The world of research has gone berserk. Too much paperwork.

While fumbling my way through this week's readings, I am beginning to notice an underlying problem that, although talked about at great length, hasn't been nailed down yet: the problem of assessment in writing classes. I don't think that as teachers in the English department we don't know anymore what composition is. We've pulled comp into so many parts, then coalesced it together to where now it's gotten so big that we've almost made it obsolete. It may seem like I'm straying off topic, but stay with me...

I find this problem most evident in the "Technical Communicator as Author" piece. The authors state: "Rather than authors producing certain discourses, certain discourses are understood to produce authors" (25). Hmm. I like the use of chiasmus, but I'm dubious as to the truth of their claim. Something about this statement stinks, I just can't put my finger on why exactly. Maybe it's just the bleakness of it. Maybe because I'm not sure how this fits into their argument.
Slack et al, go on to argue that they "...would advance the re-articulation of technical communicators...as having authorial power" (41). Okay. I'm not sure exactly why this is a problem. Is it that the authors want tech communicators to take agency over their work and therefore be accountable for what they produce, or is the argument here that tech communicators aren't given their due? It seems like it's the latter, but I don't know why this is relevant to a tech writing class. Can someone help me on this one?! It's very likely that I'm missing a point. 

So, how this relates to my rant is that I think the goal of teaching tech writing is to increase the rhetorical effectiveness of the writer; to be able to communicate rhetorically in the ways that a business audience will appreciate, and that can lead to change. But articles like this one seem to have the goal of trying to make the comp field even bigger (too much paperwork), rather than getting to the root of the problem. In other words, creating more problems before solving the first set of issues.
 I'm not suggesting that issues of social import aren't relevant to a tech writing course, but what I'm wondering here is-what needs to come first? Before we consider issues like this shouldn't we be more focused on what we're doing in the classroom to prepare students to become effective rhetors, even if they don't think of themselves in that way? And it seems that it would lend itself to the issues that these authors raise when they say, "In a sense, technical communicators need to be shaken from the somnambulistic faith that their work is ethically neutral" (43). That's a heck of a sweeping statement to make! As if they don't already have the knowledge that it isn't ethically neutral and are able to control it. That's where the rhetorical effectiveness comes into play.
The Dilger piece I felt met its goal of the implications of extreme usability. It was bringing the argument back to what the Johnson book had posited, only now the issue has changed from ignoring the user to now ignoring the user under the pretense of being "user-friendly." For example, Dilger gives a list of things that should be included in web-based text, like "paragraphs should contain one idea, using topic sentences and simple sentence structure" (53), all in the name of making the web text "user-friendly." The problem with this way of writing is that it would work for some businesses, but not all.
Moses and Katz's article was interesting to me on a personal level (i.e. it made me think about email and how it was designed with business in mind, and the ways in which the professional world is insidiously taking over the private sphere), but again I wonder, how would one teach this to students? I don't know, maybe social justice issues don't have much of a place within tech and professional writing classes. I can't imagine trying to get a group of students who already look with suspicious eyes on the humanities and try and get them to care about the social, ethical, and economic issues that surround the corporate culture. And even if I did get through, they'd be mighty disappointed once getting into the professional world, set on making changes, only to realize that businesses don't want you to try and change them.
My blog this week may seem really disjointed, and I guess that's because I'm trying to figure this all out. And the more I read, the less I know. Ha!  

Learning Intercultural Communication Competence Linda Beamer

As we all know, the workplace is ever becoming a diverse place, yet there's a lack of multicultural practice within business culture. The thrust of Beamer's article is concerned with creating a paradigm in which to pull from, that explains intercultural communication competence is learned/taught (399). She states: "The best way to understand intercultural communication is to focus on the decoding process and the role of perception in communication" (400).
Decoding is done by the recipient of a message and do to social and cultural ideals, the message may not be clear, that is, the sender may not have the same set of mores as receiver, thus having different signs which obscure meaning for the receiver. Perception, on the other hand, is knowing that a message is being sent. Beamer clarifies this idea with differentiating signifier and the signified: "The signifier...is the sensorially perceived signal without meaning yet attached. The signified is the meaning" (401). To put this into understandable terms: I see a yellow sign on an Idaho highway with the blackened-out image of a goat. I've never seen this image on a sign before because I'm from Nebraska and we have cows, not goats. But I am from the same culture in which the sign was produced, and I have seen similar signs in Nebraska, so I know that I should be on the lookout for wandering goats. I have perceived the sign and was able to decode the message based on previous knowledge and cultural influences.
So, to increase intercultural communication competences requires those making the signs to be constantly aware of what other cultures use, by looking at their "values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors" (402). Beamer introduces The Intercultural Learning Model as a way of demystifying the ways in which professionals can develop intercultural communication. This entails five levels:

