Crafting Inclusive Classrooms: Applying Invitational Rhetoric to Technical Communication Pedagogy

Core Principles of Invitational Technical Communication Pedagogy

Invitational rhetoric functions as a pedagogical framework through four interconnected principles: creating external conditions for equal participation, establishing safe and trusting communication across power differences, legitimizing subjective rhetorical strategies and embodied ways of knowing, and co-constructing knowledge through horizontal dialogue. Rather than merely describing what invitational rhetoric is theoretically, the following sections explain how each principle operates in technical communication classrooms and provide concrete visualization of what it looks like in practice. Throughout, I connect each principle to the Social Issues Project as instantiation.

Principle 1: Creating External Conditions for Equal Participation

Invitational rhetoric emphasizes the critical need to construct "external conditions that constitute an invitation for the audience to enter the rhetor's world and to see it as the rhetor does" (Foss & Griffin, 1995, p. 7). In classroom contexts, this means deliberately restructuring the material, social, and epistemological conditions of learning to facilitate genuine equal status participation rather than token inclusion. Traditionally, technical communication pedagogy has not created such participatory conditions for marginalized students. Rather, classroom norms have reflected "traditional west-centric values" positioning marginalized groups as rhetorical "others" expected to conform or be remediated (Agboka, 2013; Haas, 2012). However, as Pineau (2002) notes, positioning some students as inherently deficient is profoundly exclusive and self-defeating, which communicates that their knowledge, experiences, and ways of knowing are lesser, which undermines the possibility of genuine inclusion.

Creating equal participatory conditions entails specific, actionable structural changes. Teachers should relinquish the stance of sole expert, instead showing "willingness to yield... institutional place of authority" (Foss & Griffin, 1995, p. 8). Concretely, this might involve multiple practices: inviting students to co-design the course syllabus and learning objectives so curricula reflect their priorities and questions; allowing substantive student choice in assignment topics and formats rather than prescriptive requirements; incorporating multimodal learning opportunities welcoming diverse backgrounds, abilities, communication preferences, and modes of expression; and critically important, having students collaboratively determine participation guidelines, evaluation criteria, and even grading metrics (Rudick & Golsan, 2012). When students collectively establish what constitutes good work, and when they have voice in determining how their labor will be evaluated, dominant norms about excellence lose unquestioned centrality. This creates groundwork for marginalized perspectives to emerge, gain authority in classroom discussions, and shape collective knowledge-making.

The Social Issues Informative Guide Project exemplifies this principle in multiple ways. Most directly, it enacts the principle by dismantling the instructor’s role as the sole architect of the learning agenda: no topic is assigned from above, no community is predetermined, and no format is pre-specified. Instead, every structural decision, for example, what issue to investigate, whose voices to center, how to conduct outreach, what the deliverable should look like—is made collectively by students. This structural openness is not incidental but constitutive: it creates the material conditions for equal participation that invitational rhetoric demands.

Rather than assigning students a specific social issue to address, students collectively identify which issue matters most to them and which community they wish to serve—ensuring the project reflects their own investments rather than external mandates. During the project, students collectively decide which community voices to prioritize, how to conduct respectful outreach and listening, and what forms the final guide should take. Assessment includes student reflection on whether invitational principles were honored throughout—whether community members were treated as collaborators or research subjects, whether power was shared or concentrated. Importantly, this is not relativism; rather, it recognizes that those most affected by issues possess expertise and should direct problem-solving.

Principle 2: Establishing Safe, Trusting Communication Across Power Differences

Safety and care are vital for creating conditions where marginalized students can comfortably share standpoints that may contest dominant paradigms which have historically disadvantaged them. Drawing on Conquergood (1985), who documents how marginalized groups participating in academic contexts have experienced knowledge colonization—their experiences appropriated and repackaged as research subjects—we understand that communication across asymmetrical power lines cannot be neutral or presumed safe. Ethical engagement across difference requires acknowledging historical legacies of exclusion and one's own embeddedness within relations of dominance.

Invitational classrooms predicated on understanding across differences must establish explicit trust and care through intentional communication practices. Teachers should discuss power, privilege, and difference transparently as constitutive factors shaping classroom dynamics and policies (Ahmed, 2013). Rather than pretending neutrality or colorblindness, instructors acknowledge that they, too, are shaped by their positionality and that this positionality grants certain perspectives while limiting others. Invitational rhetoric also suggests having students collaboratively develop communication guidelines to govern respectful interactions (Foss et al., 2004). This dialogue itself becomes foundational practice: students gain trust when they see their voices matter in determining how the classroom functions and what counts as respectful engagement. Such explicit dialogue becomes particularly important when the classroom discusses sensitive social issues—homelessness, immigration, disability, racism—where students lived experiences may be directly implicated and potentially pathologized by dominant discourse.

In the Social Issues Project, establishing safety is crucial. Students from marginalized communities may be hesitant to speak about social issues affecting their communities if they fear judgment, othering, or having their experiences treated as data. Invitational approaches address this by creating explicit norms that center and protect vulnerable voices, that acknowledge personal stakes in social issues, and that refuse to reduce lived experience to academic abstraction. Reflection prompts might ask: Did we create conditions where community members felt safe sharing? Did we resist treating people's experiences as mere information to extract? Through this care-centered approach, technical communication education becomes accountable to justice.

Principle 3: Legitimizing Subjective Rhetorical Strategies and Embodied Ways of Knowing

In contrast to traditional technical communication's valorization of detached objectivity and universal principles, invitational rhetoric argues that revealing subjective positioning, emotions, and lived experience can build shared understanding and generate new insights (Foss & Foss, 1994). Miller (1979) critiques how technical communication has long privileged "objectivity rather than subjectivity, intellect rather than emotion, the technical rather than the personal" (p. 614)—values that systematically marginalize ways of knowing more common among women, people of color, working-class people, disabled individuals, and other historically excluded groups. Fricker (2007) demonstrates persuasively that personal narratives and testimonial knowledge are epistemically valid; they reveal dimensions of human experience, structural injustice, and situated knowledge that detached analysis cannot.

