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For this topic, I chose to read "Hidden Arguments: Rhetoric and Persuasion in Diverse Forms of Technical Communication" by McCaughey and Fitzpatrick. As an RCTE major, I really enjoyed how this one highlights the importance of thinking rhetorically in the writing classroom. I sometimes hear from people in other disciplines that they struggle to understand how thetoric helps students write better, or how rhetoric helps the student in general. I can see it from their perspective too though, and I think it's important for rhetoricians to try--why can't students just find themselves in their writing without rhetoric? A rhetorical practice in writing education can probably seem restraining and excessive, especially when we look at the field's origins.

However, even in complex reflective writing and research papers, students are learning to think rhetorically--it's just whether the instructor finds it useful to help make students self-aware of the fact. I personally find that, at worst, rhetoric as a framework for critically thinking is useful to students, and at best, allows students to more strongly identify themselves, their disciplines, and their goals (in and outside of the classroom) more succinctly. Isn't that the goal of a general education course?

This article is poignant in highlighting how technical and professional writers (and writing courses) are somewhat notorious for downplaying the rhetorical persuasiveness being done in their work, condensing it into "simple" and "neutral" tasks that just need to get done. However, the interviews selected seem to highlight the complexity of the tasks, the audience, and the writer's rhetorical purpose in reaching said audience. Reading the interviews verbatim made me think of the science and engineering majors I've had in my 101/102 courses who have written phenomenal rhetorical analysis in really creative ways, and yet I've also heard them downplay themselves: "I'm not a writer, I'm a science person." In fact, that was something I heard a student say today when trying to present their ideas about the effects of DDT on birds (and on humans, as they saw it rhetorically important to start there in order to convince). In my perspective, science impacts the world and it impacts us, and I have seen these students write some of the most compelling persuasive arguments yet. We are all writers with diverse backgrounds and disciplines. I think that's where every writing class should start.

In terms of business writing, documents are not standalone, still monuments but are active processes that pertain to multiple rhetorical points; professional writers often need to consider their audience on international levels, and frequently check their biases as well as how they understand a concept and relay that to others. Professional and business writing is highly rhetorical, especially things like grants. For this reason, it's funny how I've witnessed business and finance majors connect with 101/102, and I think they tend to find more use out of the projects than they initially expected.

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In reading Russel's article, I was reminded of what makes writing so powerful, and what students can reap from general education courses. A quote that stood out to me was, "writing is not an easily generalizable set of elementary transcription skills, as in the public understanding, but a complex, developing accomplishment, central to the specialized work of myriad disciplines." In other words, writing functions beyond syntactical diagnoses and appearing "literate" to the world; writing is how we make meaning, reflect, retain memory, problem solve, and even develop confidence.

As someone who has drifted between multiple career paths and developed a random range of skills and interests, this article struck a cord with me. I pondered how my writing has interlinked with the tissues of my life, my work, and my being. For instance, I grew up loving video games and eventually wrote narrative and design for several that I would publish later on. Reflection, when I have the time for it, allows me to take a step back and assess everything in my path and the steps needed to get to where I want to be. Another one would be that my passion for playing instruments has developed a kind of rhythmic obsession that I believe led me into creative writing, or maybe vice versa. Writing has also certainly helped me out in interpersonal situations. All this to say that I believe our students are the same. That is, they have a complex relationships with writing (and a reflective activity could get them to understand that relationship better).

In previous courses I've taken on business writing, I found the focus was largely on communication, but Russel also speaks to the political and environmental textual negotiations that workplace writing can entail. The interdisciplinary aspects of BTC are unique in how students may pull from the social sciences and a specific hard science in order to craft a text. It's hard to imagine this course not being useful for students entering specialized careers. I would like to bring in activities that get students thinking about their "discipline as a written conversation"--a kind of professional discourse on their interest(s), how they inform the world, and the possibilities of their writing.

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In reflecting on the Augsburg reading, I think it's interesting how the unwrapped scholarly definition looks at interdisciplinarity as something active: "process oriented, emphasizing integration and problem solving" (18). Although I went to art school, the importance and function of gen-ed courses was lost to me when I went through undergrad, and I think it surprised me later on when I developed an interest in teaching. In a similar vein, I think it's often lost on students what they can mine from a gen-ed course. I see them as sites for students to not be tested or assessed on skill alone, but to develop problem-solving skills and think across a large range of material. A gen-ed course is where students can learn more about themselves, what they enjoy, and what interests them, along with gaining significant socialization skills in a place that can mimic a professional environment.

I tend to have open-ended projects in my courses, and in a BW or TW course, would like to give students as much freedom as possible in how they plan projects. I think it's also productive to bring in a range of sources across disciplines, while also giving students my knowledge of and experience with business writing. I think in business settings, the writing is often even more communicative. Or perhaps it is more serious because of the authenticity of audience (I can imagine that rhetoric is huge in business writing). I'd like to rely on my expertise of rhetoric because it would help students build off knowledge developed in 101/102.

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The reading I selected was “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom.” I found this reading quite interesting in showing how plain language strategies are applied. More particularly, the Water Meter Upgrade Letter exercise. I think giving students a sample artifact and having them dissect it among smaller groups is an excellent way of breaking the ice of what to expect in a technical writing course. I have personally been in situations, written and spoken, where the jargon used was not understood right away, or put in terms of “plain language.” Since a Water Meter Upgrade Letter isn’t my first choice in artifact, I may use some artifacts that I am personally familiar with, given my professional background. Also, considering the idea that students come from all areas of the country and outside of the country, I think it would be interesting to incorporate an activity where each student shares their “language.” There is already a very short section in 101/102 that involves a variation in Englishes that I enjoy talking about and hearing students speak of some of their own variations. I think understanding this and perspectives early on should set a strong foundation.

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Reflection on “What is interdisciplinarity? Some essential definitions. Becoming interdisciplinary: An introduction to interdisciplinary studies.” Augsburg, T. (2016).

I greatly appreciated the definitions - they helped me compartmentalize the key nuances between interdisciplinary understanding/studies/research, integrative learning, and other terms that easily bleed into each other. The running theme of interdisciplinary study reminded me of the importance of gen-ed core classes – my gen-ed history currently informing my own pedagogy. For example, when teaching on genre, I often reference McLuhan’s The Medium is The Message – a concept I learned in a media studies class. Obviously, I believe this cross-pollination enriches discourse and the learning experience. I appreciate it when a student raises their hand and says this text/conversation reminds me of some media/art/historical concept. The synapses connect and cement, highlighting the importance of a holistic education. After COVID, I was thrown into marketing – the California universities on lock down and not searching for recently graduated, fresh-faced MFA instructors. My background in English served me well, but marketing proved an entirely different world: new genres and technical terms. In retrospect, I wish I had taken a business writing course to aid in a smoother transition. The interdisciplinary coupling of business and writing creates a strong, marketable overlap. Given the volatile current market our students are headed into, I am excited at the prospect of facilitating a business writing course.

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Topic 3 (Slater) - Writing in Disciplines

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Topic 3 (Slater) - Writing in Disciplines

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I chose to write my final post on “Rethinking the Articulation Between Business and Technical Communication and Writing in the Disciplines Useful Avenues for Teaching and Research” by David R. Russell.

The section that stood out the most to me is the following quote, “Learning to write in a discipline is not merely a cognitive accomplishment (individual or collaborative) but a socializing process in a discipline or profession and, further, a process of taking on the identity, set of values, and, often, political stances of those who write in a particular discipline.”

