As instructors of technical communication, I wonder if you’ve ever considered that our university doesn’t offer an undergraduate program specifically for technical communication. Our English department is growing and evolving and every year we gain new interest and new students, but like many collegiate institutions, we only offer undergraduates a taste of technical communication through the three courses we teach: ENL 264, 265, and 266.

In Chapter 6 from Effective Teaching of Technical Communication: Theory, Practice, and Application, author and instructor of technical communication courses Chen Chen describes what it’s like to design a technical communication course from the ground up. Her chapter, titled “Trial and Error: Designing an Introductory Course to Technical Communication,” echoes many of the conversations I’ve shared with my colleagues and classmates between classes since beginning at UMass as an instructor of TechComm.

Chen makes a distinction early in the chapter between “Basic” and “Intro” level TPC courses that we can use to understand our own experiences as TPC instructors. Personally, I’ve never considered before that, like our students, we’re enrolled in classes that are meant to teach us about, and how to perform, technical and professional communications. I am a student of technical communication in many of the same ways that my students in ENL 264: Communication in the Sciences are. But, Chen points out, our classes and programs pursue different goals. One might argue that yeah, we’re graduate students, so duh, our TCP classes will have different goals than our students’. But Chen argues that it’s more than academic hierarchy: it’s the fact that our students take Basic level TCP courses, whereas our program offers us Intro level courses.

 

Basic vs. Intro: What’s the Difference?

Basic TPC courses are like the ENL classes we teach; they give students an understanding of what TPC is and what it looks like in practice. Intro level TPC courses are courses that we take in our program; these courses introduce existing theories to students and show us how to perform the duties of technical communicators. In other words, it “seems that the distinctions here are driven by the different perceptions of technical communication as a discipline versus a profession,” (Chen 113).

Chen continues to say that Basic level TCP courses often function as a required service course for students in non-writing majors, but whose career industries likely rely on technical communication. Sound familiar? We teach business students, science students, and engineering students– and within these umbrella majors, a multitude of different majors related to these fields– because even though their career trajectories aren’t explicitly centered around writing, technical writing is a necessary skill in each of these fields.

So, we’re studying TCP as a profession; an industry in itself. Our students are studying TCP as a discipline to be acquired in order to better oneself within a different career industry. This makes sense, but for some reason, it didn’t sit well with me. I’d like to sift through two other interesting points that Chen makes regarding the difficulties of building and managing a technical communication course, and leave you with some considerations regarding Basic and Intro TCP courses after we explore these difficulties.

 

1. Limited Infrastructure Due to Changes in Personnel

I want to teach beyond our program, so curriculum development is something I think is fun (cue barfing from certified teachers everywhere– I know I’ll get there someday, too). But due to the nature of our positions as graduate teaching fellows, every semester we have a change in personnel throughout ENL 264, ENL 265, and ENL 266 courses.

The really cool, awesome thing about our curriculum is that it’s a living, dynamic entity, but as Chen points out this constant change in personnel may also contribute to difficulties we have as teaching fellows. Again, Chen’s university is similar to UMassD in that undergraduate TCP courses at her school are offered in isolation from an overarching TCP program. She writes, “the lack of a TPC program and the changes of personnel provided limited infrastructure for sharing resources and developing interpersonal relationships among instructors in a consistent and sustainable manner,” (113). And although UMD arguably boasts a very interpersonal, community-driven English department, and although we are fortunate to share time in ENL 631 to discuss our teaching strategies, I still feel Chen’s point is interestingly familiar.

Could our university benefit from, and alleviate this issue with an undergraduate program dedicated to Technical Writing majors?

 

2. Social Justice Opportunities Restricted By Basic Curriculum

One way that Chen markets her TCP courses in her university’s course offerings is by underscoring the opportunities students will have, to see a relationship between activism in the social justice sphere and technical writing. Where an elective or required writing class is almost never a non-writing major’s first choice, Chen’s chapter confirms that many of the students who enrolled in her class were attracted to this characteristic.

At the end of the chapter Chen discusses some of the feedback her course yielded, and talks about how “The gap between theory and practice widened when students began to create technical documents without being able to explicitly apply a social justice perspective to the work they were doing… It was more difficult for them to see how writing documentation for a software required a social justice perspective,” for example (123). I think this is SO interesting because it demonstrates that students actually, genuinely care about learning social justice strategies from Chen’s TPC course, which is great. It also demonstrates that perhaps one semester-long course cannot cover a student’s holistic understanding of how powerful TCP as a discipline can be. Students can take away concrete strategies: non gendered pronouns, document accessibility, etc., but that doesn’t always translate to their understanding of TPC as power, specifically power in the realm of social justice.

Do any of your weekly modules reflect social justice themes? In using contemporary examples and pop culture references, social justice definitely comes up in my class conversations. And I’m really, really proud of the way I managed the SciComm curriculum this spring. But I don’t think any part of it explicitly relates itself to social justice, nor do I think my curriculum works to demonstrate for students the relationship between TCP and social justice.

 

Discipline vs. Profession: An Awareness of Our Audience

Although Chen points out several reasons why it’s difficult to implement and maintain a TCP course in a university with little built-in support for such a task, I think the two issues explored above demonstrate why instructors of technical communication must evaluate the ways in which our current curriculum serves our audiences.

First, due to the nature of the teaching fellowship program and its relationship to TCP courses at UMassD, we can assume changes in personnel will be a continued challenge for us to navigate. Currently, there are limited opportunities for our cohort to offer one another suggestions about each other’s curriculum. We build our own curriculum and sometimes ask one another for advice, and sometimes we can carve time out of our personal workloads to “shoot the shit” in the graduate student lounge, but is that enough? In terms of audience awareness, it often feels like we are the sole perspective that goes into interpreting and developing class lesson plans. If we can’t expand on consistent infrastructure in our courses due to a constant change in personnel, then how might we leverage one another better as colleagues in our program in order to better engage our classes through our curriculum?

Second, and building from my previous point, I wonder how many opportunities we could find to inject a social justice context into lessons, assignments, and class discussions. Given more time to build our courses than a mere day before the beginning of the semester could certainly help; but I think collaboration with peers, even if they’re teaching TechComm and BizComm and I’m teaching SciComm, could help us discover new ways to reach our students and their interests better through our curriculum.

Finally, returning to Chen’s Basic vs. Intro course concepts, I want to propose that it is in fact harmful to framework ENL 264, 265, and 266 as merely a “discipline-building” course. Already, our students are required– and indeed feel forced– to take our courses because they are requirements to graduation. I don’t know if it’s enough to teach technical and professional communication to the audiences of students that we’ve been teaching, in a merely “basic,” overviewing way. When students understand TPC as a discipline, and this perception is paired with the fact that usually basic level TPC courses are “forced” requirements by an institution, we run into trouble as TCP instructors. Technical and professional communication becomes an option to discard when we frame the field this way to students; I don’t think it makes them excited about the power it could instill them with as future professionals in their chosen fields.

Audience awareness is our first Unit and concept across all three courses, but I think in some ways, our curriculum fails miserably at meeting our students where they currently are in terms of their interests, and their self-perceived strengths and weaknesses when it comes to writing. Can these missed opportunities be rectified through communal-course-building, and/or a stronger emphasis on the social justice characteristics of TCP? I don’t know for sure, but I am certain that if we walk into each semester with the assumption that our students aren’t ready to play with the theory and power of TCP, then we are making it more difficult for them to enjoy what we enjoy about the field.