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.

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.