plane.
But as important as writing is, it seems foolish for me to simply dismiss revision as the focus of serious study. For one thing, writing, and any aspect of writing we care to identify, is simply too important to ignore. That argument has been made too many times by too many people for me to go into it here. Suffice to say that writing’s important; therefore, research into revision must also be important. Haar indeed states that that “revision touches every part of the writing process” (7), and then goes into various academic definitions of revision, some focusing on the time scale during which revision happens, others identifying the mechanical aspects of revision (proofreading as opposed to organization, for instance). Haar provides us with examples of “deliberately wrought” (11) descriptions of revision offered by revision scholars, ranging from metaphorical (“internal” and “external,” “up” and “down,” revising “out” and “in”), cognitive (“a turn, a change of direction or attention, a step, a transformation from a writer-centered to a reader-centered mode of writing,” according to Flower), duration (“quick” and “thorough,” according to Elbow), and a literal definition by Fitzgerald that says “revision means making any changes at any point in the writing process.” Fitzgerald’s distinction seems to me to be the least helpful. Writing itself is, for me at least, an act of change, the most insignificant portion of which takes place on the screen and the most profound of which takes place within myself or my readers. In other words, I’m not sure but what revision is so closely related to writing that distinguishing between the two is simply an academic exercise.
Fortunately, I’m in the business of academic exercises.
And separating revision from writing does indeed allow for some advantages: for one thing, the perception that revision is different than producing, say, a rough draft, is helpful in locating a particular event or process to investigate. Another advantage to separating revision from writing is that revision is almost always in response to your audience, whether you are serving as your own audience (and editor) or whether you are revision in response to someone else’s input, revision is a response to the reader. For my purposes, the group action—two or more people changing a workplace document—is important in that group revision and peer review have become more important to composition theory in the last ten years as we see the de-emphasis on the individual as author and the emergence of recognition that writing is the result of living and working with others—friction, if you will, which is both positive and negative. There never was an author who wrote out of a vacuum, creating something from nothing (no matter how long it’s taking that idea to die, it was never true). But the teaching of revision in TC service courses (and I think we could expand this to freshman comp, too, as well as others) is still often a limited-interaction exercise.
I’ve received some very good, thoughtful responses from posting the following query to the ATTW-L:
I'm interested in knowing how group revision activities (two or more writers working on the same document) are conducted in your department's TC service courses. What sorts of genres, activities, and technologies are included when teaching/allowing students to revise a document in groups? How is authorship represented in the final document, and what roles do the students play when revising in groups?The responses I’ve received so far indicate that much of the peer review that takes place in TC service courses can be described as “asynchronous” (groups actually working as individuals and supplying critiques to other individuals) and somewhat mono-technological (MS Word shows up quite a bit; email somewhat less; Drupal only once, and no other technologies listed).
The reason I ask is that my dissertation deals with service courses, and my preliminary research indicates that group revision may look and be conducted much differently in the workplace (specifically, engineering firms) than in the classroom. I am looking for more evidence of the classroom experience of document revision.
Any information or thoughts you have will be greatly appreciated, on- or off-list! Of course, I'll be happy to share my findings.
But the preliminary information I’ve received from civil engineers answering basically the same questions is that group revision is frequently an activity wherein the group offers feedback as a group: in other words, everyone talks about what needs to happen as a group rather than as individuals working silently. Furthermore, there’s a wide range of technologies that gets used for this revision process: Google Docs, Google Sketchup, paper, Words, and PDF docs.
So, as Rich Rice pointed out the other night, the real value of my dissertation will be to figure out how service courses get their information about group revision, and to then suggest a process by which service courses could get more accurate and timely information about workplace writing (in other words, try to offer some solution).
Friday, February 12, 2010
Service Courses at the Center of the Universe
Service courses exist at the center of the academic universe, pulled by the event horizons of a dozen different institutional singularities without ever fully succumbing to the influence of one or the other. Their orbits are unstable, and yet for decades they have managed to balance on the pin head of academic gravitas.
