I’ve Got the Power:

Autumn in New England marks a transition of season and life. As the leaves change beautiful colors and wither away, teachers like myself are in a firestorm of late night grading and early morning teaching causing our complexion to change strange colors and wither away. The students are already beginning to think toward next year. This time of progress and reflection is always special, and I want to stop and look at my personal ethos. How am I doing? Am I helping others in my daily actions? What could I have done better? My aim is to find personal solutions and peace to my own disorganized dumpster of a brain for the future. The anonymous saying in meditation is that the mind is like a “drunken monkey bitten by a scorpion jumping from branch to branch.” The important things right in front of us, can be forgotten so I take this time to reflect on the power of the written word. 

As teachers of technical and professional communications (TCP), creating student awareness behind the tremendous power of their writing remains essential. Progressing through the semester during a current pandemic learning environment can lead us astray from the basic and simple principle that our words have power, and with this power we have been able to dominate all other species. Human beings were able to use their advanced communication skills to take over the planet and literally remove ourselves from the unforgiving laws of nature through streamlined methods of communications.  

Gimme Shelter: Technical Writers Impacting Home Repair

In Social Media and Advocacy in the Technical and Professional Communication Classroom: A Social Justice Pedagogical Approach writer Sarah Warren-Riley reminds the audience that seeming “mundane texts” can play major roles impacting people’s quality of life.  Riley’s role as a technical document writer played a significant role in helping struggling homeowners utilize federal and state programs to improve their living situations. Riley admits that because she did not “do her homework” she  discovered that state access to these federal programs for home improvement were being denied because of a lack of homeowner insurance. The major problem was that these homeowners had their insurance canceled by the insurance companies themselves. Home owners unable to afford to fix their home, and were unable to insure their home, and therefore unable to get their home fixed by programs that would do just that. It was a loop of paperwork that eventually Riley was able to navigate and advocate for homeowners to get access to these programs by looking through the language of the documents in place. Ultimately Riley was able to use her technical and professional writing knowledge to expose the problem that existed within the paperwork, and through revision these programs were now made accessible to those that needed them. 

Riley’s experiences providing better shelter/better quality of life compelled her students to view TCP as a form of advocacy. She said, “As the field has routinely asked, how do teachers of technical communication foster a sense of responsibility for these mediations of knowledge, values and action in future practitioners? (289)” Senses of responsibility focus the values of the students toward a problem.  By getting students to engage in social media and focus their writing toward an issue they cared about, she empowered them to view the core connection of communication as a powerful tool that can help others. 

Riley wanted to relay the advocacy within writing to her classes. She  engaged students through their use of social media to examine how they can engage in advocacy via a number of activities (see below).  Riley’s classroom goals were: 

 

• Develop an understanding of the ways that texts advocate through various modes and rhetoric. 
• Develop an awareness of the advocacy enacted in social media spaces.
• Recognize how they participate in advocacy in their social media practices. 
• Recognize their role in advocacy in the creation and dissemination of texts (292).”

 

This goal-oriented plan is an excellent starting point for advocacy assignments that could be applied in the tech-comm classroom. 

 

Classroom Activities Ideas: 

1.  Advocacy for Self and Others with the Professional Identity: Using the social media platform LinkedIn, students design their page to reflect their personal attitudes toward a topic/problem (For example Food Insecurity) that they find important. Showing more than concern, they must express in this interview how they can contribute to ending this problem.  They are given an interview at a company that deals with that specific problem and pays a life-changing amount of money. 

Goals:

1.  Make a positive impression on the interviewer
2. Express a clear ethos
3. Offer potential solutions within skillset

1. Infographic As Advocacy: Examine the history and design of an infographic you view as advocating for something. For example, the Reduce, Reuse and Recycle infographic is advocating for a reduction of pollution and for people to exercise mindfulness when creating products or waste. Its history includes X,Y,Z etc…
2. Dangerous Justification Memos: Read The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust by Steven B. Katz and discuss the lack of advocacy that exists for the groups persecuted by Nazi Germany in concentration camps. 

 

Getting Students to Care:

Although Riley was working with a limited sample size and her goals were not entirely met, arising out of this ambitious task was the engagement of students via their social media toward an awareness of advocacy. Students were eager to engage and discussions based on the assignments proved that they had a general awareness of the importance of the TCP advocacy and awareness a writer must consider. However the students’ work was not entirely reflective of a critical analysis/critical thinking shown during these assignments. There is a tremendous impact for future impact for students in their career paths: 

 

Once engaged, students can then begin to consider how all texts advocate. This, in turn, helps them to recognize how technical communication can be created through a lens of advocacy and in what ways technical/professional writers can affect the presentation of materials that can potentially alleviate concerns related to social justice. The use of this knowledge in future employment situations has the potential to empower writers to present information in more socially just ways (299). 

 As teachers of TCP, making students aware of the power of their writing is the first step. Although social media the desired advocacy awareness was not explicitly found, the ideas for student exercises throughout the chapter (294-296) are valuable and easily applied lessons for the current TCP classroom. 

 

Hungry for Change: A Personal Story

Food for many other species relies on hunting and gathering, as well as the defense of that food from other predators. Do you know how incredible it is that we can simply go inside a building for food? Why even go inside? Drive up, yell a number that symbolizes a meal at a total stranger, hand them paper or plastic symbols representing and transferring value and drive away with a happy meal. These intricate networks of human-to-human communication are layers of symbols that we have established in order for some humans to feed others. 

However a flaw exists within the system, not everyone has access to food or resources for food. Food insecurity is everywhere, yet there’s more than enough food for the roughly 8 billion people on earth. How can this giant issue of needing food, not simply be solved by giving food to those that need it? I wish I had a better answer to explain this other than profit, but I don’t. Some people own food resources and want to make money off that resource. 

So what? What can be done by technical communicators? How can writers’ words help feed the hungry? Advocacy. The core of rhetoric is persuasion and as writers of rhetoric we can start to use our creative minds to provide basic human needs. It starts with the identification of a problem, and the call to action. Programs for food insecurity like Meals on Wheels exist out of advocacy, especially for those that cannot advocate for themselves. The website design, the language used and the usability of such a crucial site must be consciously constructed. As technical and professional communicators, we can start to help by looking at the systems in place and evaluating them for their effectiveness and determining whether these designs are human-centered.