• Acknowledging diversity
• Organizing Information by Stereotypes
• Question the Stereotypes
• Analyse Communication Episodes
• Generating "Other Culture" Messages      (404)

This model is both "incremental" and "cyclical" in that it's continually reinventing itself to better fit the needs of the intended audience (404).

The breakdown of the model:
Acknowledging diversity: what it sounds like- to conscientiously realize that there are differences between cultures that could block meaning for the receiver by the sender.

Organizing information by according to stereotypes: Beamer gives the example of Arabs may stand closer to you when they're speaking or that Chinese will refuse hospitality when first offered (406). She acknowledges that stereotypes don't make a culture and that's why the next level is important.

Posing questions to challenge the stereotypes: questioning stereotypes can open up the ways in which a culture may view business-related stuff like: time, technologies used, and how they make decisions (406). To aid in questioning stereotypes, Beamer offers these suggestions:

• Thinking and Knowing: how a culture "acquire, organize, and transmit information" (408)
• Doing and Achieving: as it sounds- what a culture does and how they go about getting it
• The Self: if the culture values individualism or interdependence
• The Organization of society: if there's a strong caste system versus an egalitarian culture 
• The Universe: if a culture looks at the world revolving around humans (humans in the center), or if the world/deities are at the center.

Analyzing communication episodes: once copious amounts of information has been gathered, then the knowledge can be applied by looking at past communication. This is where one can look at what went right, what went wrong, and what was in the middle with regard to effectively communicating signals for a culture.

Generating "other culture" messages: now senders can empathize with a culture's communication style. They can create news signs based on the culture's needs or modify existing models.

Connections:
Thrush article pointing to same issues as Beamer; the workplace is diverse and we need ways of communicating cross-culturally. Thrush is different in that she adds the layer of masculine and feminine. This was missing from Beamer's article- and maybe it should have been because I got the sense that Beamer was thinking about multicultural communication from a masculine perspective, and maybe could have gone to how female perspectives can add complexity to culture.

Fukuoka, et. al.: Complicate Beamer by asking are cultures that different or is it that "assumptions" about what cultures want is what makes the difference. They look at manuals and how many illustrations are in Japanese versus American. And that's where I lose the connection because then their inquiry became more about how these respective cultures liked/didn't like lots of pictures in their manuals.

Breuch: This may be a stretch to pull a connection from "technical literacy" into multicultural communication, but the former does hinge on the latter. Breuch's posit that computers are not "neutral" but rather "political in development and use" (487), which makes me think of Beamer's notion of looking at stereotypes and how a computer could play into that. Would a professional in another culture feel "othered" in some way if she didn't possess the same tech literacy? Or would she feel more included by having that shared knowledge?

Selber et. al.: They make the call to see tech literacy as "a complex set of social practices through which meaning is made collaboratively" (501), drawing on Beamer's Posing Questions to Challenge Stereotypes to make communication inclusive v. exclusive. In other words, the more eyes on the project the better communication will be transmitted.

Questions: While we all see that the workplace is changing in diverse ways, and folks like Beamer have given an explicit way of going about teaching multicultural communication, do you wonder if the real work is in making more people aware, and therefore care, about the changing environment? Are there ways in which teachers could do activities that show the effects of missed communication? Or do teachers go over this stuff, and not push too much of the literary crit way of doing things that Russell and others are concerned about?

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?

Lame course objectives for tech writing class (to be revised)

Objectives that students will be able to do by the end of the semester:
Learn the means of persuasion (ethos, logos, pathos)
Find the medium in which best fits the field (e.g. video, commercial, email)
Different rhetorical tropes and schemes useful in writing
How to offer feedback in meaningful ways
What goes into different genres of writing
Consider other cultures and how that might shape the writing

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.