Service courses exist because legislatures tell public institutions they have to have them; they exist because academic institutions feel that students need to “just know” some things; they exist because legions of students have taken them in past generations, thus making them a tradition; and, they exist because they are part of an honest effort at helping students become citizens.
Many academics take “service course” to mean any of the lower-level courses that all students at public colleges are required to take; thus, introductory classes in history, political science, and freshman composition are all service courses. However, service courses are actually any courses offered by one department to the students of other departments (non majors). Thus, there are far more service courses than one might think. Service courses that fall under this definition could be as varied as renaissance and reformation history, medieval philosophy, web design, or technical editing.
But whatever its most far-flung incarnations may be, for technical communication researchers the “service course” is most commonly the class taught to students from across the university who need initiation and practice in the workaday documents they will be required to produce upon graduating and securing a job. This course, designated ENGL 2311 by the Texas Common Course Numbering System (TCCNS), has a variety of definitions across the nation, but most fall pretty comfortably into the following description:
“Principles, techniques, and skills needed for college level scientific, technical, or business
writing.”
Texas A&M University refines that to the following:
"Processes of developing field-specific technical information related to the major, including researching, drafting, editing, revising, and designing technical reports, proposals, manuals, resumes and professional correspondence for specific audiences. Special topics, computer and distance sections available. Prerequisites: ENGL 104; junior classification."
A careful reader will note that while above I defined the goal of the service course as preparing students for workplace writing, the first definition—from the Texas Common Course Numbering System—mentions only “college level. . .writing” and that A&M refers to writing “related to the major.” The question that arises naturally from this juxtaposition is whether “college” writing is the same as “workplace” writing. My experience talking to people in business, politics (including members of the Texas State Board of Education), and education (elementary, secondary, and post-secondary) indicates that at least for many people, college writing is in fact the same as workplace writing. In other words, many college graduates who have gone on to shape our families, communities, businesses, and schools think that the way we write in the classroom is the same way we write in the office. Therefore, there is no dissonance caused by the above contrast in definitions.
Researchers conversant with college writing and business writing will, or should, note that there are in fact pretty significant differences between college and business writing. For instance, there is a distinct difference in genre. College writing is often in the form of essays, but essays practically don’t exist at all in business. Furthermore, a good college-level producer of essays will write using terms and citation styles that often don’t apply to business. MLA citation style, by way of example, is practically unheard of off campus, and essays frequently deal with students’ personal opinions on politics, literature, and history, which, though important, do not often come up in workplace writing.
There is, of course, a significant amount of college writing which is not in essay form. Students routinely produce proposals, lab reports, and technical reports. They also make posters, slides, and handouts for technical presentations, and some students produce educational materials as well as websites and business plans and case studies. These document do in fact share a great deal in common with workplace writing: they are modeled on actual workplace documents (such as business plans) and are required so that students gain experience in generating these documents, becoming more comfortable with the genre and purpose of such texts. So far, so good.
But perhaps one of the most important distinctions between workplace writing and college writing is the end, or goal, of the document. In school, everything a student does is (or is supposed to be) for the direct benefit of the student. Students work as individuals and are graded as individuals. Even in group work, students receive individual grades, and savvy instructors have policies in place for the student who does not contribute as much as is expected. Upon graduation, students receive a personalized diploma recognizing their efforts. Students own their writing, and thus their grades.
In workplace writing, documents frequently do not list an author but instead bear the name of the company or institution for which the student (now graduated) works. The end of the workplace document is to increase the value of the organization, not the individual, though individual benefits of course come through in the form of paychecks, raises, and promotions. But the primary purpose of that document is to increase the value of the organization: paychecks are a secondary benefit, a consequence, of the increase in organizational value.
