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…
Tag: Pedagogy
The Practical, the Theoretical
In “Regenerating Once Fallow Ground:Theorizing Process and Product in 21st-Century Technical Communication Ecologies,” Adrienne Lamberti and David M. Grant write, “We ultimately found ourselves needing to repeatedly return to this argument: pointedly theorizing both pedagogy and the purposes of technical communication does not have to squeeze out application in the classroom, but rather can enrich 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…
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…
The Accidental Endorsement
The Accidental Endorsement If you’re reading this, then you’re a digital citizen, too. Nice to meet you. Social media is ubiquitous. It’s arguably harder to avoid social media and online communities than it is to grow a following online. Honestly, it goes to show that even when our society occupies the same space– the same Read More…
Cathartic Realizations: Other TCP Teachers Struggle, Too!
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 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.
Plain Language and How it Relates to Technical Writing
Something we always teach our technical writing students early on in the semester is the art of plain language, and why it’s a valuable skill when dealing with a broad audience. Kira Dreher, author of “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom” does an incredible job at breaking down the benefits of plain language Read More…
Plain Language and Why Autocorrect is Racist
We English scholars are a bunch of snobs. There, I said it. Historically, English loves to gatekeep “correct” and “proper” English. Recent movements to decolonize the field have attempted to foster the ideology that no language usage is more correct than the other. And while anti-racist English standards are necessary, it’s also necessary to teach Read More…
Interstitial Design and Collaboration: Evolving our Pedagogy
By Cameron Sinclaire “Design, when considered as a core concept of making process-based decisions toward crafting a solution or deliverable, involves recursive critical thinking towards a goal,” Liz Lane (pg. 30) states, author of Interstitial Design Processes: How Design Thinking and Social Design Processes Bridge Theory and Practice in TPC pedagogy. So how might we, Read More…