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Katie’s Narrative
Halfway through my doctoral program, I was excited to teach my first technical writing course. When designing and discussing the course with the program directors, I felt confident in my ability to teach the material. After all, I had almost completed my coursework for the Professional Writing Certificate, my electrical engineer father and I often discussed the importance of writing for engineers, and I worked with both undergraduates and graduate students as a writing center tutor for four years. Yet all of my abstract understandings of technical writing did not teach me what technical genres looked like practically; nor did they prepare me for the myriad of contexts that my students brought into the technical writing classroom.
Genre theory examines genres as rhetorically and socially situated. Carolyn Miller suggests that genre should be viewed rhetorically, left “open rather than closed and organized around situated actions” (155). Kerry Dirk and Brad Jacobson et al. suggest that students view genres as informed by rhetorical moves and situations. By considering academic genres in these ways, I am able to navigate most genre conventions well—save for perhaps small quirks in style guide preferences. When I do encounter unfamiliar genres (namely in tutoring settings), I ask students to identify the rhetorical moves/situation and, for questions outside of my scope, direct them to their professors, “the experts” in their genres. These strategies work so long as I am familiar with the social contexts and/or I am not positioned as an expert. Yet these strategies did not transfer into teaching technical writing as I was surprised to find that I had little to no context for the genres I was assessing and was now meant to be “the expert.”
I had hoped that my “coach” mentality would help make up for my lack of expertise. After all, John Bean and Naming What We Know had taught me that being an expert in material was not needed to teach writing; my novice status could be an asset in FYC. However, I struggled to gain a sense of where and how my online asynchronous students wrote, which ordinarily would be my way of supporting my students as experts in their contexts. This was made more difficult by the fact that I had been given assignment sheets with no clear guidance on how to ultimately assess the resulting work. I understood that there were specific expectations for these genres, as I’d been generally told the Engineering department had such expectations. However, I had not accounted for the variety of engineering contexts—mechanical to chemical to electrical and more—that my students would be coming from. Stuck between knowing that there were specific expectations my students needed to follow and not knowing what those expectations might be, I had difficulty giving my students meaningful feedback. How could I coach my students on how to navigate genre contexts when I could not even begin to understand how others were assessing them in a concrete way?
My issue here was, mostly, an internal one. While I’d taught FYC for three years before taking on a professional writing course, I could not begin to know what I didn’t know about the genres I was asked to teach. This was not helped by the fact that TPC courses are, for job market purposes, framed as easy CV lines. However, the assumption that RC students easily transfer their skills due to their knowledge of genre theory neglects to consider a material reality: GSIs may not know the practical contexts of the genres TPC asks them to teach, as further detailed by Anna below.