“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.
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