Writing in the classroom means the student owns the document and produced all of the work within it. When a student cites information, it is for the purpose of acknowledging outside help, such as quoting a source of information. But in the workplace, documents are frequently used and re-used, and even kept as templates for later work. A single paragraph page may contain the words of five or six employees, but those words are not attributed directly to those authors; instead, the document is taken to be literally the work of the group. Ownership of that text goes to the organization, and plagiarism takes on an entirely different shape and meaning. Stealing words and ideas from other companies is bad; re-using text produced from a worker who may no longer work there is completely reasonable, even without attribution.
The lack of recognition of the difference between classroom writing and workplace writing is largely transparent, and often detrimental, to the service courses designed upon the assumption that classroom writing and business writing are the same thing.
Service courses exist because legislatures tell public institutions they have to have them; they exist because academic institutions feel that students need to “just know” some things; they exist because legions of students have taken them in past generations, thus making them a tradition; and, they exist because they are part of an honest effort at helping students become citizens.
Many academics take “service course” to mean any of the lower-level courses that all students at public colleges are required to take; thus, introductory classes in history, political science, and freshman composition are all service courses. However, service courses are actually any courses offered by one department to the students of other departments (non majors). Thus, there are far more service courses than one might think. Service courses that fall under this definition could be as varied as renaissance and reformation history, medieval philosophy, web design, or technical editing.
But whatever its most far-flung incarnations may be, for technical communication researchers the “service course” is most commonly the class taught to students from across the university who need initiation and practice in the workaday documents they will be required to produce upon graduating and securing a job. This course, designated ENGL 2311 by the Texas Common Course Numbering System (TCCNS), has a variety of definitions across the nation, but most fall pretty comfortably into the following description:
“Principles, techniques, and skills needed for college level scientific, technical, or business
writing.”
Texas A&M University refines that to the following:
"Processes of developing field-specific technical information related to the major, including researching, drafting, editing, revising, and designing technical reports, proposals, manuals, resumes and professional correspondence for specific audiences. Special topics, computer and distance sections available. Prerequisites: ENGL 104; junior classification."
A careful reader will note that while above I defined the goal of the service course as preparing students for workplace writing, the first definition—from the Texas Common Course Numbering System—mentions only “college level. . .writing” and that A&M refers to writing “related to the major.” The question that arises naturally from this juxtaposition is whether “college” writing is the same as “workplace” writing. My experience talking to people in business, politics (including members of the Texas State Board of Education), and education (elementary, secondary, and post-secondary) indicates that at least for many people, college writing is in fact the same as workplace writing. In other words, many college graduates who have gone on to shape our families, communities, businesses, and schools think that the way we write in the classroom is the same way we write in the office. Therefore, there is no dissonance caused by the above contrast in definitions.
Researchers conversant with college writing and business writing will, or should, note that there are in fact pretty significant differences between college and business writing. For instance, there is a distinct difference in genre. College writing is often in the form of essays, but essays practically don’t exist at all in business. Furthermore, a good college-level producer of essays will write using terms and citation styles that often don’t apply to business. MLA citation style, by way of example, is practically unheard of off campus, and essays frequently deal with students’ personal opinions on politics, literature, and history, which, though important, do not often come up in workplace writing.
There is, of course, a significant amount of college writing which is not in essay form. Students routinely produce proposals, lab reports, and technical reports. They also make posters, slides, and handouts for technical presentations, and some students produce educational materials as well as websites and business plans and case studies. These document do in fact share a great deal in common with workplace writing: they are modeled on actual workplace documents (such as business plans) and are required so that students gain experience in generating these documents, becoming more comfortable with the genre and purpose of such texts. So far, so good.
But perhaps one of the most important distinctions between workplace writing and college writing is the end, or goal, of the document. In school, everything a student does is (or is supposed to be) for the direct benefit of the student. Students work as individuals and are graded as individuals. Even in group work, students receive individual grades, and savvy instructors have policies in place for the student who does not contribute as much as is expected. Upon graduation, students receive a personalized diploma recognizing their efforts. Students own their writing, and thus their grades.
