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Contents
Introduction
Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and Rhetoric and Composition (RC) scholarship often claim instructors must possess—and teach—discourse-specific knowledge so students may learn how to write for their disciplinary genres and contexts. Lora Anderson writes in her introduction to Rewriting Work that acknowledging the “place[s]” where writing happens is an essential prerequisite to engaging with TPC scholarship and pedagogy given that place and context are integral to “identities and ideas about expertise” (11). Similarly, Lisa Melonçon argues TPC scholarship must intentionally “consider the material dimensions of context” by focusing on how, why, and where writing happens in workplace settings (47). These studies stress the importance of crafting a curriculum that teaches the nuances of genre, audience, and rhetorical situation so students may expand their understanding of the myriad reasons for how and why people write across contexts. This socialization often requires interaction with that community and their genres, a sentiment that is reaffirmed by RC scholars, such as Anne Beaufort. Although Beaufort calls for general writing instruction to focus on discourse theory to prepare students to write for their various discourse communities, Beaufort questions: “[C]an a teacher of writing teach one to write for a discourse community the teacher is not a part of?” (58). While this is a useful question for all instructors to think through, it is a particularly important question for graduate students that serve as professional writing instructors. Most Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) do not have TPC-specific training or experience at the onset of their teaching careers; instead, GSIs are typically only trained in composition, resulting in mixed success achieving TPC course objectives (Doan). This lack of training catches GSIs in what Mary Louise Pratt identifies as a “contact zone,” a space where differing expectations for writing between instructors, students, and administration “meet, grapple and crash with each other” (34). In our experience as GSIs in the TPC contact zone, graduate students “grapple” and “crash” with the expectations that come with performing as “expert” educators, providing expected assessment, and navigating a less-than-familiar administration.
Our article adds to the above existing conversations by acknowledging that awareness of discourse-specific features is integral to teaching writing courses, while also acknowledging, as Sara Doan notes, that often “instructors do not have the requisite content knowledge or the time to plan their pedagogies around these evolving content areas and best practices” (20). Echoing Beaufort’s question: How might a teacher design a course, specifically a TPC course, around social situations and context if the instructor is unfamiliar with the vast rhetorical situations students are writing for in the workplace? Additionally, how might a teacher design a course wherein enrolled students are writing for vastly different discourse communities?
What follows, then, is an overview of our experiences teaching TPC courses as GSIs at our urban, Midwestern, Research 1 institution. The two courses we describe—Technical and Scientific Writing and Business Writing—are prerequisite courses, required for students across tracks before enrolling in their capstone or senior seminar course, and they are often taught in an asynchronous, online modality. Students can also opt to take these as electives, and they are therefore treated as general “catch-all” courses for how to write professionally. As our experiences detail, we often teach students in our TPC classrooms who have experience writing for “real world” contexts through their co-ops or internships, and our students’ writing experiences differ dramatically depending upon their discourse community’s writing practices.
Going into teaching TPC, we each expected that we were prepared to teach the genres of technical writing and professional writing given our teaching training in First-Year Composition (FYC), which provided us with knowledge about genre and discourse theory. However, we found our students often had institutional writing experience for professional discourse communities that we, as their instructors, were unfamiliar with. As GSIs, our TPC pedagogy was initially framed through our FYC training, and so, when we entered the contact zone of the TPC classroom, there was a clash between our graduate teacher training and the expectations of the classroom, namely the expectation that we would know how to write for and assess writing for every single discourse community a student participates in. Our experiences echo Sara Doan’s findings in her 2022 study of TPC instructors where she noted that “less experienced instructors typically relied on terminology from composition or classical rhetoric,” resulting in “problems that arise when rhetorical concepts are not used effectively for teaching TPC” (21). In our experience of the TPC contact zone, GSIs are expected to teach TPC genres using their existing knowledge of composition despite the fact that students’ social situations and discourse-specific expectations for writing do not look the same and that instructors often have little to no context for the various professional writing contexts and genres our students write for and within. Following Jamey Gallagher and Kris Messer, this article questions how we teach discourse-specific TPC writing instruction to students “who are already in the real damn world” (147). Teaching GSIs to shift from a FYC focus on “rhetoric as argument” to the problem-solving ethos necessary for TPC courses would help them better equip their students to enter the workforce as adept writers.
To answer the question of how to shift this focus, we use an autoethnographic narrative method to relay our personal experiences of different challenges entering the TPC contact zone. Across our narratives, we consider how GSIs can be supported in developing a pedagogy that is not driven by “what we think is expected of people in the work world” (147), but rather is built around the contextualized rhetorical skills that students’ careers ask of them. Such an approach limits our ability to make claims about TPC outside of our local context. To account for this, we place our experiences as GSIs teaching TPC into conversation with existing TPC and FYC pedagogies, ultimately identifying these challenges as having structural solutions that can help new instructors bridge the gap between the rhetorical contexts of these two subfields. Though approaching the TPC curriculum with previous coursework on genre theory, Anna and Katie both detail that our FYC training does not always adequately prepare instructors to teach professional genres. Further, while we assumed we might be able to transfer our knowledge of teaching FYC into TPC, Brooke details the difficulty in assessing and engaging with student work when our students are a different audience than the students we teach in FYC. Finally, while we lack specialized training in teaching TPC courses, Alex describes the challenges in making programmatic changes to support writing program administrators (WPA) to bridge the gap between programmatic goals and individual instructors’ realities. We conclude our article by describing our solutions towards preparing instructors, particularly GSIs, to teach these courses.