In short, learning to write in a discipline… is a socializing process. This has a holistic, evolutionary feel, an emphasis on immersion (think integration or, even, indoctrination). Writers learn to walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk dependent on their discipline. It reminded me that classroom experience is a significant pre-career “socialization.” In-class activities, lectures, texts, etc. all generate this socializing environment. So, teaching proves an opportunity to cultivate a kind of educational biosphere – intentional, poignant, discipline-specific.

This feels slightly ironic considering Michael Carter’s reference to David R. Russell in Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines, “professors typically learn to write…not by any direct instruction but by a process of slow acculturation through various apprenticeship discourses…unable to see that writing itself is specific to the discipline.” This felt true to my writing journey – I steeped – in everything – the biosphere. Thus, learning to write was less direct, step-by-step, and more of an aggregate bloom. However, I do wonder if more professors have an inner meta discourse acknowledging writing is specific to discipline than Russell believes.

All of this to say, I was reminded learning to write is more of a holistic “socializing” process (back to identity and value evolution) than direct nitpicking instructor-led alteration (put a comma here).

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I have chosen to reflect on “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom” by Kira Dreher (as this was my first real introduction to the concept of plain language). Even though English is my first language, I grew up in the Islands of Fiji, once a British Protectorate, speaking the Queen’s proverbial English. I believe this is why many literary journals have returned my work on the basis of “purple prose.” It is not purple – it’s just bruised. In short, plain language is not my strongest suite. However, granted, I see the utility in adopting plain language, especially on the corporate/marketing/technical/global front. It is a tremendously marketable skill to translate complex information into black-and-white simplicity, finessing “content, style, organization, and document design.” A big takeaway for me was the idea of writing to learn and writing to affirm technical expertise – develop student confidence through clear, concise communication. This is where “genre” and “plain language” intersect so symbiotically. Finally, the concept of “prioritizing the user” struck a chord – user and target audience feeling almost identical (“user” instinctively feeling a bit more universal to me). Plain language helps inhibit gatekeeping by championing accessibility – a foundational pillar for equity. This chapter encouraged me to reconsider some of my pedagogical delivery: are my lectures, texts, and assignment prompts accessible? In other words, where can I implement/translate into more plain language and/or pare down unnecessarily slippery verbiage?

(After rereading my last line – the irony is not lost on me).

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The reading I chose was “Rethinking the Articulation Between Business and technical Communication and Writing in the Disciplines Useful Avenues for Teaching and Research.” I was curious about the approach taken in 307/308, and this cleared up some questions I had in the back of my head. Although the article is a little older, I can understand how and why BTW would be treated similarly to Foundations of Writing courses. The reading brought back many ideas that revolve around the notion that writing in formal schooling and writing in professional workplaces are vastly different. Having written in professional settings in the past, it is interesting to think about how the writing differs from the writing I completed in school.

Although the reading provides insightful information, I wasn’t sure if I noticed a specific way of going about teaching courses like BTW. The article does mention how we should familiarize ourselves with professional fields with similar writing conventions. I think challenges that I might face are diving into fields that I am not very well versed in, like engineering. However, I would definitely use and share my own practices with business writing that I have used in the past. I would be curious to see how it lines up with what is expected in a BTW course. I can also already see how it would be easy to tie rhetoric into certain aspects of business writing which can help students build off their previous 101/102 courses.

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I read “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom,” by Kira Dreher. Like Dreher, I believe that “Robust plain-language strategies overlap substantively with core aims of technical communication.” Plain language is user centered and is designed to ensure that the reader/user reads a document once and is able to obtain the information they need. Plain language also strives to use visual to minimize using excessive words. I enjoyed reading this article. Some of the benefits that the writer mentions, I’ve also encountered having taught Technical Communication and Business Writing for a number of years. Like her, I believe using plain language does tie the PTC field to a wider movement. The U.S. government mandated plain language in their documents, and we also see plain language movements outside the U.S. as well.

One aspect of plain language that I hadn’t thought about before was that it can be seen as part of the social justice movement. Having read this, I can see the connections between plain language and social justice. If people, end users and customers are able to comprehend rather than be frustrated by documents governmental agencies or our students produce, this makes them more knowledgeable and this in itself is empowering. This means that those who have a greater vocabulary are not privileged.

I believe that teaching students in Technical Communication plain language strategies aligns with the definitions of perspective taking offered in the video for this week. Becoming aware of and using plain strategies helps students develop empathy for their end users, as they have to essentially take on the perspective of that user to determine how they, as writers/rhetors can make their writing more concise, more visual, etc. and more accessible to their intended audiences.

I really don’t see a downside to using plain language. I suppose it may make writing feel more formulaic. I have used many plain language exercises in my Technical Communication classes. I’ve sometimes used poorly written memos and had students redesign them incorporating plain language strategies.

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Selection: A Critique of Disability and Accessibility Research

I just recently graduated with an MEd in Learning Design and Technologies, and during my studies, I had the chance to focus on The Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508, and Section 504 to include the creation of accessible digital spaces and evaluations on digital spaces. A number of institutions regularly violate these laws. A positive is this article brings awareness to research and the need to focus on engaging disabled users from the start to enhance the research process. From this point, faculty participating as course designers for online courses should start classes with accessibility initiatives that avoid routine habits of retrofitting course material. Doing so will support an instructional strategy that creates an environment that aims for inclusivity and enhances learning for all students, especially those with disabilities, and can assist in the timely delivery of course materials in many cases. To integrate accessibility in courses, instructors should rely on the UD principles, examine whether the digital materials are flexible, simple, and intuitive, involve assignment guidance, and whether ESL students easily understand the language provided. Another way to enact accessibility initiatives is by providing closed captioning to videos rather than waiting to be notified of accommodation requirements. Many students use closed captions: consider those needing to watch the video in a quiet library. There are many ways to implement accessibility initiatives in digital spaces, and faculty unsure about meeting legislation requirements should seek workshops to meet these requirements.

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Selection: Genre and Academic Writing in the Disciplines

I appreciate the text and the opening statement in the section "What is Genre?" Hyland (2008) points to the idea that we enter the conversation of genre with prior knowledge and expectations about our writings and points to the term SCHEMA. I'm familiar with the term, but I have yet to consider sharing this connection with students in 307 or 308. I think it would help to convey that they may have specific ideas about technical writing or business writing. Still, in this class, we'll build on their current knowledge by examining various writings such as a Request for Proposal or a cover letter to include learning about those conventions via the course readings. Soon enough, they should notice patterns, as Hyland (2008) mentions. I also appreciate the idea that writing is a social practice. With that idea, writing with others in the class and for others supports building connections that Gen Ed. Classes are striving for.

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The reading I chose was “Rethinking the Articulation Between Business and Technical Communication and Writing in the Disciplines Useful Avenues for Teaching and Research.” This article seems to have been published when BTW courses began being offered at universities. I say this because of the articles referenced, but also because of the acronym used as well. Today, the CPTSC and ATTW and members of the discipline as a whole refer instead to PTC – Professional and Technical Communication. One of the writer’s purposes in the document seems to be arguing for the legitimacy of PTC, and this is another reason why the article seems dated. Today, many English departments or independent writing departments have PTW courses that are well established, and these are respected and seen by some as the more “practical courses” offered in English.

Despite its dated references the article raises an interesting perspective that I had not thought of – seeing BTW courses as a form of Writing in the Disciplines. I suppose that in fact BTW courses are WID. Maybe the difference between BTW and other WID courses is that they are specific in a way that other WID courses are not; for instance, Writing in Literature appeals to only students who study literature, while BTW appeals to a wider cross section of students – engineering, agriculture, nursing etc. One element of Rusell’s argument that I appreciated is that he seems to continue the conversation on interdisciplinarity that we read in topic 2. For example, he writes, “Both sets of teachers can learn from the research and practice (pedagogical and otherwise) of their counterparts to add value to professional education.” I believe that this is one of the beneficial components of interdisciplinarity. Faculty members across disciplines can learn from each other and consequently enhance their individual respective disciplines.

