How TC fails Pragmatism

My master’s thesis deals with pragmatism as it appears in a series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. I argued, pretty successfully, that Jamesian pragmatism was already a feature of American novels before James himself became famous for endorsing pragmatism as a life philosophy. Since then, I’ve been affected by James’ writings in my teaching and my research, always believing that I was engaged in a very pragmatic practice: teaching others to improve their writing so that they could move on in their classroom and work-related careers. But a conversation with my dissertation chair, Fred Kemp, has made me question that assumption of pragmatism. Pragmatism is an approach to valuing a theory or situation so as to find whether it benefits the individual. A pragmatic approach to education would involve a student choosing a major and then taking classes that fit his or her interpretation of that major’s value to the individual. A history major might focus in on nineteenth century America and classes that would aid in teaching that history to high school students.

But Fred pointed out that TC service courses are a response, not a homegrown initiative. Those classes are a response to a need identified by others, and our response is to create and offer a class based on those needs. It’s a backwards sort of pragmatism, one that responds to someone else’s pragmatic desires. A department which offered such courses could do so in a pragmatic matter, being sure to make money and intercampus social capital, provide teachers with an outlet for their well-honed pedagogical skills, and creating a curriculum that meets the needs of the department while also serving the students and client departments. But that’s almost never what happens. In fact, I’d argue that it never happens except there may be some golden campus where service courses benefit everyone. In practice, those classes tend to make servants of the undertrained instructors who are paid blue collar wages for university-level teaching, and the students are frequently not served by those courses due to the courses’ generality and lack of theoretical and practical rigor.

So in practice, TC service courses are the opposite of pragmatic. They’re some sort of perverse altruism where the best of intentions help few, if any, attain their goals.

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.

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 taught (rightly so) that clarity is the goal of all good writing. The humanities, though, often approach writing as an art in itself, and that freewriting and rough drafting and the very act of writing is worth taking noting. And as with the engineers who argue the opposite, the humanities scholars are indeed correct. Two approaches, both utterly logical, and both somewhat incompatible in teaching and in practice.

The contrast between what engineers and employers seem to want can be seen in Blyler’s (1995) article in which she argues for 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 (1993) takes a humanities-based stance when arguing against a “formulaic” view of genre and purpose for business communication courses. But formulaic is exactly what the 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 otherwise. We should not train students to write genres within such a specific space and place. No doubt helping students recognize their rhetorical circumstances, taking a broad approach to audience analysis and textual production, would help them think more globally about writing and perhaps more critically about the purposes of genre. But that means we’re not responding to the needs, the stated needs, of our client departments and are in fact working more pragmatically according to our own “cash value” when it comes to our service courses.

Perhaps pragmatism has failed me at last, in that a pragmatic view of the TC service course will result in classes that do not address the specific needs of the intended audience. Furthermore, if we deliberately create courses that do not address those specific needs, we may be failing to follow our own stated goals for effective technical communication. If the class fails, perhaps the class author is the one to blame.

Bushnell (1999) 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 acknowledge bias rather than avoid it. 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 (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. It’s also important to note that Bushnell’s take on university education is dated: we no longer (always) aim to broaden minds and further intellectual horizons. Instead, the more common goal is to train students for specific professions, which more and more commonly require even further specialization after college. What careers exist for which (a) a university degree is required, and (b) require no further specialization or continuing education?