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.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
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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