Three readings this week ask us to reconsider our approach to technical communication and how we teach it to students. Bosley’s “Cross-Cultural Collaboration” highlights the differences among what she terms “Euro-North American culture” and other cultures, include those of Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East, and how these differences affect communication practices. While Bosley acknowledges that her article focuses on generalizations, she also maintains that differences in communication practices do exist, and these behaviors can have a profound impact on group work and collaboration (468).

Collaboration has been on my mind recently; I assigned a chapter entitled “Creating Communications with a Team” for Tuesday’s ENGL 305 class. After reading Bosley’s “Cross-Cultural Collaboration,” I took another look at the chapter I assigned. Anderson devotes a segment to cross-cultural communication, citing Bosley’s article in the process. However, most of the chapter is devoted to “Euro-North American” communication practices, including suggestions on how to be an active listener by making eye contact (Anderson 464) and how to debate effectively (463).

Anderson’s approach makes sense. While Bosley asks to alter our pedagogical strategies in order to make them more inclusive, the fact remains that Euro-North American communication practices (really, white male practices) continue to dominate business settings. By acknowledging the privileged place of Euro-North American culture in our classrooms and in society at large, I am not proposing that we accept and participate in that culture without question. Indeed, the first step in creating change is to take a good, hard look at ourselves and the situation we’re in.

Both Bosley’s article and Brausseur’s “Contesting the Objectivist Paradigm” assert that there are multiple approaches to teaching (technical) communication. Brausseur, in particular, seeks to introduce “a new paradigm for ‘objective’ discourse’” in the classroom through feminist critique (477).  Wilson outlines another approach in “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism” as he looks to postmodern theory to expand our pedagogical practices.

I find Wilson’s approach particularly interesting. He begins, at the outset, by acknowledging that a “postmodern technical communication pedagogy may seem a multifaceted oxymoron: designing a structure to teach a structureless approach to the structured description of structured systems” (72). By designing new pedagogical practices, Wilson hopes to educate “partners in the technology enterprise and not merely punctuators of sentences” (73). I support this goal wholeheartedly, and for the most part, I also find value in his pedagogical approach.

As Eric pointed out in his post, it is difficult to imagine technical communication without structure. Technical communication is so entrenched within the modernist paradigm that I can’t imagine a radical re-imagining of how we do things that wouldn’t severely undermine our practices. Furthermore, I don’t view the traditional, modernist, objectivist approach as an entirely bad thing. For me, writing that we call “clear” and “precise” – thoroughly modernist, Euro-American values – is a good thing. However, it doesn’t hurt to rethink our approach to our work, and Wilson gives us a few good places to start.

Wilson draws upon his own experience and Reich’s concept of the symbolic-analytic work to argue for an expanded approach to technical communication pedagogy. Despite his characterization of postmodern pedagogy as “structureless,” I see his suggestions as a way to propose a new paradigm – a new structure that takes difference, and different kinds of interactions among values and belief systems, into account. For example, the mapping exercise he proposes in his “systems thinking” section is a way to impose structure on a vast system. The difference between this activity and more “modernist” approaches to thinking about systems is the way it asks students to consider a wider variety of relationships among disparate elements.

Of all his suggestions, I find Wilson’s mapping activity to be the most immediately useful for my students. I plan to include an in-class mapping activity this week as students begin researching information for their feasibility reports. Mapping isn’t a new strategy to me, but it also isn’t one I’ve stressed in any of my courses. However, Wilson’s argument is a convincing one: “By perceiving complexity in terms of dynamic systems of interrelated elements, students can slip the confines of traditional hierarchies and linear thinking/writing/political subjectivity” (92). Encouraging students to expand their approach to thinking about and drafting documents is a good first step in encouraging them to see themselves as flexible, symbolic analytic workers.

Anderson, Paul V. Technical Communication: A Reader-Centered Approach. 7^th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. Print.

Bosley, Deborah S. “Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” Central Works in Technical Communication. Ed. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 466-474. Print.

Brausseur, Lee E. “Contesting the Objectivist Paradigm: Gender Issues in Technical and Professional Communication Curriculum.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Ed. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 475-489. Print.

Wilson, Greg. “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 15.1 (2001): 72-99. PDF.