In workplace writing, documents frequently do not list an author but instead bear the name of the company or institution for which the student (now graduated) works. The end of the workplace document is to increase the value of the organization, not the individual, though individual benefits of course come through in the form of paychecks, raises, and promotions. But the primary purpose of that document is to increase the value of the organization: paychecks are a secondary benefit, a consequence, of the increase in organizational value.
Writing in the classroom means the student owns the document and produced all of the work within it. When a student cites information, it is for the purpose of acknowledging outside help, such as quoting a source of information. But in the workplace, documents are frequently used and re-used, and even kept as templates for later work. A single paragraph page may contain the words of five or six employees, but those words are not attributed directly to those authors; instead, the document is taken to be literally the work of the group. Ownership of that text goes to the organization, and plagiarism takes on an entirely different shape and meaning. Stealing words and ideas from other companies is bad; re-using text produced from a worker who may no longer work there is completely reasonable, even without attribution.
The lack of recognition of the difference between classroom writing and workplace writing is largely transparent, and often detrimental, to the service courses designed upon the assumption that classroom writing and business writing are the same thing.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Focusing the Question
How do we, then, 1) measure and 2) bridge the inevitable gap between employer expectations and the knowledge, skills and dispositions taught in TC service courses such that schools can better keep up with changing needs and emerging trends in industry?
This question is the one that’s occupied me for the last couple of years. It’s a noble quest, to be sure, trying to keep a practical, service-oriented course on track with employers’ expectations. It’s the basic requirement of an education: teach me to do something, or to think something, that will better me (or, in this case, make me more employable). But over time, the base question (“How do we. . .?”) has become more rhetorical than anything else. How, in fact, do we keep classes current with industry, assuming that we should do so in the first place?
And is it possible to keep a course which serves an entire undergraduate university population, composed of 90-some-odd majors, relevant to the writing practices of each student’s intended career path such that those students will come out of the course actually writing and understanding the documents of a particular profession better and more effectively than when they went into the course? No, probably not. But it’s worth looking into.
William James might argue that the “cash value” of the larger question, the “How do we” question, is to serve as a touchstone or a frame, but not the actual endeavor itself. Rather, it lays philosophical ground for me in that it keeps the focus on the practicality of the TC service course.
So back to the question, I’ve been refining it in my head for some time now. If the question lends itself to broadness, to lack of specific focus such that it really does become more rhetorical than an actual request for information, then I can at least refine my approach to the question. The question of “How do we. . .” then becomes a guiding philosophy rather than something I have to answer directly. I’ve considered questions like:
1. If more authentic writing situations make for more effective learning, then how can a technographic study help capture workplace writing practices for inclusion into the classroom?
In order to answer this question, I’d need to make clear the value and validity of a technographic study (which, in all fairness, I’d need to do in any study that uses the word “technographic”).
The study design would have to take into account other study designs and their findings in order to make that final comparison, the “how can a” part of the question, make sense. And that’s a sticking point, seems to me, since another ethnographic study (not technographic in nature) would of course have examined different things in the first place; thus, comparing results wouldn’t work too well without some serious rhetorical gymnastics.
2. How can ethnographic observation methods, traditionally used in writing studies to record information on the production of texts as well as the interactions of writers, be shifted in order to take into account the participation of technological artifacts in the writing process?
I like this question a bit more than the first because it allows for a simple critique of past studies and an opportunity to justify a different approach (the technographic lens, if you will). That’s a valuable piece of real estate, but I think it would work better as an article rather than as a full-length dissertation project. Must make a note.
3. If, as a number of researchers assert, technology “participates” with us in the creation of both artifacts and activities, how can we measure the extent and influence of that participation?
