A Brief History of the Real World in TC 101

By Thomas Barker | Senior Member

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This column focuses on a broad range of practical academic issues from teaching and training to professional concerns, research, and technologies of interest to teachers, students, and researchers. Please send comments and suggestions to ttbarker@ualberta.ca or the column blog at http://theacademicconversation.ning.com/.

A time-honored method of teaching technical communication requires that instructors base their lessons and documents on the working world of technical communicators or workplace communicators. Because of the link of technical writing and “real-world” workplace writing in general, the urge to make assignments applicable to students’ future careers has resulted in a history of real-world examples, assignments, exercises, and evaluations. This edition of The Academic Conversation focuses on what academics have said over the years about the relationship of their classrooms to the real world of work, and, specifically, what techniques and strategies they use to create assignments that mirror workplace practice. As we shall see, the growth of the very concept of real-world assignments parallels the opening of the pedagogy of technical communication to the now practically border-free, digitally saturated classroom.

The Upside of Real-World Assignments

First, what does the technical communication classroom gain by focusing on real-world assignments? Beyond the obvious answer to that question—experience outside the classroom—students gain the chance to structure their work around workplaces structures, namely, projects. Projects provide a kind of integrated learning experience, giving students skills in management, research, design, usability testing, and writing. What’s more, projects involve clients and client values, and real reader information needs. They expose students to the standards and practices of the professional workplace. Finally, they bring opportunities to network with professionals and possibly develop mentoring relationships.

The Downside of Real-World Assignments

On the downside, real-world assignments are messier than those in conventional teaching. They bring fewer lectures and greater student responsibility for learning. Put simply, the shift from teacher-centered to student-centered brought anxiety. “But I have to teach the active voice,” a bothered instructor once told me. Well, yes, but why do your students need to know it? Their readers use the passive voice all the time. And further, instructors had to wait, white-knuckled, for students to ask them how to organize a report. It was a troublesome time for academics, this “workshop” style of teaching. And, in addition, students worked more in teams and their final products showed great variability in genre, form, readers, format, and other characteristics. This brought challenges to grading and assessment. Under the old system instructors knew what to expect and what counted as quality. Now the old standards dissolved in the wash of relevancy and accountability.

Projects for “Real-World” Clients

The most common of community and workplace assignments are those that require “real-world” clients. Such assignments ask students to work in groups or find readers for their reports, instructions, and proposals. They wrote manuals and instructions for their work or the classroom. Looking to the university context, instructors set students on projects such as writing proposals for the college or university, or brochures for student groups and clubs. They composed reports of usability testing of personal or university websites. A favorite assignment of this type is the résumé: the quintessential “real-world” assignment. Résumés were both personal but impersonal in that they could follow a small handful of acceptable formats. Most students really cared about their résumés, because they cared about jobs. And more, résumés were designed, with a variety of fonts and formats to engage the human-resources persons who read them. The Internet contains no end of examples and good advice on résumés. Of all the real-world assignments in technical communication, the résumé reigns because it has all the hooks a teacher could want for engaging students in the first week of first-year technical communication.

Real-world assignments like these have built-in benefits for engaged learning. They decentralize the instructor and the content by shifting authority for learning to readers and users. Thus they legitimize the classroom in ways that theory, history, lectures, tests, and readings cannot. Deborah Hinderer, for example, explored how usability testing challenged students to find suitable test participants, a process that enriched their learning of the testing process.

But these kinds of assignments had more than an effect on student learning. The often represented an expanding of the classroom, a breaking down of walls that increased the legitimacy of technical communication courses. Instructors began forming partnerships with business and industry that brought new teaching resources into their grasp. Sharing classrooms across national boundaries opened their students up to unfamiliar cultures, but it also opened up instructors to opportunities for intercultural exchange of teaching techniques. This kind of “network building” helped instructors and programs by providing opportunities for advisory boards and expanded teacher research opportunities. In the meantime, the urge to evoke the context of communication got help from business communication classes where cases and simulations represented the backbone of managerial and communication instruction.

