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Practical Strategies
Addressing these thorny problems for new teachers of TPC is not an easy task. Even for more established TPC instructors, Doan argues that there exists a disconnect between genre-focused instruction and pedagogy, as genre theory has “not always translated into actionable pedagogical methods that enable students to learn how to solve problems using workplace documents” (Doan 24). The most obvious solutions, which we have derived from already-existing graduate student training on teaching FYC—new teacher orientations, regular professional development, mentorship models, and such—are time-, labor-, and resource-intensive, particularly for programs that would be building such structures essentially from scratch. Even better would be the involvement of a broader range of stakeholders—discipline- and industry-specific experts as well as TPC researchers and faculty—both in the development of the curriculum and in the development of the instructors most likely to be delivering it. Such an approach productively draws from WAC/WID models that bring together faculty from across institutions to support students’ disciplinary writing practices, but again, finding the resources to develop and sustain such programs is a challenge at many institutions. What is especially difficult for GSIs is that while they might have an awareness of these programmatic or institutional solutions, they are often poorly positioned to instigate these kinds of changes, both due to their temporary positions within programs and their relative lack of power or connections within the broader institution. In TPC programs that rely heavily on graduate student labor to teach courses, administrators should be mindful of this and actively solicit these instructors’ feedback and ideas as they plan for programmatic and curricular changes.
Given these systemic issues, it can be overwhelming for GSIs with limited TPC experience to determine best practices for their courses. That said, we find that there are practical strategies that can be used to bridge the gap between a lack of genre-specific knowledge and what FYC teachers are more familiar with. For instance, discourse communities, which are typically taught in FYC courses, can be a powerful way to help students engage with their own writing and practice metacognition and audience analysis. Teaching students to investigate their professional discourse communities can also empower them to better engage with unfamiliar genres in familiar and unfamiliar settings. This strategy encourages students to consider themselves as experts in their own field and allows the GSI to become a coach in the writing process.
In lieu of practical expertise with TPC contexts, GSIs may benefit from turning to reflections as a component of assessment, particularly for major assignments. While instructors will always need to grade student work based upon their context-specific institutional and departmental standards, we suggest utilizing a flexible grading ethos in TPC classrooms. This ethos necessitates a grading heuristic that grades student work not on what the instructor views as a universal professional “style and correctness,” but rather, assesses work upon students’ metacognitive reflections about how and why their submitted assignment reflects their community’s discourse practices (Elliot 47). In our own TPC classrooms, we typically ask students to submit a memo or cover letter alongside their genre-specific assignment. In these reflective assignments, students consider the rhetorical choices they made and why they made those choices in the submitted assignment, identifying how their rhetorical choices successfully capture their discourse community’s writing practices. Such a reflection is standard in FYC to facilitate transfer (Robertson, Yancey, & Taczak) and to give students working on non-written texts the ability to share their understanding of the social and rhetorical contexts for their work (Shipka). When applying this assignment to the TPC classroom, students are encouraged to become more aware of what it means to write in their professional workplace, while also giving instructors a place to begin assessing their work based upon the discourse traits described.
Our assessment practice is ultimately guided, again, by the notion that the TPC classroom is a contact zone. We believe our assessment practices should not apply a universal maxim or suggest, even inadvertently, that students are writing in an insufficient way when we may not possess sufficient knowledge of their discourse communities’ writing expectations. Ultimately, future research must better attune to assessment methods in TPC. To date, Margaret N. Hundleby and Jo Allen’s 2010 Assessment in Technical Communication is the only edited collection about TPC assessment, suggesting the TPC field has long “suffered from irregular attention, uncertainty about authentic strategies, and muddled identification of aims” when setting expectations for assessing TPC student work (Elliot 45). No matter the assessment styles used, the most valuable focus for GSIs would be to help students analyze their own discourse communities and practice audience analysis. This allows GSIs to do what they do best: guiding students toward a metacognitive understanding of their needed genres and allowing students to take control of their own learning.