This question works well, too, and in fact may be the winner of this group. First, I’d need to line up some theorists and researchers who assert that technology participates alongside us (Johnson-Eilola and Kien I already have, but I’m wondering if there aren’t some other techno-heavy hitters like Marcuse and Ellul who could be worked in?). So, assuming I’d gotten the theoretical basis squared away, next would come the study. And the study itself would be the primary benefit to this question over the previous: the previous question could be answered entirely using deductive reasoning, or at least an answer could be roughed out of the raw material. But with this third question, I’m allowing for the inclusion of a decent empirical study. My diss chair will argue that it’s going to be difficult to quantify the word “participation” empirically, but I’m not sure that’s the hard part. I think a good study design would adapt ethnographic methods such as direct observation and interviews, with focus groups where we focused on the technology itself and got the group to provide some feedback, some sense of how they fit the technology into their daily work.
But there’s a host of what I’ll call on-the-ground problems with that one, starting with who I’d be using as participants and why, and how to get them to talk about technology without leading them (technology is notoriously transparent—just think about the last time you really thought about how helpful shoes are) into saying what I think. So that’s just two good problems to deal with. I’m sure there are more.
But one of the more serious, I think, problems is that I might just uncover disciplinary differences in the group inclusion of technology that point to the dissolution of TC service courses, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
Let me back up: let’s say I use two participant pools, one from a human resources firm and one from a civil engineering firm. What if I find that the use of language, the production of written artifacts, and the inclusion (and subsequent participation) of technology into both spoken and written communication is so very specific to each firm (and really, to each field) that, in fact, there’s no way to include both approaches in a single class? Would that point to an overall condemnation of the idea that we can train future professionals to produce technical documents in a single, one-size-fits-all course?
Honestly, though, that potential conclusion doesn’t worry me. It’s getting there—the problems on the ground, as it were—that are the real obstacles. If those can be addressed such that a replicable, empirical study can be carried out and the results recorded in a usable fashion, then the results may fall where they may. I imagine chapter five will be full of all kinds of speculations about application anyhow.
This question is the one that’s occupied me for the last couple of years. It’s a noble quest, to be sure, trying to keep a practical, service-oriented course on track with employers’ expectations. It’s the basic requirement of an education: teach me to do something, or to think something, that will better me (or, in this case, make me more employable). But over time, the base question (“How do we. . .?”) has become more rhetorical than anything else. How, in fact, do we keep classes current with industry, assuming that we should do so in the first place?
And is it possible to keep a course which serves an entire undergraduate university population, composed of 90-some-odd majors, relevant to the writing practices of each student’s intended career path such that those students will come out of the course actually writing and understanding the documents of a particular profession better and more effectively than when they went into the course? No, probably not. But it’s worth looking into.
William James might argue that the “cash value” of the larger question, the “How do we” question, is to serve as a touchstone or a frame, but not the actual endeavor itself. Rather, it lays philosophical ground for me in that it keeps the focus on the practicality of the TC service course.
So back to the question, I’ve been refining it in my head for some time now. If the question lends itself to broadness, to lack of specific focus such that it really does become more rhetorical than an actual request for information, then I can at least refine my approach to the question. The question of “How do we. . .” then becomes a guiding philosophy rather than something I have to answer directly. I’ve considered questions like:
1. If more authentic writing situations make for more effective learning, then how can a technographic study help capture workplace writing practices for inclusion into the classroom?
In order to answer this question, I’d need to make clear the value and validity of a technographic study (which, in all fairness, I’d need to do in any study that uses the word “technographic”).
The study design would have to take into account other study designs and their findings in order to make that final comparison, the “how can a” part of the question, make sense. And that’s a sticking point, seems to me, since another ethnographic study (not technographic in nature) would of course have examined different things in the first place; thus, comparing results wouldn’t work too well without some serious rhetorical gymnastics.
2. How can ethnographic observation methods, traditionally used in writing studies to record information on the production of texts as well as the interactions of writers, be shifted in order to take into account the participation of technological artifacts in the writing process?