Of course, positioning BTW as a WID course risks overlooking some of the unique qualities of BTW, ( now PTC) courses. Overall, I think the approach offered in this article is useful for my teaching. It reminds me to draw on writing to learn and writing to communicate strategies, from WID, to inform my BTW/PTC teaching.

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For this response, I chose to read Dreher’s (2021) “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom.”  I found this reading to be very helpful, partly because it provides hands-on classroom activities that can be used in a BTW course, but primarily because it is very reflective of what I see every day in my career/day-job as a business writer.  In reading this article, I couldn’t help but wear my business writing hat versus my writing instructor hat.  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve worked as a fulltime business writer for the past nineteen years while also working as a college instructor of composition for about twenty-six years.  For my day-gig as a business writer, I work in the government field, specifically in the legal arm of public health.  Thus, much of what this reading talks about accurately reflects what I see in my day-to-day experience.  Specifically, Dreher (2021) discusses plain-language and its prevalent use in several fields, including government, legal, and healthcare writing. These fields intersect perfectly to describe the kind of writing I see and do in my day job.  I work for the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, which is the state’s Medicare administrator.  Within this public health entity, I work in the legal division as part of the agency’s general counsel team.  That said, my job is comprised exactly of healthcare, legal, and government writing.  For my agency’s outward and public-facing communication, we employ many of the practices discussed by Dreher (2021), including using readability formulas and following government mandates regarding reading accessibility and level.  As Dreher (2021) acknowledges, “Researchers and practitioners have shown the severe limitations of readability formulas, citing their lack of attention toward real audiences, material contexts, document organization, and design, as well as a host of other rhetorical considerations” (pg. 49).  In my experience, this is true, but readability formulas are a good place to start, especially since they are efficient and cost-saving.  For example, my agency uses one convenient readability formula that Dreher (2021) discusses: “many versions of Microsoft Word come with the Flesch-Kincaid readability formula already built in for users” (pg. 49).  Because the Flesch-Kincaid formula is built-in, there is no additional cost beyond the typical licenses purchased for Microsoft Word.  This is a time and cost-saver for my agency, and it also helps us carry out our mandate, which is to communicate with our public-health members in 6th grade language.  Again, while the Flesh-Kincaid is not perfect, it is a good starting point that allows us to check our own public-facing communication for readability.  Additionally, we use the Flesch-Kincaid as an audit tool to ensure providers and contractors are also using 6th grade, plain language in their communications to members.  I acknowledge that that above is an oversimplification of plain language, but these are real-world examples that I can offer from experience.

One critique I have in response to the reading and to my own thoughts above is that while clear and concise language is a good goal to aspire to in writing, “the fraught concepts of ‘plain’ and ‘clear’” themselves (pg. 45) can be troublesome in that they are hard to define and widely varied, as Dreher acknowledges (2021).  For example, my government agency aspires to write at the 6th grade level.  However, as a composition instructor, I am pretty certain that I don’t want my college students to write at the 6th grade level.  Thus, I worry about what Dreher (2021) and others have called the dumbing-down of writing (pg. 59).  I certainly see a place for plain language in business writing, especially as it pertains to public-facing communication.  However, for some texts our students write and for many of the non-public facing communication I see and write for my day-job (like legal decisions and complex investigation reports), using 6th grade language is not practical or effective.  Thus, I think the ultimate goal is to see our students gain the capacity to write in plain language or more complex structures.

For practical application in my classroom, I hope to show my students many kinds of writing styles, ranging from plain to more complex.  Ideally, they will have access to both plain and non-plain language as needed, which will fit whatever rhetorical situation they may find themselves in.

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I chose “What is interdisciplinarity: some essential definitions.” I enjoyed the reading especially because I’ve read some of Joe Moran’s book and I ‘ve also read Charles Bazerman’s work on interdisciplinarity in Writing Studies.  I found it interesting that and disciplinarity was defined on one level as a form of control and policing. This rings true to me. Many disciplines have conventional says of being and doing and these are often rigid. Being part of a discipline shapes how we see and engage with the world around us, and sometimes this limits how we teach and what we teach. I did a presentation on this at the CPSTC, in which I focused on the English Department at university where I taught. This department was so focused on policing its borders (a form of disciplinarity) that it continued to miss many opportunities to form affiliations within the University ( a form of interdisciplinarity), and thereby strengthen  the department itself  through those other affiliations/disciplines.

Interdisciplinarity, it seems to me, offers a way as the article suggested of “complementing” a discipline by drawing on others. An interdisciplinarity approach would allow, for example, for incorporating  creative writing into Mathematics, Writing Studies, and Technical Communication and business. This, to me, enhances those disciplines because it offers new ways of being and of understanding those disciplines.

Personally, I don’t see a downside to interdisciplinarity as an approach. I see it as a positive pedagogical tool. It allows students to make connections across disciplines, thus fostering the WAC approaches many universities try to encourage. As an instructor, it allows me to As Bazerman points out, to “draw on the resources of many disciplines.” For instance, I’ve used creative writing in my Writing and Technical Communication classes; in one of the papers I’m working on for publication, I’m trying to incorporate anthropology into a literary analysis. Overall interdisciplinarity helps to redefine and expand disciplinary borders.

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For response #4, I chose “(Teaching) Ethics and Technical Communication” by Derek G. Ross. Ross argues that “we have more productive communication when we can see another’s point of view, and we can produce more ethical communication (working alone or in groups) when we can clearly articulate our reasoning and desired outcomes” (68-9), and I like this statement a lot because it’s not just true within writing or within academia, it’s true just generally for life, and I feel like writing can sometimes feel the most applicable when we can connect what we are learning to things outside of writing, outside of academia. Ross always states that “clear understanding of our actions allows us to communicate our reasoning to others” (69), which is something that I’m trying to integrate into my classroom and can be very helpful in scaffolding. I often verbalize reasoning to my students. I will talk through how a specific assignment or activity connects to the greater project or outcome, but it’s not something that I have included in my assignment sheets in the past, but between this and one of the earlier readings for this mini course, I am starting to think that doing so would be valuable for my students.

I think that the discussion of ethics is really interesting, especially when using the late to class, help an old woman across the street example, but I couldn’t help but wonder why, in all of that discussion of student time, student money, is he helping the woman because she’s a woman and he’s a man, etc, why there was no option to send an email to students. This was published in 2012 and 2017, a time in which it was becoming increasingly normal to have smartphones and have email on a smartphone, so why does it not come into play that a professor running late could email the students as a courtesy to simply say “I’m running late.” That would be cognizant of their time, right? I’m confused why thirty seconds cannot be taken to send a polite email.

I like the idea of having students draft up their own set of ethics for the classroom. It would be interesting to apply that to both a BTW classroom and a foundations writing classroom, putting the shared ethics of that classroom into the hands of the students who are in it. Classroom discussions can bring up a lot of different feelings depending on the material, so it would be interesting to do this in a semester where you know some hard topics are going to come up. I taught a class where we were reading On the Come Up by Angie Thomas, a novel that exists in the same universe as The Hate U Give and deals with police brutality. I had black students who had either had bad police experiences themselves or had family who’d had them, and then I had a white student who had a cop father. It led to a very tense conversation, but I think that having a community decided set of ethics for discussions in that classroom might have helped the conversation.

