Quodlibet

I’ve always been interested in what we teach and why. My father, an attorney, was always happy to explain the uses of reading Greco-Roman philosophy and political thought. He was never too proud to explain the uses of historical study or of reading the more prominent works of the Western canon. My mother, a public school teacher who specialized in elementary grade music, never hesitated to point out the importance of studying music, including in her explanation the development of rhythm, fine motor skills, and listening. My mother, in her turn, grew up listening to her parents talk about education. Her mother was a 40-year veteran of Texas public schools, spending the majority of her years teaching seventh grade English. Her father taught physical education and coached basketball for at least as many years, and even in his later years would lead the exercises for all of his undergraduate classes, doing the jumping jacks and push-ups along with the students for every section of every class. For my grandparents, talking about education around the dinner table was literally both the bread and the butter of their lives.

My own investigation into the why’s and wherefore’s of education started with writing instruments. I became engaged in the history of the pencil and its adoption, and exclusion, from writing instruction in classroom environments. Interested as I am in older writing technologies, I nonetheless used them as a way into a discussion of digital writing technologies, the pencils of today. I wanted to know what a student was thinking when choosing a particular writing tool, be it hardware or software. But as with Demosthenes, so with today: more often than not, we use what is available to us whether through social pressure, market forces, or some indeterminate personal choice, I found I could not climb into another’s thoughts and distinguish between personal motives and external exigencies. Parchment or papyrus, pencil or PC, those are things we cannot yet know.

So my inquiry changed, both broadening and narrowing at the same time. I became intrigued with the service course, that bugbear of the academic curriculum characterized by academic departments which offer to teach a course in their subject area to students not majoring in that area. History, math, writing, the sciences: most academic departments offer a version of the service course due to a number of reasons. We offer the service course because other students need to know the basics of our profession; we offer the service course as a favor to other departments, and they offer us similar favors in return; we offer the service course because most public universities are required by law to offer students a broad education, and thus our governments have a say in what gets taught and to whom.

Service courses in subjects such as chemistry, history, and literature attempt to offer students outside those fields a glimpse into the practice and base knowledge necessary to understand them. For those subjects, we might well assume that the periodic table, the Battle of Hastings, and Beowulf will be with us for many more years. For history and literature in particular, the classroom experience is the definitive experience: those fields are not practiced widely outside the classroom. For service courses in math, we can safely assume that the principles underlying calculus and probability calculations will not change, nor will the methods for executing those principles.

For technical communication, our service courses represent a particularly difficult position. Technical communication, like engineering and marketing, exists outside the classroom in thriving variety. Our tools, including hardware and software as well as the genres of documents we use, change in both predictable and sporadic fashion. Looking back, we could have predicted that the advent of personal computing would have a democratic effect on who produces business documents (clerical workers not trained in technical communication or document suddenly found themselves with the tools necessary to perform those tasks), or that an Internet connection would provide new ways of sending and receiving documents. Not all changes are predictable, though, and in the early days of the Internet I suspect that no one saw Twitter coming, nor Facebook, and YouTube would have been a pipe dream even for the most forward-thinking digital advocates. And so our service courses in technical communication are in a bind, trying to keep up with changes we can see and those we cannot.

In technical communication service courses, we are further bound by the lack of trained instructors. The history of technical communication instruction, bound so tightly to university needs and the literary expectations of a traditional English program, add up to an undertrained, underfunded, and often uninterested workforce of lecturers and adjuncts who teach technical writing service courses in order to make ends meet while finishing their degrees in literature and cultural studies. Add to this the above difficulties in keeping current in technical communication practices, and what we have is a recipe for mediocrity: students trained to mechanically fill out genre-specific documents based solely on textbook and institutional memory. For technical communication service courses, memory is not enough.

For the service course in technical communication, there is at least one more significant binding factor: historically, professional technical communicators and technical communication academics do not communicate well with each other. Speaking generally, and only generally, professionals in technical communication think of academics as monks in their towers, separated from the lively practice by culture, time, and distance. Academics in technical communication are, in this view, full of lofty ideas and scholarly ideals that rarely find purchase in the world outside the ivory tower. Professionals, views by the academics, do not heed the valuable studies and hard-won data of our continued investigations into more effective forms of communication. The two branches of this divided family speak only rarely, and with some unease.

However, the creation of usable knowledge is at the heart of both professional technical communication practice and the academic study and teaching of technical communication. As academics, we study document design and rhetoric specifically to help an audience perform an action or make a decision. With untrained instructors, that goal cannot be met. With underfunded programs, that goal cannot be met. Without a stable dialog between practitioners both inside and outside the academy, that goal cannot be met.