Jessica McCaughey and Brian Fitzpatrick push teachers of technical communication to help our students unobscure and explore some of the more nuanced, subtle instances of “persuasion” in the workplace. In Chapter 16, titled, “Hidden Arguments: Rhetoric and Persuasion in Diverse Forms of Technical Communication,” McCaughey and Fitzpatrick talk about how technical communication is best taught when it’s situated in real-world contexts. 

But isn’t that what we’re trying to do anyway? 

On the one hand, we each teach one of three different courses, each similarly designed and meant to underscore rhetorical awareness and persuasive writing for non-English major students. The fact that our university recognizes differences between science-based majors vs. business majors vs. engineering majors should indicate that someone along the way was considering how these students’ real-world contexts after graduation will look different from each other’s. Our curriculum shifts to match the needs of our audiences; our students. So #meta, right? I’m introducing my students to research reviews this week, and we’ll continue practicing summaries and syntheses while reading through scientific labs and research reports. My colleagues teaching BizComm just finished handling public relations nightmares in business operations with their students; my TechComm buddies are gearing up to teach their students how to break down and accommodate complex series of information with iFixIt. 

So if our classes are tailor-made, what’s the issue?

While our curriculum prepares students to recognize “what to do” when faced with any of the given scenarios we throw at them during a semester (‘you’re trying to get hired,’ ‘you’re convincing shareholders to continue investing,’ ‘you’re sharing new information with the public,’ etc.), it may not explicitly be preparing students for realistic, nuanced instances of persuasion in the workplace. And frankly, our curriculum is designed to intentionally emphasize this directive– “what to do when X happens” – as we’re always, constantly asking students to consider, “What is your purpose in writing this document?” 

I think my students and I both really love using “the purpose” to guide our journey through each unit. I felt this way when I taught BizComm, and I feel it now teaching SciComm. In our Syllabus Day classes, I like to open with a grandiose speech about “purpose” because from purpose, stems everything else a student might need to consider in our class: knowing the purpose of our document, we might ascertain our audience. Knowing our purpose, we might consider what strategies to pursue. When you ask a room of sleepy frowns, “What is our purpose in writing a resume?”, and they finally come to life and ask, “To get hired?” Ooof. There’s another teaching strategy for us to consider: start the year off by making everybody feel like a genius really early on. 

But with purpose, comes problem. McCaughey and Fitzpatrick warn that many teachers “look towards concepts such as rhetorical problem solving as a way of grounding technical communication pedagogy (Karatsolis et al., 2016). Still, when instructors frame technical communication as rhetorical and persuasive, many do so only around explicitly persuasive forms, such as proposals and other “public” technical texts,” which points to the issue with “purpose” (306). The logical structure of our curriculum makes perfect sense to follow because it familiarizes students with certain common genres and genre conventions, and it equips students with the concept of rhetorical awareness and audience analysis to carry forward (if they stick! – we can only hope). But the logical structure of our curriculum is built entirely around this idea of “rhetorical problem solving,” which gives students very little wiggle room to consider A) ‘problems’ outside of the ones posed in our Unit Assignments and correlating homeworks, and B) persuasion beyond problem solving. 

 

Bottom Line

According to McCaughey and Fitzpatrick, students struggle in their transition from school to real-world contexts “because of classroom writing’s rhetorical limitations and its tendency to focus on “generic skills,” rather than on “developing strategies for social and intellectual adaptation,” applicable across both academic and professional writing contexts… a writer with a series of past successful assignments, writing to hypothetical, generic audiences with abstract stakes, is jarred when their writing expectations become incongruous with the new and newly elevated stakes of the authentic workplace,” (313). 

I think we all try to teach our students how to learn and be thinkers; none of us try to encourage passive learners and thinkers. It’s more exciting for us, too, if our students can draw on real-world examples or make connections to our subject material. We can feel ourselves learning more from one another when our students’ engagement with the material becomes more personal. But sometimes, I think we like to hope that our curriculum is doing the legwork for us and stimulating these learners and thinkers. Currently, we have a lot of homework assignments due each week between units, and I’ve often wondered if we are utilizing this opportunity to communicate with our students through their homework well enough.

Our conversation about amending some of our curriculum will be ongoing, I know, but my contribution right now is a small strategy I’ve adopted in my SciComm course this semester. Many of our homeworks ask my students to list quotes and summarize readings, or to take short quizzes on some of the concepts: much like the other ENL courses taught by graduate teaching fellows, SciComm has varying lengths of homework assignments. When it comes to the shorter assignments, I always love to add a short, “PART II.” Sometimes I conduct a check-in (how are you feeling about the course? What is troubling you about this unit?), and sometimes I ask them to make a class-to-self, class-to-world, class-to-class, or class-to-other connection. My hope is that in doing this, I am both building relationships, and gaining valuable insight into the way my students contextualize our course against their outside experiences. 

 

Curriculum design is necessarily as recursive a process as writing, I think. If anybody is up to the task of tending to a curriculum so that it best meets our students’ needs, I think our cohort can champion the fight.