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For #3, I read the “Genre and Academic Writing in the Disciplines” by Ken Hyland. I thought it was really interesting and really hits on some important parts of writing. The first thing that really stuck out to me in the article was this mention of cultural differences in writing. Hyland notes that “Hinds (1987) believes that this has a lot to do with the fact that English makes the writer rather than the reader responsible for clarity and this is very different from German, Korean, Chinese and Japanese, where the reader is expected to dig out the meaning from a dense text” (548). This is interesting to me because it’s not something I’ve spent a lot of time talking about. During grad schools, our 102 book had a separate reader and one of the essays discussed some of the differences between English writing and Chinese writing discussing this point that Hyland is making. English writing has us straight and to the point. The author needs to make the connections for the reader and not the other way around whereas Chinese writing is very different. I know when we are teaching writing in American schools, there is an expectation that we teach in a way that is going to allow students to be successful in these schools, so it would make sense to heavily emphasize the straight and to the point method, but I wonder how we can be aware of the other method? Can we teach students to be successful in our academy while also acknowledging that other cultures don’t write this way?

Hyland says, “But despite these problems, the concept of DISCOURSE COMMUNITY, understood as a group who have texts and practices in common, is important as a way of joining writers, texts and readers together” (549), and I wonder how I can emphasize that in my teaching not just in potential BTW courses, but also in my foundations writing courses. I discuss discourse communities when I’m teaching, but I don’t know how much I emphasize that these are places where students can belong. Writing can be very lonely. It’s an isolated activity for many people, but discourse communities make it seem a little less so and might make the whole writing process a little more interesting or worth it, especially if students are encouraged to feel like they are part of some sort of community of people who are all using the same type of language to take part in a greater conversation. Hyland argues that “Genre teaching means taking the world outside the writing classroom into account by going beyond grammar and vocabulary to prepare students for their future experiences using the most detailed needs analysis that time allows” (556). And I think that making sure that students realize that what they are doing has importance outside of the classroom or real world applications can help foster their enjoyment of writing as well as give them purpose.

A side note (something that just made me laugh): Hyland uses “informant” to refer to, I assume, real-life people they have spoken to in pursuit of this article. It feels out of place here and more akin to something that involves spies and/or espionage. Or, I suppose, journalism.

Hyland discusses portfolio writing. Do students create portfolios in the BTW courses?

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I chose the article “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom" by Kira. I liked this article because I learned a couple of new concepts such as Flesch Reading Ease Formula and the Gunning-Fog Formula from this article.

The article “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom" by Kira Dreher deals with the fact that it is important to teach the principles of plain language in in courses including technical communication courses. Dreher argues that teaching plain language principles plain language is important because it could enhance students’ ability to understand content as well as enhancing their ability to convey this content effectively. The writer also argues that planning language could make our writing more accessible to diverse audiences including those who are underprivileged.

The writer also claims that plain language is useful because it can minimize confusion and misinterpretation of messages and other types of texts and that it can promote successful communication. The author also maintains that there is a growing demand for accessible information in many fields and industries and that plain language can help address this demand.

The author also discusses some strategies for teaching plain language in addition to highlighting that it is important to demonstrate real world examples. The author emphasizes the importance of collaboration between students and those working in industries so that the former can gain practical experience. Finally, the author advises the educators to be updated on the developments in plain language research so that they can teach it effectively.

The author encourages collaboration between students and professionals to gain practical experience and foster an appreciation for plain language. Additionally, Dreher suggests that technical communication educators should stay updated on plain language trends and tools to maintain relevancy in their teaching.

In conclusion, the article asserts that incorporating plain language principles in technical communication courses can significantly improve students' communication skills and better prepare them for professional careers. By focusing on plain language, educators can equip students with valuable tools to effectively convey complex information to diverse audiences, ultimately contributing to a more inclusive and accessible world.

The article would be informative and useful to people who do not have a background in technical communication. However, while this article argues that plain language can enhance communication by enhancing clarity and minimize linguistic discrimination by enhancing accessibility, it does not address the fact that the use of too much plain language can limit students’ creativity. Nor does the article deal adequately with the requirements and terminology that are peculiar to specific fields. A discussion would minimize the confusion of readers like us.

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I have read Ken Hyland (2008), one of the foremost authorities on academic writing and one of my favorite authors. I can find that the ideas expressed in this article are elaborated  in the author’s recent books and his 2004 book on genre and academic writing. This article would give  a wealth of information to those interested in genre-based writing. In this article titled "Genre and Academic Writing in the Disciplines" Hyland deals with the concept of genre and its significance in academic writing in the disciplines. Hyland argues that it is important for us to be aware of genre conventions in order to successfully communicate with members of the discourse community.  Hyland also discusses that different fields have discipline specific genre conventions and genre expectations, which have an impact on the writing process, thus impacting the teaching and evaluation of writing. Furthermore, the writer argues that it is very important for writers  to know about the expectations of the audience and their writing style.  Finally, the author highlights that it is important for writers and educators to know and recognize the fact that there are diverse academic genres.

I like the article, but it is also important to know that we need to incorporate multiple approaches into our writing curricula because one single approach such as text-oriented approach, e.g. genre-based pedagogy is not sufficient. This is why writing curricula nowadays incorporate not only text-oriented approaches but also writer-oriented approaches and reader-oriented approaches. Our PDCs are good examples of it. This is why  I do not confine myself to it  but rather I apply elements from all the approaches I noted above in my teaching although I am a big fan of genre-based pedagogy.

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I read “Rethinking the Articulation Between Business and Technical Communication and Writing in the Disciplines: Useful Avenues for Teaching and Research” (Russell, 2007) for this Padlet response.  Much of the article struck me for a variety of reasons, especially because I read this through the lens of someone who sits on both sides of BTW: namely, a person who, by night, has taught ENG 101 and 102 (and now wants to teach BTW!) for the past twenty-six years, and a person who, by day, has been working as a full-time business writer for the past nineteen years.  I was able to appreciate this article from the perspective of an instructor who teaches inside the ivory tower but who works outside of it as a writer, editor, and manager of writers.  My use of “ivory tower” is not meant to be disparaging, but it is meant to show the oft seen disconnect between writing in college and writing in the professional world.  Russell hits on this precisely in his article when he cites previous work by Perelman (2004): MIT graduates were asked “to rank the 25 most important skills their work entails and how well MIT had prepared them for performing each.  The four highest ranked skills were analyzing problems, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, and writing. About 60% of the graduates said MIT had prepared them well to perform the first three, but only 20% said MIT prepared them well in writing” (Russell, 2007, pg. 271).  Anecdotally (but precisely reflecting the research), I see this in my own professional work, wherein only one of my staff writers is very strong, and the other four require extensive revisions, reworks, and edits before their work meets expectations.  Part of the problem, as Russell (2007) describes, is that "academic researchers, even those in professional schools, are sometimes not aware of communication practices in workplaces” (pg. 254).  Thus, we see new graduates leaving the college classroom and entering the workforce ill-prepared to write effectively.  Indeed, this article articulates the disconnect between what we educators are teaching in our writing classes and what we business professionals are seeing in the workplace.  Again, as Russell (2007) reiterates, “[W]riting in formal schooling can prepare, or fail to prepare, people for a lifetime of involvement in modern culture” (pg. 256).  It seems that most of time (indeed 80%) we may be failing to prepare our students, according to the research Russell cites (2007, pg. 271).  Beyond that, there is no one, single way to prepare students for professional writing because the multitude of professions are so varied.  Specifically, Russell (2007) highlights that “the problems students had in learning the discourse of a discipline were highly discipline-specific” (pg. 255).  Beyond that, there are “profound ways that school writing differs from workplace writing – and the ways that student writers become professionals who are writing” (Russell, 2007, pg. 259).  All that said, this article does a thorough job painting a vivid (and sometimes disheartening) picture of how complicated this issue is and how truly difficult it can be to teach writing.  For someone who is teaching writing in a university setting, while simultaneously working as a professional business writer – and perhaps more importantly, a manager and editor of staff writers – the conundrum is palpable.  Nevertheless, Russell (2007) remains hopeful: “Higher education the world over is responding – sometimes rapidly, sometimes glacially – to changes in the growing specialization and complexity of knowledge and knowledge work that demand greater rhetorical flexibility, the capacity to create knowledge in new and often interdisciplinary ways, and the ability to reshape and repurpose knowledge in complex environments” (pg. 270).