I like this question a bit more than the first because it allows for a simple critique of past studies and an opportunity to justify a different approach (the technographic lens, if you will). That’s a valuable piece of real estate, but I think it would work better as an article rather than as a full-length dissertation project. Must make a note.
3. If, as a number of researchers assert, technology “participates” with us in the creation of both artifacts and activities, how can we measure the extent and influence of that participation?
This question works well, too, and in fact may be the winner of this group. First, I’d need to line up some theorists and researchers who assert that technology participates alongside us (Johnson-Eilola and Kien I already have, but I’m wondering if there aren’t some other techno-heavy hitters like Marcuse and Ellul who could be worked in?). So, assuming I’d gotten the theoretical basis squared away, next would come the study. And the study itself would be the primary benefit to this question over the previous: the previous question could be answered entirely using deductive reasoning, or at least an answer could be roughed out of the raw material. But with this third question, I’m allowing for the inclusion of a decent empirical study. My diss chair will argue that it’s going to be difficult to quantify the word “participation” empirically, but I’m not sure that’s the hard part. I think a good study design would adapt ethnographic methods such as direct observation and interviews, with focus groups where we focused on the technology itself and got the group to provide some feedback, some sense of how they fit the technology into their daily work.
But there’s a host of what I’ll call on-the-ground problems with that one, starting with who I’d be using as participants and why, and how to get them to talk about technology without leading them (technology is notoriously transparent—just think about the last time you really thought about how helpful shoes are) into saying what I think. So that’s just two good problems to deal with. I’m sure there are more.
But one of the more serious, I think, problems is that I might just uncover disciplinary differences in the group inclusion of technology that point to the dissolution of TC service courses, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
Let me back up: let’s say I use two participant pools, one from a human resources firm and one from a civil engineering firm. What if I find that the use of language, the production of written artifacts, and the inclusion (and subsequent participation) of technology into both spoken and written communication is so very specific to each firm (and really, to each field) that, in fact, there’s no way to include both approaches in a single class? Would that point to an overall condemnation of the idea that we can train future professionals to produce technical documents in a single, one-size-fits-all course?
Honestly, though, that potential conclusion doesn’t worry me. It’s getting there—the problems on the ground, as it were—that are the real obstacles. If those can be addressed such that a replicable, empirical study can be carried out and the results recorded in a usable fashion, then the results may fall where they may. I imagine chapter five will be full of all kinds of speculations about application anyhow.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Techne and Teaching TC
I’ve just this morning re-read Moeller and McAllister’s (2002) “Playing with Techne,” which offers a strong contrast to much of my reading, writing, and thinking over the past couple of years. In a nutshell, Moeller and McAllister argue against the current mindset that professional, as opposed to academic, documents and setting are the preferred method of teaching technical communication. As a caveat, I think it’s important to note that Moeller and McAllister seem to be talking about TC classes offered to TC majors, rather than the far more common service courses offered to non-TC majors (to the tune of some 800,000 students per year, in fact). So that distinction may be responsible for much of my reaction to their argument. And it’s only fair to point out that the essence of their discussion—that encouraging students to “play” with newly-acquired tools and knowledge is one of the best ways of getting them to develop skills and learn associated conventions—is an excellent point, though I’d point out that encouraging folks to play with anything is a good start to learning.
Moeller and McAllister (2002) argue against “textbooks that push technical communication students prematurely into workplace scenarios” and claim that textbooks of technical communication “position the student as an employee who is stuck awkwardly between a boss who wants a project done inexpensively but well and a customer who wants a project done well but inexpensively” (185-6). Moeller and McAllister miss, however, one of the primary exigencies of teaching technical communication: the overwhelming majority of our students are not going into TC as a profession, and they do indeed enter the classroom looking to learn a few things that will immediately help them in a workplace situation. Engineering students, in particular, tend to graduate and begin working immediately in positions that place them between a mid-level boss and a customer in precisely the scenario described above.
