You just kinda wasted my precious time (Freedman and Adams), but don't think twice, it's alright

For this week’s reading I will be blogging about Aviva Freedman and Christine Adam’s Learning to Write Professionally: “Situated Learning” and the Transition from University to Professional Discourse.”

The authors are arguing that “[w]hen students move from the university to the workplace, they not only need to learn new genres but they also need to learn new ways to learn those genres” (311). Freedman and Adam define genre as not just reoccurring style in a text, but also how genre is also reinvented by social, cultural, ideological, and political influences (311). They then make the move to dichotomizing the ways in which the university and workplace teach and write.

Universities usually employ the guided participation method. This is the more traditional view of learning where students are given a set of issues to work on and are guided by a professor (mentor) who both supports students’ learning and models how to go about fixing a problem. The idea behind guided participation is that once the student has gained awareness of a genre, then she’ll be able to reproduce as needed what was modeled in class.

The authors then contrast guided participation with Lave and Wenger’s “legitimate peripheral participation (LPP).” Unlike guided participation, the focus of LPP isn’t so much based on learning, but rather apprenticing in real life situations where material production is the concern (312).

How Freedman and Adam’s then assessed these types of learning in the classroom versus the workplace was looking at undergraduates in financial analyst course, and graduate students who were actively interning.

What they found was that the undergrads learned from the professor modeling how to perform tasks, and then carried out their own strategies based on what they had learned in class. The grad students in the workplace had the same element of mentor-learner, and also the method of delivery (i.e. using computers), but now the writing is very different from the university. Rather than having a clearly defined rubric from which to work, the interns needed to figure out what information to include in a document, in what order, and think about for whom they were writing for, which got even trickier when they would be pulled away from an assignment to go work on something completely different.

What I felt was the most particularly interesting difference between university and workplace learning was the notion of “authentic” writing. Students are given situations that are based on actual events and then write about it, whereas the workplace is the actual event. For example, an inter taking meeting notes and has to make sure the information is accurate and easily understandable; if she fails to do this then there is no rewrite: it can hurt her credibility (323).

The authors also make the distinction that in the university, the professor has a more vested interest in students by way of the grade. If students aren’t learning then the professor is failing. In the workplace, however, there may be some evaluations based on work (almost like a grade), but, according to Freedman and Adams, evals are few and far between. Evaluations in the workplace also tend to look at the whole rather than its parts, and that there’s “sparse use of praise and blame” that goes into the eval.

Freedman and Adams conclude that there needs to be more research done on both these types of learning and how they work within their respective places, so then university student-to-workplace employee has better use of different genres.

That is where I stop being nice with this article. The authors may have done extensive research, but it seems to me that they only picked out the places that supported their claim, rather than to actually give something of import to technical writing teachers. They say nothing of how to blur these lines; nothing of how students can and do learn more than just how to write in one genre of professional writing. It’s not like there’s a lot of sonnet writing going into the kinds of writing the workplace does. To say another way: workplace writing is pretty straightforward, and it seems like the authors tried to complicate something that isn’t necessarily all that complicated! I know because I’ve been there.

Freedman and Adams also neglect to go into detail what happens when one is in the workplace, has a so-called mentor, but the mentor is unwilling to pass on what she’s learned. I saw this happen a lot- young blood comes into the office and the seasoned employee is intimidated, thus resistant to helping the new employee. With regard to evaluations: evals are grades, and some companies do give evals quarterly. Often one is not just evaluated based on the whole, but as an individual, unlike what Freedman and Adams claim.

Overall, I felt this piece was written to show the authors’ prowess, rather than giving anything substantial to the tech writing teaching field. It did help me think about the implications of the Russell article I read for last week, that if one only focuses on teaching text-based prose, and doesn’t bring in some of the criticism and how to apply that to texts then students, then they could potentially have trouble navigating the workplace discourse.

Connections: The authors are working from the same place Berkenkotter and Huckin are in that the genre of professional writing has been myopic, and that this can hurt the creditability of the workplace writer. Spinuzzi’s article is also calling for a broader view of the types of writing that takes place in the classroom versus the workplace, which has been a connecting thread so far in most of what we’ve been reading in this class. The only difference is that Freedman and Adams did it less masterfully than some of the other articles I have read.  

Questions: If it’s true that there is dissonance between the university and workplace writing, what do we do to better facilitate the move of students being students to actually being workplace producers of texts?   Should we discuss the political underbelly of the workplace? That is, when an incumbent resists helping the novice? That sometimes workplaces only want their employees to be only so literate to do their jobs, but not to think too much?