One critique I can provide (and it is not a critique of the article itself, but a critique of the very conundrum described above) is that we still don’t have a particularly useful understanding of the best way to teach writing, whether in FYC or BTW.  Russell (2007) says the “central question” is this: “Which approaches work better to teach students to successfully perform professional tasks that require communication?” (pg. 268).  He goes on to answer his own query: “Unfortunately, we have little research to answer this complex question” (pg. 268).  It remains somewhat of a mystery, then, as to how to best teach and prepare our students.  It is also a mystery as to why some of our student writers enter our classes already better prepared than others.  And in my personal experience, our students’ skillsets seem to be significantly established by the time we ever see them enter our college classes; one or two students in each one of my classes enters the class already an excellent writer and leaves an excellent writer.  The rest have varying degrees of skill level, and instructors strive to get them writing a little bit better than when they arrived.  How and when writers got to their skill level in the first place is what I find most intriguing.  Were those skillsets solidified by junior high or high school?  Again, in my experience, I see skillsets largely solidified by the time students reach college, and my goal, then, is to try to enhance those skillsets as much as possible in the short span of a semester.  Realistically, that might just be a small bump up from where the student starts.  Also, to switch perspectives to my job as a business writer, my experience is that many professional writers also show very slow and small improvements over time.  Most of the professional writers I see started out either as great writers who continue to be great writers, or okay writers who get marginally better with years of practice and hands-on application.  Nevertheless, I am hopeful for what I may find in BTW courses, namely that much of the writing is business and task-specific, smaller in scope, and more specialized, which may be more straightforward to teach from a practical standpoint.  So while I am realistically optimistic about my role in helping students with “learning to write,” I am also unabashedly confident in my role in helping students with “writing to learn” (Russell, 2007, pg. 249).

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Video Link https://screenpal.com/watch/c0fXY4VaH8T

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I reviewed UNESCO’s (2017) Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives for my topic 2 response.  The most significant takeaway for me is the importance placed on education as a means to achieve various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  In this reading, education is positioned as one of the primary drivers of attaining SDGs.  This makes perfect sense since education “empowers learners to take informed decisions and responsible actions for environmental integrity, economic viability and a just society for present and future generations” (UNESCO 7).  As the reading points out, “However, not all kinds of education support sustainable development” (UNESCO 7).  Indeed, this becomes crucially important because the kind of education needed to achieve SDGs is a very special one: “Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)” (UNESCO 7).  As educators, it is important, then, to keep ESD at the forefront of our minds and classrooms.  Making this all the more challenging is the reality that we have students of every background in our general education courses.  We see students of all majors and disciplines enrolled in Foundations courses, and this will be true for our BTW students as well.  As our topic 2 video discusses, even when we have many STEM students taking our BTW courses, that does not mean we have a monolithic pool of students who see the world in the exact same way.  STEM students are as diverse as any student population, and BTW instructors need to be cognizant of that.  The reading acknowledges and affirms this and encourages educators to offer “disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives on issues of global change and their local manifestations” (UNESCO 52).  Doing so will help instructors to deliver the right kind of education – ESD – while simultaneously teaching a very practical curriculum to the students enrolled in BTW.  I see BTW as a place where practical writing meets what UNESCO calls “an ambitious and universal agenda to transform our world,” otherwise known as the very SDGs we strive to achieve (6).

One critique of UNESCO’s vision for ESD is that since we have a diverse student population, whether within STEM or within any general education population, we are likely to encounter some students who do not subscribe to the various SDGs and who do not want an education centered around the SDGs.  This is probably rare, but it is a reality.  As an example, I have recently encountered a small group of students in one of my ENG 102 classes this semester who are openly – what I would call – anti-SDGs.  I have been teaching at UA since 2021, and this is the first semester wherein I have encountered students who feel this way (or who are vocal about it anyway).  In my 102 classes, we watch several different documentaries that align with the various SDGs (“no poverty,” “gender equality,” “climate action,” “life below water,” “life on land,” etc.).  For example, one week we will watch a documentary on climate change, and another week we will watch a documentary on LGBTQAI+ rights.  I offer about five documentaries for each topic of discussion, and the students vote via a Slido poll on one documentary that we will watch in class for that topic/theme.  After we watch the documentary, students have an opportunity to discuss the film, conduct a rhetorical analysis of the content, and explore project topics related to the documentary.  I also offer a Padlet for students to anonymously offer their thoughts about the film as a discussion-starter.  This is where I have – for the first time since I started with UA – seen some students who appear to be very intolerant of the principles outlined in the SDGs.  For example, one student commented anonymously on our Padlet that the documentary on climate change was “overdramatic fake news.”  For the documentary we watched on LGBTQAI+ rights, one of the students commented on our Padlet, “A man is a man.  A woman is a woman.  Biology is biology, and there is no such thing as transgender.”  For every documentary we watched, which again feature themes and topics outlined in the various SDGs, one or two students responded with comments similar to the above.  My classes have about twenty-four students each, and this occurred only in one ENG 102 section, so this is a small percentage of students overall.  Nevertheless, I have to admit I was startled and taken aback by comments like these.  This was new for me to encounter since the time I first began teaching at UA, but it is a reminder that our student population is indeed diverse, with all kinds of individuals from all kinds of backgrounds and mindsets.  It was not an easy task in class for me to acknowledge those comments while attempting to also acknowledge the opinions and thoughts of students who are mindful and tolerant of the aspirations set forth in the SDGs.  I did not enjoy being a teacher on those days.

To apply some of this to my teaching, I am going to stand firm in continuing to frame my curriculum in SDGs-centered philosophies.  However, I am rethinking my use of anonymous Padlets.  I may instead require students to include their names on Padlet posts.  Unfortunately, this may discourage some students from sharing as openly, but it will also likely minimize ignorant and intolerant comments, which seem to arise when people are shrouded in anonymity.  I am still thinking this through, but I am hopeful that I can find a way to encourage open communication in the classroom while also discouraging intolerance, nastiness, and hatefulness.  A work in progress…

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I chose “What is interdisciplinarity? Some Essential Definitions” by Augsburg, T. I found this to be quite interesting as it mentioned exercising caution when using general dictionaries for academic research. Depending on the term, I can see how this can be a little bit of an issue. I’m just now noticing this as students define “genre” in their genre analysis. I don’t think it helps when multiple sources have different definitions of terms. I may have to remind students to exercise caution when finding outside definitions of terms. From what I understand about interdisciplinarity, there are multiple disciplines involved, and knowing that ahead of time can help with research. I can definitely see how this would tie into BTW, especially when one would work with multiple disciplines in the students. Having multiple disciplines in the classroom may be quite challenging and it would be interesting to have students who are studying similar disciplines start out together in groups and gradually break those groups up to introduce other disciplines in their learning. The term “discipline” alone can have a variety of definitions and I’m pretty sure everyone has their own unique definition of such. The reading did mention linking academic discipline and military discipline and I also found this interesting because this thought did not initially occur to me initially. I can see myself using this as an example early on to make sure students are aware of how this can be a little tricky.

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Amelia's Blind Men and the Elephant is a beautiful parable to introduce the idea of perspective taking and interdisciplinarity in the classroom! Thanks for that. Will definitely use in the classroom.

