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: Teaching Strategy
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…
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…
Did Anyone else Understand What she Just Said? Plain Language in the Classroom
Students will often glare at me in confusion as I stand before them and attempt to communicate essential rhetorical concepts, and in those moments I am transplanted. I am no longer the teacher of a very tired and very perplexed class, I am the student that sat in ENL 101 and struggled to understand what Read More…
Social Justice Advocacy in the Classroom
In her chapter for the book Citizenship & Advocacy in Technical Communication, Sarah Warren-Riley argues for the use of social media in the classroom as a way to teach students how to critique the messaging they see and how to advocate for themselves and others. While Warren-Riley is focused on the technical/professional communication classroom, her 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…
Ethics for Dummies
Alternatively: Teaching Ethics in a Void I’ve been teaching Bizcom for two semesters now and one thing is clear; the business field is not a very ethical one. Well, duh, you might say, there’s a reason the evil corporate overlord archetype exists. And yes, I would answer, I enjoy an “underdog vs. big business” Read More…
The Pedagogy of Plain Language
Plain language functions in two ways in the communications classroom: first, it is incumbent upon the instructor to use plain language while instructing students; second, that same instructor must teach their students the use of plain language.