Russell's argument trajectory

The article I had this week was David R. Russell's "The Ethics of Teaching Ethics in Professional Communication: The Case of Engineering Publicity at MIT in the 1920s"

Russell starts off with two questions: "To what extent, in any, should business and technical writing courses serve the pragmatic needs of business and industry, and to what extent, if any, should those courses teach the concerns of literary studies? And two, What is the responsibility, if any, of the instructor of these courses to teach ethics?" In plain speak, teachers teaching technical writing classes, that come from a lit crit background, want to teach their students ethics from a humanities perspective that doesn't attend to the needs of the students. Humanities teachers don't need to teach ethics because these students already come from backgrounds that have ethically importance (working for the common good), even though it varies from the lit crit way of ethics.

He answers one right off: yes teach ethics, but "how, when, and for what purposes they should be promoted" (167). From there Russell goes into ethos of a profession- "Those values, those rules or conduct...that create and maintain the professional community, that give it its "integrity," its identity" (167). Thus begins Russell taking teachers from a lit crit background that teach tech writing. Russell traces the history of the "two cultures" : lit crit and industry writing. Tech writing is mostly taught by English folks submerged in lit crit- a field of study that has been alienated from other departments because it's seen as unnecessary. Marginalized and feeling undervalued, lit crits banded together; seeing the alienation from other professions as a badge of honor. The consequence of this is that tech writing teachers are coming into the classroom, mostly unknowingly, undermining the ethics of the various disciplines students are in, by trying to humanize them in a lit crit way. The result is that teachers are doing a disservice to the students by pushing their own agendas rather than what is beneficial for the student. I know there's a lot of lit crit, but Russell comes down hard on this particular field of study.

Russell uses the Engineering Publicity at MIT in the 1920s to illustrate how teaching tech writing can be done effectively. It was initially set up as a way for students to learn to show their ethos to government, the public, and employers (177). Used a holistic approach by featuring language, writing, reading, and speaking. Students weren't taught ethics from a humanities POV, but with case studies and how people in the field dealt with the issues. Last, students wrote as engineering professionals in genres like reports or memos rather than a critical analysis paper. The MIT program went through changes (being wildly reductive here): ending up with the same holistic view, only now with professionals, not just teachers, being invited into classrooms to speak on a broad spectrum of topics.

This all leads to Russell stating that it's not the job of a tech writing teacher to impugn the students' discipline, but rather to find out more about the field(s) in which they're teaching, so that when they do make critiques, it's coming from a knowledgeable place and knowing when those times arise (kairos).

Questions:     Is it possible to do this? To remove yourself from your beliefs enough and be willing to lean in to another perspective?

Is there space to teach some aspect of lit crit in a tech writing class?

This piece ties into Miller's article directly. He uses her argument as one of the ways in which tech writing is being approached by a lit crit POV (Ex: "...questions about whose interests a practice serves and how we decide whose interests should be served" (158).

I like Porter's article, because I think it accentuates and complicates Russell's piece. Porter takes a different spin, but like Russell, believes that kairos is important. Different spin in that where Russell was more about learning a lot about different fields, Porter is saying that teachers shouldn't interfere with students' writing, but support as needed (189). I think Russell was remiss in the idea of support.