Invitational technical communication classrooms make deliberate space for students to draw from lived experience, personal narrative, creative expression, dialogue journals, performance, and other embodied methods that valorize emotive, experiential, and relational ways of knowing (Jones, 2016). This is not replacing rigor with feeling; rather, it is recognizing that embodied knowledge—the knowledge that comes from living through systemic inequities, from navigating institutions as a marginalized person, from carrying multiple identities—constitutes valid evidence worthy of consideration. Trauma-informed pedagogy research similarly shows that when students can bring whole selves to academic work, learning deepens and psychological safety increases. In the Social Issues Informative Guide Project, this principle is enacted when students solicit stories, testimonies, and lived experience narratives from community members. Rather than replacing these voices with external expert analysis, the guide centers community members' own articulations of their experiences, needs, and solutions. A guide on homelessness might center unhoused individuals' own accounts of barriers and resources rather than social worker perspectives; a guide on disability justice might foreground disabled people's own definitions of access rather than medical model assumptions.

Pineau (2002) argues that minoritized positionalities offer vital insights that dominant worldviews systematically lack, and that invitational pedagogies can facilitate "permanent disequilibrium" through deliberate juxtaposition of clashing standpoints that spark critical reflection. Through witnessing connections between subjective standpoints and broader social/structural dynamics, students' consciousness expands beyond reductive assumptions toward understanding systemic complexity. This furthers goals of promoting critical thinking and rhetorical dexterity in diverse contexts, which are the very competencies employers and communities need from technical communicators.

Principle 4: Co-Constructing Knowledge Through Horizontal Dialogue and Productive Dissonance

At its core, invitational rhetoric seeks collaborative knowledge production through horizontal dialogue rather than expert transmission. Traditional technical communication has prized top-down information transmission, with instructors delivering fixed content and students receiving it passively. This model obscures knowledge's situated, partial, contestable nature and considers the fact that all knowledge is shaped by the knower's position, perspective, and stake in outcomes. In contrast, invitational classrooms recognize students as equal agents co-constructing contextual understandings that reflect multiple perspectives.

Importantly, invitational pedagogy deliberately holds space for dissonance and unresolved tensions rather than seeking hasty consensus or closure. Foss and Griffin (1995) explain that a key assumption is that the effort should be not to persuade others but rather facilitate the play and interplay of divergent perspectives even when they conflict. Seeking consensus prematurely is problematic and potentially harmful because marginalized voices have been systematically excluded from shaping dominant notions of "common sense" and universal truth. An invitational approach understands that allowing marginalized perspectives to surface, clash with, and challenge privileged narratives is generative—it prompts deeper analysis of complexity and reveals taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in dominant thinking.

Rudick and Golsan (2012) describe this as a “pedagogy of uncomfortable conversations" where differences in interpretations are foregrounded deliberately to complicate thinking (p. 242). Rather than resolving tension toward comfortable agreement, students gain practice grappling with interfaces of complex social positionalities and power dynamics. Dissonance becomes pedagogically productive. Through ongoing reflective dialogue that holds—rather than resolves—contradiction, students gain critical fluency in engaging complexity. The Social Issues Project creates multiple moments for such dialogue: when student teams negotiate which social issue to address, disagreeing about priorities and stakes; when they engage with community members holding different perspectives on solutions; when they encounter contradictions in their own assumptions, when they collaboratively revise their guide based on feedback revealing unexamined biases. This meaning-making through inclusive dissonance aligns with goals of social justice education centering critical multiplicity over assimilation toward dominant paradigms.

Principle 5: Enacting Citational Justice and Knowledge Equity: Classroom Applications of Invitational Principles

A particularly generative application of invitational rhetoric emerges when we consider citational justice—the practice of consciously, equitably referencing and platforming scholars from marginalized groups. Calls for citational justice within academic disciplines emphasize the need to critically examine whose voices are referenced as authorities shaping knowledge production (Ahmed, 2013; Liu, 2021). Citational marginalization mirrors and sustains inequities encoded within communication practices, granting legitimacy only to dominant paradigms while erasing minoritized peoples' intellectual contributions. This matters because citations function as currency in academic communities—they accumulate power and influence for referenced scholars while rendering uncited scholars invisible.

Invitational technical communication classrooms grounded in power-consciousness and democratic knowledge construction provide ideal sites for students to develop critical awareness of citational politics. Rudick and Golsan (2012) describe invitational pedagogies as consciousness raising endeavors illuminating systemic inequities through collective analysis from plural standpoints. Instructors can facilitate open scholarly dialogue about citational marginalization, helping students understand how omission and erasure constitute harm. This critical lens then empowers students to notice and question effaced voices within their course materials, and to consciously seek out and incorporate counternarratives from scholars of the global majority, from scholars writing from decolonial and critical race theory frameworks, and from disabled scholars, indigenous scholars, and others marginalized in technical communication. Importantly, students learn that citation is not a bureaucratic requirement but an ethical practice—an act of recognition, accountability, and justice.

In the Social Issues Informative Guide Project, invitational citational practice appears when students consult scholarship and resources during research. Rather than relying on dominant sources, students can consciously seek scholarship by and about marginalized communities. When creating their guides, students can cite community organizations led by marginalized people, can feature testimonies from affected community members, and can credit traditional knowledge alongside academic expertise. This enacts citational justice in the service of social issues work.