Moeller and McAllister also argue against the data-driven assertions of other TC researchers that novice writers often only begin to value rhetoric after being exposed to the professional discourse and environment. Instead, they criticize TC for having “warmly embraced an emphasis on ‘efficient writing’ simultaneously taught and practiced in a recontextualized classroom that tries to mirror difficult workplace realities” (187).
A great deal of their argument reinforces the classroom versus the “real world” duality that makes for so much trouble in both academic and non-academic surroundings. The purpose of universities has always been to produce and spread knowledge. This mission, which is tempting to describe a two-pronged but is really indicative of the symbiotic relationship between research and education, is and has been commonly found in the Far East, Middle East, Near East, and Western schools for centuries. And while the modern American university now leans more towards being a trade and professional than a liberal arts institution, our job is still to produce knowledge and spread it around in anticipation of someone doing something with that knowledge. Whether they’re hunting for furs or designing solar-powered sewage treatment plants, our students have got to be ready to do something with what we teach them, and that means the classroom is part and parcel of the “real world.” To pretend that school isn’t the “real world” is simply to miss the point of school.
Moeller and McAllister go on (unwisely, in my opinion) to suggest that students don’t have much experience being students, even though they show up to college having already experienced as many as 13 years (sometimes more) of formal instruction (188). In fact, our students show up often knowing little other than how to be students, and how to fit within the construct of the classroom environment. What we need to break free from, then, is the idea that the writing assignments of the TC classroom will be similar to the essays and personal narratives they’ve written so far. Thus, approaching the TC classroom with an air of workplace sensibility seems to be a good start particularly if we’re going to pay attention to the research results from Katz, Winsor, and others.
The crux of their argument, which despite my criticisms is an interesting and valuable point, is that students in TC courses should be encouraged to be shapers of knowledge, the artisans to whom the word techne makes reference (though actually the ancient Greek for “artisan” is, in Roman letters, tekton). But it seems they’re working from first principles rather than hard data, and I think they’ve missed the target in terms of accurately identifying the first principle. For instance, and as I stated earlier, they identify students as not knowing much about being students. That’s a missed opportunity for enlightenment. I’d argue (again) that college students know, in fact, very little except for how to be students. And, as I also pointed out above, they’re simply missing out on a great deal of valid data gathered by painstaking ethnographic methods, and while I’m currently engaged in a critique of those same studies, I’m by no means under the impression that the results of those studies are invalid or should simply be ignored. Far from it! My own critique is based on the idea that there’s some missing element to the methodology behind many of the ethnographic writing studies we’ve done in the past. But the results of those studies, such as they are, sure seem pretty solid and are at least worthy of comment in Moeller’s and McAllister’s article.
Artemeva, Logie, and St-Martin (1999), in an article that represents the dialogic opposite of Moeller and McAllister’s argument, describe a course in which lower-level engineering students are exposed to “typified writing practices in situated contexts of the engineering disciplines, interactions with existing texts, and interactions with relatively experienced writers (engineering students from upper years, teaching assistants, and instructors)” (302). Artemeva, et al, admit that “[r]ather than viewing their course work as dummy runs or simulations, students need to perceive what they are doing as being real and having consequences” (303), but this admission is in frank response to the necessity of TC coursework matching TC professional practice rather than resisting it.
In line with Winsor’s findings, Artemeva, et al, state that students “usually bring with them a resistance to the notion of engineering as a profession that requires literacy” (303). If Artemeva, et al, are right, and my experience indicates they are, then Moeller and McAllister’s humanities-based approach will simply not appeal to the engineering students in their classes, and might even alienate them entirely.
Moeller and McAllister (2002) argue against “textbooks that push technical communication students prematurely into workplace scenarios” and claim that textbooks of technical communication “position the student as an employee who is stuck awkwardly between a boss who wants a project done inexpensively but well and a customer who wants a project done well but inexpensively” (185-6). Moeller and McAllister miss, however, one of the primary exigencies of teaching technical communication: the overwhelming majority of our students are not going into TC as a profession, and they do indeed enter the classroom looking to learn a few things that will immediately help them in a workplace situation. Engineering students, in particular, tend to graduate and begin working immediately in positions that place them between a mid-level boss and a customer in precisely the scenario described above.
