Essential Music For Reading this Blog Post In the 1990s the Odyssey was rebranded for the silver screen and titled Terminator 2: Judgement. Odysseus was named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), and her long journey home is now aided by her tough guy teenaged son and a previously evil cybernetic organism from the future (played by Arnold Read More…
Category: Diversity in the Classroom
Choosing to Use Technology
After being both an instructor and student in a time of advanced technology, I’ve come to believe that technology is quite the double-edged sword. Compare technology to roommates or box cutters if you will: both can go from helpful to horrible in a matter of minutes. But what’s so helpful and what’s so horrible about Read More…
The Great Garby
In my undergraduate and more nerdy days, a piece of advice my professor gave me has been turning over in my mind ever since, “For the last time. No! You cannot pick your groups, and if you ask me again, I will fail you Garby.” These were hard times, especially since Garby wasn’t my name. Read More…
Talking Head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8 (Talking Heads- Once in a Lifetime) For my 3rd consecutive semester, my teaching fellowship has centered upon conveying the professional identity within the Technical Communication classroom. Unlike previous semesters, the classroom polices outlined in the syllabus are explained in severe detail from the first day of class. I project the syllabus on a big Read More…
To Put It Plainly: Plain Language Is Advocacy
~ In her chapter “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom,” Kira Dreher argues for a framework for teaching technical communication that asks students to use and evaluate plain language and PL strategies. Dreher points out the PL is so important to several industries that we have gone so far as to develop conventions Read More…
Are you speaking my Plain Language?
Plain language plays a significant role in technical communication as all writing and communication instructors know. However, explaining it to students can be challenging, especially in Business Communication. In Business Communication, student interests range from finance and accounting to marketing and small business entrepreneurship. With so many options, companies, and job ads, finding a Read More…
Social Media and TPC: Turning the “Mundane” to “Essential”
Students outside of technical and professional communication do not always fully understand the impacts of communication. They come across so many forms and templates in writing classrooms, that they see it as filling in blanks. This is especially true with business and technical communication classrooms. Writing instructors, on the other hand, know technical and professional Read More…
Who Educates the Educators?
Despite decades of research on Black Language, its survival since enslavement, and its linguistic imprint on the nation and globe, Black people and Black Language scholars keep having to remind y’all that it is a legit language. (Baker-Bell) Have you ever heard an author pop off so loud you hear it through the Read More…
Advocacy in Action
Ethics and Professional Communication As communicators and teachers, it is required of us to create pedagogical practices that are both functional and ethical. And how do we do this? How do we create material that is socio-culturally situated as well as practical? Sarah Warren-Riley describes methodologies that educators can utilize to execute classwork and discourse Read More…
Make Room For Discomfort
— That universal question: “Am I doing enough to challenge my students’ perspectives without making them too uncomfortable?” April Baker-Bell and Jessica Edwards remind us (in Linguistic Justice and “Inclusive Practices in the Technical Communication Classroom” from Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication: Scholarly and Pedagogical Perspectives, respectively) that educators are still actively ironing-out the Read More…