Cases as Real-World Assignments

Case studies grew in business, management, public relations, and marketing units in colleges and universities. In these environments, instructors routinely reshaped their workplace experience into cases that challenged students to build new businesses, explore new markets, and apply textbook principles of accounting, economics, and finance. Business law, also, provided an incentive for case-based learning and teaching.

Case studies in technical communication gained popularity in teaching during the 1990s, a time when technical communication made the shift from content-based teaching to workshops and a growing sense of the larger community surrounding the academy. Indeed, proponents of the case method, such as Jone Rymer, touted the method because it provided a “slice of business life” inside the classroom. Rymer’s book Cases for Technical and Professional Writing embodies the approach. Cases, as a teaching tool, require a number of features that make writing interesting: rich, suggestive narratives give students the chance to apply their imaginations to problems and solutions, role assignments provide a humanistic focus on tasks, and dates and specifics bring a sense of real life to learning.

More recently, cases and simulations as a teaching strategy have gained popularity in teaching ethics. Scandals such the Enron scandal and the Challenger disaster give communication teachers rich examples for interrogation and development of critical thinking. Centered in the academic area of business communication, case-based learning and teaching allows students to experience the ethical issues in communication. Business ethics, in particular, needs a focus on making ethical decisions, which cases provide due to their open-ended nature. Cases allow for a set-up that focuses on specific questions about legal, risk, and personal issues that often crop up in situations calling for ethical communication. They allow for discussion and they stimulate critical thinking in students. Also, since law is often “case-based” instructors find a ready supply of legal cases to use in the communication classroom. Along with real-world assignments, cases set the stage for instructors to embrace the next wave of real-world focus in technical communication: service-learning.

Service-Learning as Real-World Assignments

Service-learning as a teaching technique has come of age in technical communication. Sending students to do volunteer work in not-for-profit sector for community partners represents, in some ways, the epitome of the impulse toward engaged, real-world learning. But service-learning brings a rich history and intellectual context to the equation. Service-learning—defined by Wikipedia as, “a method of teaching that combines classroom instruction with meaningful community service. This form of learning emphasizes critical thinking and personal reflection while encouraging a heightened sense of community, civic engagement, and personal responsibility.” The pioneering work in this area by Melody Bowden and Blake Scott in Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication defined projects and processes for technical communication instructors but also reviewed the rich history of service-learning as a way to build awareness of the very humanistic issues that lie at the heart of our discipline but have been so much ignored by administrators over the years.

In my WRS 305 course this semester at the University of Alberta, students use the principles of technical communication on risk communication projects for non-profit organizations in Edmonton. Currently, for example, we’re working with a homeless shelter, a service center for at-risk youth, two seniors centers, and a service organization for the disabled. One project will focus on hazards surrounding a set of stairs in an older building that are out of code for new buildings, but still present a challenge for elderly citizens. Students on this project will explore the various fall, slip, and confined-space hazards associated with this stairwell, as well as interview clients to assess risk factors. They will use design principles for complex problem solving to develop communication messages and materials (posters) to help clients make safe risk decisions in using the facility.

In this class, students benefit from a network of community partners managed by the University’s Community Service Learning program. Technical communication and other instructors can find their own clients, but at the University of Alberta they can benefit from the CSL program’s networking, Web portal, and other services like police checks for students working with vulnerable populations. Most universities in North America have similar programs that work across departments and disciplines and can help in all phases of service-learning course development, from course design to evaluation. In this way, those wishing to take this step towards real-world assignments can get plenty of help.

Alive and Well

John Freeman, writing in the Wall Street Journal on 21 August 2009, argued that the new era of electric communication has robbed us of the contexts of our lives. We need to turn back to the real world and slow down in order to build meaningful and rewarding relationships. Others, such as Ann Kroeker, (http://annkroeker.com/‎) point out how technology can both enrich our lives and enhance it at the same time. Arguments about technology aside, this brief history has shown that the real world—the context of community as business, industry, and service organizations—is alive and well in technical communication 101. Forging partnerships with communities has brought, in the main, an era of increased accountability for teaching, enriched learning experiences for students, and enhanced community partnerships for both individual instructors and programs.