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.