Stories We Hear, Stories We Tell, and Stories We Live: Teaching Narrative in the Technical Communication Classroom

Introduction

In my first semester of college, I took an English class that used Joseph Campbell’s model of “the hero’s journey” as a framework for all the writing we did in the course. We created short stories, analyzed articles and films, and researched the lives of historical figures. Campbell’s idea of the monomyth—that all stories follow a familiar pattern—was brand new to me back then, but applying it as a lens to look at both pop-culture and scholarly work taught me that narrative serves a valid function in academic settings. Because humans are narrative beings, narrative methods increase our potential to form new knowledge and make meaning from the things we perceive and experience. In fact, stories are “the most common, universal way” to make sense of our lives (Marsen, 2014, p. 305). Ever since that first English class opened my eyes to the potential narrative holds for the classroom, I’ve been hooked on stories.

Perhaps since my introduction to narrative’s rhetorical uses occurred early in my academic career, I have had little trouble seeing the value of story. Yet the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) and narrative have a complicated history. In 1988, Barton and Barton’s (1988) foundational article drew attention to the persuasive potential of narration by detailing the historical devaluation of narrative in TPC and urging the field to invest more interest in exploring the many benefits of story as a communication tool. Over a decade later in 1999, Perkins and Blyler took up this call and published both a book-length collection titled Narrative and Professional Communication and a special issue on narrative in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication (Small, 2017). Though Perkins and Blyler (1999) predicted that by 2009 narrative would be prevalent in the field, later scholars—such as Moore (2013) and Small (2017)—have noted the lack of meaningful progress made after this initial flurry of scholarly activity. 

Yet there have been several more recent additions to the conversation that challenge earlier assumptions of TPC as a field of logic and objectivity that is incompatible with story. One needs only to look at examples such as Cushman’s (2015) illustration of storytelling in technical service work, Jones’ (2016) and Bacha’s (2018) call to reimagine narrative in design, or Van Ittersum’s (2014) and Ledbetter’s (2018) work on the use of story in tutorials to see how narrative adds richness to technical communication.

Indeed, narrative has proven useful across the discipline. In business communications, narratives can build trust with customers, increase engagement, market products and services, build corporate culture, promote unity within the company, and drive organizational change (Hirst, 2017; Lemanski, 2014; Moore, 2013; Perkins & Blyler, 1999; Zachry, 1999). In science writing, a narrative approach can make complex knowledge accessible to a general audience and show how science functions in the real world through the demonstration of scientific theory in action (Mott et al., 1999; Sheehan & Rode, 1999). In history research, narrative can help us to construct and organize knowledge of the past and present it in more memorable ways (Mott et al., 1999). Yet despite its many areas of practical application, narrative has remained somewhat divisive in academia—still seen as “too personal, too incomplete, [and] too anecdotal” (Small, 2017, p. 235). While the Social Justice Turn in TPC detailed by Walton et al. (2019) has helped bring acceptance to experience as a way of knowing,¹ I believe the field will not fully embrace narratives until we as scholars, practitioners, and instructors learn to better articulate the complexities of narrative practices and begin to teach narrative in ways that effectively prepare students to communicate in their future careers. 

This article is my attempt to blend story and pedagogy in a way that shows how narrative can be interwoven into TPC theory and practice. I have already set the scene by sharing the storied history of narrative in technical communication, along with my own story of how I was first introduced to narrative’s potential in academia. In what follows, I discuss the difficulty of defining narrative and the trouble with reducing narrative to a singular pedagogical method. I then illustrate a three-part approach to the teaching of narrative that uses stories in the classroom, teaches students how to apply stories in the workplace, and trains students to view themselves as part of a larger story. I view this three-part framework as a pedagogical tool that helps align instructors of TPC with recent advocacy efforts to embrace more diverse narratives in the field.² Lastly, I argue that embracing narratives in TPC and approaching narrative more holistically in the classroom prepares students to be more culturally aware communicators who are capable of promoting social change.

---

^[1] In the adjacent field of composition studies, Journet (2012) details a similar progression of narrative. She notes how early compositionists thought narrative to lack rigor before the “social turn” in the 1980s began to place value on personal history and ethnography. This, Journet claims, was followed by the “narrative turn” of the 1990s. Here, narrative’s power to organize and make sense of the world was recognized and narrative practices began to gain more acceptance in the field. Yet, Journet observes how even in composition studies there is still a tendency to define narrative “in contradiction to the more ‘objective’ or ‘rational’ methods” (p. 15).

^[2] I refer here to Natasha Jones, Kristen Moore, Rebecca Walton, and other recent scholars I have cited throughout this article, yet I also acknowledge my citations do not tell the complete story and there are many others in the field doing important work in promoting narrative.