This was my first time teaching professional writing, and admittedly I had very little prior knowledge about teaching technical/professional communication specifically. I understood this class was very genre driven and task oriented, and I opted to adhere to the shared syllabus that is recommended to first time teachers. This being my first upper division course, and for students not strictly in the major, I wanted to make sure each unit project provided a clear, tangible final product that would help students benchmark their own development as a writer. For the most part I had engineering and business majors, but the few education and communication majors I had in the two sections I taught were a welcome addition and brought a slightly different perspective.
My larger goal for this course was to give students space to develop and analyze their own writing process, one where they took charge of their project management. I used their larger unit projects as the sample for talking through the writing process with them, in a sort of weird reversal from first year writing where the writing process takes a more central focus in the second unit. The course was rather task oriented, and I found the feedback I offered students to be much more document driven. I also found the memo genre to be a useful way to guide reflection and feedback from myself to my students in addition to their feedback to one another. Essentially, while it was not my original intent, the memo became a useful tool for charting their progress through the course. I think their discussions and feedback to one another in this memo form helped them to focus their feedback on specific areas for revision as opposed to messages of positive affirmation (which they reserved for their in class discussions).
My second core goal for the course was to help students identify ways they could become clearer communicators, to which Anderson’s text provide a fairly good, scaffolded road map. The second unit focus on instructions, something I felt was a useful professional genre but ultimately felt more at home in technical communication. I left this assignment fairly open, allowing students to select any procedure they wanted to make instructions for. While I recommended they select something they felt they were a novice in (and could therefore better empathize with future, equally unfamiliar readers), they could certainly do just as well selecting something they thought they knew quite well (like doing the laundry). The important thing was to find the “right amount” of steps: specific enough to help their reader feel confident in completing the task well, but not so specific that they felt the steps were redundant or insultingly obvious. Students also performed usability tests to help refine the instructions themselves but also the website they were creating for them.
While many went towards “food,” the two best projects deviated in interesting ways. One of my students created a cocktail recipe instructions, and while I sensed he chose this topic to push classroom boundaries, his final project was among the most polished in the class. He demonstrated a mastery of breaking down a seemingly straightforward task into foundational steps in addition to providing anecdotes that helped readers to understand when they had completed a step correctly (that experiential knowledge that those familiar with a task might know intuitively). He also modified the way users navigated the site to ensure they followed his steps fully without skipping ahead. The second exemplary project took something people do everyday, changing the toilet paper. What made her project effective was the level of polish for her site but also her use of gif images that worked with her written instructions to clarify steps. With accessibility in mind (and a little tongue in cheek) she created a second set of instructions from a left-handed perspective.
My last core goal was to have students to reflect on the specific skills each project represented. This is the course I developed my class rubric assignment (where students co-construct the categories and parameters for grading their projects in addition to weight of each category). I was pleasantly surprised by how much this helped to clarify the unit projects, not just what was required of them but what skills they were honing as they worked on them. This assessment assignment become pivotal in the final feasibility report project as it helped them to devise a group plan for completing the project. The report had a lot more research than they were expecting, and while one group in particular had a project that offered very tangible solutions to a problem that affected most students on campus (crosswalks) it was how they used the rubric as a way to devise important feedback for improving future iterations of the course that truly impressed me. Though I had stressed time would be of the essence, many students explained that more time could have been spent on this project than in others (i.e. they wished they had learned to manage their time better). In knowing what they needed to get out of each unit, they articulated how much time they actually needed to build those skills. They felt that the final unit project did indeed build on the task management, scaffolding, testing and reporting, and managing group dynamics but that availability of their stakeholder hindered any proactive progress as key information needed to be obtained from them.
I have decided that in future iterations of this course I will maintain the application letter and on-boarding portfolio as well as the instructions portfolio in their entirety (the first two units). While originally I thought giving all students the same stakeholder (one I could arrange to visit the class ahead of time), I think their ability to identify a problem to address was an important takeaway that I want to maintain. Instead of a large feasibility report project that they would complete in 8 to 10 weeks (something that would require me to shorten the time table for the previous two units), I would instead try two smaller projects instead.
The first project is an adaption of an assignment a fellow WRT 307 instructor designed: the unsolicited recommendation letter. This assignment asks students to identify a problem, research solutions, and then create a series of recommendations for addressing the problem which they then communicate in a letter to a stakeholder. This assignments removes the issues of scale that come with the feasibility report, but maintains the problem selection, research, and choice development components of this larger project.
The second project is a workplace genre portfolio that tasks students with collecting different examples of the writing genres they will use in their actual future workplaces and then conducting in depth genre analyses of these materials. Not only does this allow students to work on something directly related to their future occupations, this assignment also helps students to investigate how these genres “work” and what they “do” in the workplace. I believe that in acquiring important genre knowledge about specific, relevant workplace materials, students are better equipped to begin using them effectively.
I learned a lot from these upperclassmen, many of which came from other disciplines. While I think they had plenty of room to discuss readings with each other, I think modifying the larger unit project sequence could leave them more space to “digest” the larger implications of their projects, not to mention diminishing the “crunch-time” on the final project.
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