For this topic's readings, I did Ross (2020) because I'm very interested in the issue of ethics given my dissertation research on ChatGPT.

Ross (2020) is a wonderful introduction to different ethical frameworks: Aristotellian, Kantian, utilitarian, feminist and ethics of care etc. which can help guide our actions and decision making.

I) Some basic terms that we should be familiar with that I learnt through this reading:

1) Normative ethics versus descriptive ethics: The former refers to ideal guidelines and the latter to descriptions of actual precepts that guide action. Similarly, morality are the general norms followed in a society and ethics are a person's individual framework for decision making.

2) Virtue ethics, deontological ethics, consequential ethics: The first looks at agent's character, the second at agent's obligations, and the last at the result of agent's actions.

3) Anthro, zoo, bio, eco-centric ethics: Within the consequential ethics, the impact of an action can determined based on various actors: humans, animals, living beings or ecological actors.

4) Issue of value: "This leads us directly into issues of value: when I make decisions based on action and consequence, I might consider something’s instrumental value (its ability to cause value either through trade, sale, negotiation, etc.) or its intrinsic value (the belief that whatever I am considering has value no matter what I do with it)." (71)

5) Building ethical equations: Using this vocabulary, essentially people can map out the various stakeholders in any decision and work out their thinking behind the decisions they are taking.

II) Using these terms, Ross (2020) also introduced some prevalent ethical frameworks:

The idea is not that these frameworks can provide a correct answer. Rather you can use them to think through your decisions and give a justification for them using these frameworks.

Aristotle: virtue-driven and rule-based: Here, "one determines the most virtuous of possibilities from decision-making options and then chooses that outcome, regardless of outcome or personal backlash." (73)

Kant: This expands Aristotle's frameowrk through the "categorical imperative" -- if everyone in that situation starts to do the same, how will the world be?

Utilitarian: Bentham and Mill: Greatest benefit for greatest number of people.

Feminist: Role of power must be factored into the ethical equation.

Ethics of care: try to make all stakeholders happy instead of just one by finding alternative pathways.

Based on this vocabulary, since I am teaching impact of AI technologies on tech comm in my 308 tech comm class, I want to introduce students to considering the ethical impacts of introducing these technologies in their industries.

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I really liked the demographic breakup for ENGL 308 in Amelia's slides. Now that I know the majority of my students this summer will be from engineering, education, agriculture and life sciences, I can plan activities better.

I've read Carter (2007) and Hyland (2008) in the past, both of whom have done pioneering classification work by describing the similarities and differences between different disciplines by examining the genre and discourse features of the texts that they produce. These works have been instrumental in providing theoretical and empirical arguments for Writing in the Disciplines approaches and research on transfer. Keeping this context in mind, I started reading Russell (2007) to see how these approaches inform TPC/BTC scholarship.

Here are the main points in Russell (2017) that I really liked:

1) Historical arc: It was illuminating to see how BTC courses were initially taught with the same fallacy that 101 and 102 courses were -- i.e. teaching students to do literary criticism in writing courses will give them transferrable writing skills for any discipline or profession.

2) Applying WAC/WID principles to BTC: Russell is specifically exploring the application of WAC/WID principles like "learning to write" and "writing to learn" in BTC classrooms. In this spectrum, BTC courses largely lie more on the "writing to learn" approach. Within this, I learnt about some really important research like Bazerman's formative work on research paper genres, and Odell and Goswami's work on workplace genres. This sent me down a rabbithole to find Beautfort's (2008) review essay on research in the professional-technical writing which I've bookmarked to look at while preparing introductory lessons for my 308 class.

3) Difference b/w WAC and WID: I'd often been confused between the two but some secondary searching through the article's bib helped me understand that WAC is not a course in itself, rather than approach to make other courses more writing intensive by applying learning theory and writing theory principles, while WID are specific writing courses designed to teach how to write in a specific discipline

Overall, reading this units readings helped to remind to scaffold my students' learning of BTC genres within the genres they are already familar with in their disciplines as well as to show how to transfer these genres to other situations they might face in the future.

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2 - Self-Compassion & Compassionate Pedagogy (Slater)

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2 - Self-Compassion & Compassionate Pedagogy (Slater)

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For my second reflection, I have chosen to cover Self-Compassion and Psychological Well-being by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer. I greatly appreciated the obviated connection between self-compassion and compassionate pedagogy, which skip hand-in-hand. As educators, we are keenly aware of the human condition and often offer compassion to students (in the form of extended deadlines or listening attentively to the occasional office-hour breakdown). I have had several deaths in the family (both real and fabricated) and one student whose cousin was murdered midsemester. All of this to say, I believe it is much easier to provide compassion, empathy, and heart-felt grace to students rather than ourselves. At least, in the vein of full self-disclosure, this is a capital T truth for me (a deconstructing preacher’s son).

The primary idea that stuck out the most to me (as cliché and tired as it may sound) is that we cannot give what we do not give ourselves. Granted, there is a fine line between self-accountability and self-flagellation. There is a great balancing act. To aid in this, it’s imperative we seek and do our utmost to maintain our “health” – psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physical - for vivacious pedagogical practice. I also appreciated how the text solidified the certainty that suffering is unavoidable. It is a part of life and can provide meaning. This reminded me of Victor Frankl’s Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything and of what an old friend described to me as: courageous acceptance. We, as educators practicing self-compassion, courageously accept to pass this empathy onwards to our students and fellow faculty. We can, in fact, give to ourselves what we give to others.

Also, connecting this reading to Neff’s TED Talk, I loved the salient distinction between self-esteem and self-compassion. Self-esteem is so binary, whereas self-esteem holds more fluidity, covering a multitude of so-called “sins.” I thoroughly enjoyed Neff’s quote, “Self-compassion is a way of relating to ourselves kindly. Embracing ourselves as we are: flaws and all.”

In short, the big takeaway from the reading and TED Talk is this: self-criticism (though a powerful driver) is ultimately not the best nor most sustainable method of motivation. And, conversely, compassionate pedagogy proves a helpful, sustainable model. It’s always been my goal to create a safe and equitable pedagogical environment – self-compassion proves a solid foundation.

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I chose to reflect on Asoue Inoue’s “What Labor Based Grading Contracts Look Like” as this proves a fairly novel concept for me (I have just recently returned to academia from COVID corporate life). At first, I found labor based grades an intriguing concept – I see their utility in terms of cutting down on grading time and leveling the equity playing field (think language barriers, socio/economic challenges, and visible/invisible disabilities). Initially, I felt apprehensive about entertaining the idea of implementing grading contracts. There is, after all, something to be said for “competency” and “qualitative success” over effort – in short, quality of product (this is perhaps my corporate brain at work more than a true reflection of my pedagogical practice). Good writing is good writing. Yes, the rules are arbitrary, but they are particularly well-cemented for introductory composition courses: adhere to the prompt, grammar conventions, and demonstrate competency in syntax/style, etc. The classical, arbitrary rules are well-accepted and fairly universal.

However, when looking back upon when I taught creative writing, I told students up front, “There would not be a benefit to me grading your short stories and poems. Simply do the work and you will receive full credit.” In other words, it was contract/labor based. Why? Because I perceived creative writing as more fluid, with greater margin for error. Thus, reading Inoue, I had to challenge my preconceived notions about the differences between composition and creative writing. I found it was a significant blunder to assume students had more experience and familiarity with composition (despite it being statistically more likely) than poetry and fiction. We anticipate students “should” know their way around a rhetorical analysis more than a sonnet, and they are graded/rewarded for implementing previous instruction. Labor-based grading allows for obstacles of knowledge gaps to be lowered, highlighting the importance of this coursework, this discussion, this revision more than carried over knowledge. We’ve all had that student who shows up three times a semester but writes nuanced, beautiful, and 🤬 compelling work. Is it fair for this student to pass having missed x amount of instruction time and discussion? Labor-based grading has helped solve this problem for me.

