Program Review and User-Centered Service Courses: What Needs to Change

Service courses represent our largest academic client base, but one of our least-represented areas of research. During this talk, I will discuss why current program review methods fail to account for rapid changes in writing genres and technologies as well as why we should be concerned.

Continuing a conversation begun by the November 2007 issue of Technical Communication, this paper seeks to identify a gap in current practice of program review in TC. Our profession, practiced in the classroom and the cubicle, serves students and employers in diverse disciplines by way of the service course. Service courses make up the majority of credit hours generated by TC instructors; however, our program review models do not take these diverse populations into account. The CPTSC (and WPA) models for program review call for periodic external review with an eye toward improving our courses, faculty research, and institutional goals. An unfortunate oversight is not including professionals who convey technical information but who are not, by title or training, technical communicators. My own classes for the last twelve months are made up of junior and senior undergraduates, none of whom are (currently) headed for jobs in our discipline, but who are required to take the service course in TC due to the everyday demands of their future jobs. What is missing is input from the employers of service course students, the non-academics who nonetheless convey technical information on a daily basis. Without their input, our service courses will not do what we say they do, i.e., train professionals in various disciplines to write in the workplace, and may not even keep pace with changing writing genres and writing technologies. By educating students in irrelevant and out-moded genres and technologies, we are further encouraging the perception that writing classes are not worthwhile to students outside the writing majors, and, incidentally, furthering the argument for excluding technical communicators in academics and the workplace.

I intend to provide a brief overview of program review as it is often applied to technical communication programs, and compare those methods to editorials and other texts (such as Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud) proposing ideas for the future of technical communication; texts which often indicate a need for increased involvement from non-academic stakeholders. I will also present the current state of my own research into technical communication program review, which includes data gathered from engineering programs at my institution (Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas) as well as business and education colleges, as well as ideas for future improvements in program review.