Moeller and McAllister also argue against the data-driven assertions of other TC researchers that novice writers often only begin to value rhetoric after being exposed to the professional discourse and environment. Instead, they criticize TC for having “warmly embraced an emphasis on ‘efficient writing’ simultaneously taught and practiced in a recontextualized classroom that tries to mirror difficult workplace realities” (187).
A great deal of their argument reinforces the classroom versus the “real world” duality that makes for so much trouble in both academic and non-academic surroundings. The purpose of universities has always been to produce and spread knowledge. This mission, which is tempting to describe a two-pronged but is really indicative of the symbiotic relationship between research and education, is and has been commonly found in the Far East, Middle East, Near East, and Western schools for centuries. And while the modern American university now leans more towards being a trade and professional than a liberal arts institution, our job is still to produce knowledge and spread it around in anticipation of someone doing something with that knowledge. Whether they’re hunting for furs or designing solar-powered sewage treatment plants, our students have got to be ready to do something with what we teach them, and that means the classroom is part and parcel of the “real world.” To pretend that school isn’t the “real world” is simply to miss the point of school.
Moeller and McAllister go on (unwisely, in my opinion) to suggest that students don’t have much experience being students, even though they show up to college having already experienced as many as 13 years (sometimes more) of formal instruction (188). In fact, our students show up often knowing little other than how to be students, and how to fit within the construct of the classroom environment. What we need to break free from, then, is the idea that the writing assignments of the TC classroom will be similar to the essays and personal narratives they’ve written so far. Thus, approaching the TC classroom with an air of workplace sensibility seems to be a good start particularly if we’re going to pay attention to the research results from Katz, Winsor, and others.
The crux of their argument, which despite my criticisms is an interesting and valuable point, is that students in TC courses should be encouraged to be shapers of knowledge, the artisans to whom the word techne makes reference (though actually the ancient Greek for “artisan” is, in Roman letters, tekton). But it seems they’re working from first principles rather than hard data, and I think they’ve missed the target in terms of accurately identifying the first principle. For instance, and as I stated earlier, they identify students as not knowing much about being students. That’s a missed opportunity for enlightenment. I’d argue (again) that college students know, in fact, very little except for how to be students. And, as I also pointed out above, they’re simply missing out on a great deal of valid data gathered by painstaking ethnographic methods, and while I’m currently engaged in a critique of those same studies, I’m by no means under the impression that the results of those studies are invalid or should simply be ignored. Far from it! My own critique is based on the idea that there’s some missing element to the methodology behind many of the ethnographic writing studies we’ve done in the past. But the results of those studies, such as they are, sure seem pretty solid and are at least worthy of comment in Moeller’s and McAllister’s article.
Artemeva, Logie, and St-Martin (1999), in an article that represents the dialogic opposite of Moeller and McAllister’s argument, describe a course in which lower-level engineering students are exposed to “typified writing practices in situated contexts of the engineering disciplines, interactions with existing texts, and interactions with relatively experienced writers (engineering students from upper years, teaching assistants, and instructors)” (302). Artemeva, et al, admit that “[r]ather than viewing their course work as dummy runs or simulations, students need to perceive what they are doing as being real and having consequences” (303), but this admission is in frank response to the necessity of TC coursework matching TC professional practice rather than resisting it.
In line with Winsor’s findings, Artemeva, et al, state that students “usually bring with them a resistance to the notion of engineering as a profession that requires literacy” (303). If Artemeva, et al, are right, and my experience indicates they are, then Moeller and McAllister’s humanities-based approach will simply not appeal to the engineering students in their classes, and might even alienate them entirely.
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