I now greatly appreciate the concept of labor-based grading – a compassionate and equitable foundation for classroom instruction. I plan to implement labor-based grading in upcoming semesters.

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I chose the “Assessing Student Writing” from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Writing Center. I try to assess student’s writing early on to see what they already know and so I can adjust my instruction as necessary much like the reading describes. I have had some success with this, this semester, but I did have a couple of students who did not submit earlier assignments, so it was harder to gauge where they were with their writing.

At one point, the reading mentions the burden of excessive feedback, and this is something I struggle with. I have created some rubrics to ease the amount of feedback I give, but I still manage to write a lot of extra comments at the end. While reading this I grew curious and looked through some feedback I had gotten during grad school, and I did find some lengthy feedback that I couldn’t believe the instructor took time to do. As a student then, I couldn’t tell you if I read the whole thing because of other obligations. So, going back to where I am now, I am currently trying to ease up the amount of feedback I give. I’ve spoken with other teachers who do tend to give the most feedback early on, and gradually decrease as the class ends, and this is a technique I am learning to apply (assuming the students’ writing improves over time).

The reading also mentions how “Some teachers have students help collaboratively design rubrics for the grading of writing.” I would love to try this at some point this year to see if my rubrics may be easier to follow. However, I am not sure how to go about this.

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I completed the “What is Pedagogy?” The positive–provided four brief pedagogical approach categories: behaviorism, constructivism, social constructivism, and liberationist, and a brief overview and links for additional reading when subscribing. A critique–the article suggests that Vygotsky believed learning is a collaboration between student and teacher and fails to mention the two principles associated with the pedagogy: the more knowledgeable other (MKO) and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The MKO is a person who knows more about the subject matter. The ZPD involves what they know and do not know. The MKO needn’t be just the teacher but also a peer (Orey, 2010, p. 11).

I use Vygotsky’s constructivism in a class by recognizing the ZPD and, as the MKO, providing support (scaffolding activities) to move them through the ZPD. In a BTW course, it’s essential to allow students the chance to be the MKO and help peers move through the ZPD and respect the nature of collaborative work. Especially in the online learning course where learners are non-traditional adult students and have been working professionals.

Orey, Michael. (2010). Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching, and Technology.

The Global Text Project. EDP 540 Learning Theories and Instructional Strategies. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://textbookequity.org/Textbooks/Orey_Emergin_Perspectives_Learning.pdf

What did you think about the reading? One positive, one critique, and one application to your teaching materials or approach.

For the second reading selection, I read "What is Interdisciplinary Some Essential Definitions" and initially thought the reading could be helpful for students. The positives are the brief definitions shared, such as "Interdisciplinary refers to the general phenomenon of combining or integrating disciplinary perspectives" (Augsburg, 2016, p. 19). Integrating this definition in class could help students understand the synergy that can develop when more than one discipline shares knowledge to create learning networks. This is one shared perspective, and the article offers many interpretations I found could be helpful for learners.

As for my critique, I found the "links between academic and military disciplines" lacking. While both military and academia will involve rigorous, disciplined, organized education and training, the article never dives into how so. So my students would most likely not understand how the two are connected without my explanation. And really, I cannot understand precisely how Augsburg understood the link without further clarifications.

I'd most likely use the article to help learners understand how connecting with other interdisciplinary fields could benefit them professionally to learn from one another.

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For Topic 2, I read the Augsburg chapter. In her book chapter "What is interdisciplinarity? Some essential definitions" taken from her book Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies (2016), Tanya Augsburg defines interdisciplinarity in detail and discusses its significance in contemporary academic and professional settings, explaining how interdisciplinarity can be approached and utilized.

According to Augsburg, interdisciplinarity is nothing but a way of integrating knowledge and methods from multiple disciplines. The author also claims that the aim of interdisciplinarity is to solve complex problems, issues, or questions that cannot be fully understood or solved using the perspectives of a single discipline. According to Ausburg, interdisciplinarity is a collaborative and integrative approach seeking to create new knowledge by crossing the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Although the concept is not unknown to me, I like the chapter because it presents the concept of interdisciplinarity in an accessible way and discusses its importance and how it can utilized in academic and professional settings in an easy and convincing manner. I agree with the author over the role of interdisciplinary studies in the solving of complex problems in our academic setting. The chapter would be a good read to anyone interested in this topic. However, I also think the author tends to dumb down the concept by including and citing the dictionary definitions of the concepts of discipline, interdisciplinary, etc. so many times, which was not necessary.

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I also read the Tes Magazine's (2018) article  What is pedagogy?                                                                           According to the article, pedagogy means how teachers deliver curriculum content to their students, taking into account various factors such as the latter's age and subject matter and the teaching context.  The article also asserts that there are four main pedagogical approaches: behaviorism, constructivism, social constructivism, and liberationism with behaviorism involving teacher-centered instruction, constructivism focusing on student experiences and reflection, social constructivism combining teacher guidance and student-centered learning, and liberationism emphasizing student voice and democracy in the classroom. The article rightly says that teachers develop their own pedagogical principles using research and experience.   So have I. While all the above pedagogies are effective in a way, they have certain limitations. From my experience, I have found  ( and other teachers may also have) that a single pedagogy is not sufficient in a real classroom situation and that I have often had to apply multiple pedagogies to effectively teach my students. In a word, I often apply what is known as Eclecticism,  a pedagogy that combines features of different pedagogies. I think this would be true of other teachers. In fact, in real life a teacher would hardly ever apply a single pedagogy to effectively teach, and therefore curricula nowadays would often have multiple pedagogues built into them.

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So, I chose the Augsburg chapter and I was first struck by the information about the dictionaries and encyclopedias. I learned in my PhD to use the OED for definitions in papers, so I did, and didn’t use them very often because it wasn’t often that I found myself needing to define words, but this chapter starts by looking a little critically at dictionary definitions. What really sticks out to me is this idea that dictionary definitions often don’t “provide students with adequate explanations” (14). I’ve never considered that before. They don’t have a lot of space and have to give whole definitions quickly before moving onto the next page. This also applies to encyclopedias. And encyclopedias also can’t be updated easily, at least not written ones. Wikipedia can be updated every day, but with that comes a lack of credibility. I think this is interesting, and I’ve never thought deeply about it before. I think that this is really an interesting way to start a chapter that works to define interdisciplinary. Just one dictionary definition won’t be enough.

“Disciplines represent the organization of knowledge” (15).

The quote from Howard Gardner discusses how students just see disciplines as subjects. But I would like the chapter to spend more time discussing this. How does the difference between a subject and a discipline fit into the definition of what a discipline is?

The correlation between a discipline within a university or other academic setting and the militaristic discipline is very interesting. Augsburg says “studying a particular discipline involves rigorous, regimented, methodological education and training” (16) which is interesting, the idea that you have to be a disciplined person to study within a discipline, but does that mean you cannot take part in a discipline of knowledge without being very serious about it? Can you dabble in different disciplines?

I like the idea that interdisciplinary study gives a more complex or comprehensive view/method of understanding. I’m not wholly sure how to integrate this into my classroom. I’ve had to do a certain amount of interdisciplinary research for myself during grad school because I wasn’t getting the perspective that I wanted, so I wonder if I could bring in sources about the same topic from different disciplines and discuss the different ways that they approach the topic.

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I chose: "Assessing Student Writing" by the Writing Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The article says not to “burden students with excessive feedback.” I think this is great. I struggle with knowing how much feedback is too much and how much is too little. The Writing Center at the University of Nebraska Lincoln suggests two things to focus on, and I think that’s very fair. I do try to spend more time focusing on bigger issues in drafts and then highlight the smaller issues, such as formatting citations or things like that, but I think I am going to try to adapt to two and have those things that students can focus on.

I’m not really sure what to make of the section on commenting. When I give feedback now, I focus on global first. I think of global as the things that make the paper work and local as more line-level items. I’d rather focus on global first because that’s what I think should come first when it comes to revising. If there is an issue with the argument, I want them to put their focus there and figure out how to make their argument stronger or work the way they want it to work before they start correcting their grammar or language use. This made me feel like global perhaps wasn’t the place to start. And perhaps I’m misunderstanding it, especially when it says that global is often used to justify the grade.

Rubrics are not something that I’m currently using, but I like the idea of sitting down and articulating what an A, B, C, etc. paper looks like and having that available to my students as they are starting to put together an assignment. I think I will start doing this with my assignments. I currently have a list of expectations at the end in a “Putting it all together” section that I don’t know is the most effective way to do it.

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I read chapter one from bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom as recommended in the BTW mini course compassionate pedagogy video.  Much of the chapter resonated with me, especially the content about “feminist classrooms” being the “the one space where teachers were willing to acknowledge a connection between ideas learned in university settings and those learned in life practices” (hooks 15).  This idea particularly struck me because it mirrors my own experience many years ago as a student.  The very first two seminars I ever took happened to be feminist theory courses taught by two different professors, both of whom were “striving to create participatory spaces for the sharing of knowledge” (hooks 15).  At the time, I didn’t know any better and simply assumed this was how all grad-level seminars were offered and how the very best professors taught.  It wasn’t until much later that I understood why their classrooms were set up in this way: the very nature of the classroom was designed to allow students and professors to engage together in their learning while everyone present could find and share their own voice freely.  Those formative experiences gave me something to strive for and latch onto.  What hooks was describing way back in 1994 reminds me of what I would consider a “safe space” in today’s times and lingo.  These safe spaces are crucial for real learning, but they also serve as a reminder that plenty of classrooms that aren’t safe spaces may very well do the opposite.  As Jamila Lyiscott explains in one of my favorite TED Talks called “Why English Class Is Silencing Students of Color,” the fact that we describe some classrooms as “safe spaces” implies that other classrooms are not safe and that outside of a safe-space classroom, there is a palpable feeling of “fugitivity” for many students.  To counter that, Lyiscott describes that the classroom should be democratic, set-up with everyone (including the teacher) sitting in a circle, and offered in a way that promotes interaction and participation with both students and the teacher learning from each other equally and as equals.

One critique I have of hooks’ chapter is that some of it didn’t age as well as other parts did.  For example, hooks speaks of “confessional narratives” as being something that both students and vulnerable, risk-taking professors should engage in.  hooks says, “When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess” (21).  Indeed, teachers should share too. However, hooks frames “sharing” as “confessions,” which for me elicits some very negative connotations, specifically calling forth ideas of shame, wrongdoing, and admission of guilt.  In today’s classrooms, when people share, the better practice is to consider the sharing of ideas without judgement.  This would be especially true in the safe-space classrooms that hooks envisions.

Nevertheless, the judgment-free sharing behind those “confessional narratives” is still something I want to realize in my own classroom, and this is something which is still a work in progress for me.  Despite striving for a safe-space classroom myself, I still find myself often holding back when students are sharing.  I often share less than I could or even want to.  This is in part due to long-standing worries about letting go of “authority” in the classroom, which of course ought not be there in the first place.  When I find myself holding back, not being vulnerable, not striving for self-actualization, and guarding and editing my thoughts as I say them to students, I need to remind myself of exactly what I never want to do in the classroom: fall victim to what hooks describes for many instructors who operate “by the exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom, the classroom” (17).  One example where I can apply this is during an icebreaker activity that we do every day in class, wherein I normally stand to the side while students talk and participate, and I merely listen.  That said, my goal for the rest of the semester is to engage in this activity right alongside my students as they share and engage.

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I have been particularly interested in assessment for a while. That is why I have decided to comment on the first article "Assessing Student Writing" by the Writing Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

According to the article, assessing writing is a process that involves evaluating student work for formative or summative purposes. It occurs at various stages throughout a course and teachers take on different roles to provide feedback. One of the main purposes of writing assessment is to offer feedback for student development.

The article further states that good assessment practices start with clear learning goals and assignment descriptions. Teachers should design writing assignments with learning goals and assessment methods in mind and offer feedback early in the writing process. It is crucial to maintain open communication with students about expectations and assessment methods. Balancing the amount of feedback and allowing students to maintain control over their work promotes a healthy learning environment.

I agree with most of the points made in this article. I believe I also implement most of the suggestions made in the article in my teaching.

I agree with the article that too much feedback can be confusing, daunting and counterproductive to the student. Although many people would argue against using a rubric, I like to use a rubric for assessing student writing, but I do not confine myself to the rubric while assessing. There is a reason why I do this. I know equality does not always ensure equity. I have also found that some students, especially those students who are not very familiar with the US academic norms yet and /or students who are from different cultures can produce high quality drafts without conforming to the rubric.  So I also allow for and/or am accepting of norms of non-dominant varieties of English in my student writing as long as it is comprehensible. Of course, I also teach my students about the privilege and importance of using the norms of Standard English varieties in academic writing as as well teaching them about the risks of using the norms of non-dominant/non-Standard varieties.

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I read Asoue’s Chapter 4: What Labor-Based Grading Contracts Look Like. Labor-based grading contracts : building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom, and skimmed through the Labor-Based Grading Resources.

One positive of this approach, is that it privileges the process rather than the product. Students get to focus on achieving course goals instead of the grade they will receive at the end of each project. Additionally, some students work hard on a project but remain at the C level, while some put less effort into scraping an “A.” I think labor-based grading would help to level the playing field, ensuring that all students put sufficient effort into assignments (as students and the instructor define it). Another benefit is that it frees the instructor to help more students learn and understand concepts rather than spending excessive amount of time grading papers and determining whether a final product is an A or A+ etc.

Some of the critiques that I have of contact grading are articulated in this paragraph:

(a)   Is it true, for example, that producing a certain amount of writing entails the same degree of labor for all students? Surely, some students could produce five typed pages in two hours, while another student might take seven hours to do the same task. In fact, this disparity is likely–especially at institutions that now admit students with widely-divergent levels of preparedness. How does contract grading account for this disparity?

(b)   How can an instructor enact “labor-based grading” when there is no reliable metric to indicate how much labor any particular student put into an assignment?

(c)   Does this incentivize students to try less hard than they would otherwise? (source “Contract-Grading” and the War Against Academic Excellence — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (jamesgmartin.center)

I want to try labor-based grading but begin with one assignment rather than all the grading for a course. This will benefit me as much as the students, allowing me to be more attentive to students and the process by which they produce an assignment.

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I decided to view the TED Talk by Kristin Neff. On a personal level, I have mixed feelings about this text. I have been trying to approach teaching sources and my teaching through a neurodivergent lens, which is why I find much what Neff says a bit grating. I agree that we should take a self-compassionate approach to ourselves and to stop being judgmental. I think that people are too hard on themeselves. I also agree that self-compassion and self-kindness can have a positive affects on others.
However, many of us live marginalized lives. We've been judge even with these type of self-compassionate approaches. It's interesting that she mentions meditation because I have met folks who cannot practice meditation because it does not recognize their inability to stand or sit still. It does not recognize its own ableism. Not everyone can meditate. Not everyone wants or likes to meditate. Not everyone can sit or stand still. Not everyone likes still ness. I am aware that meditation does not have to involve any of this, but it is at the root, which makes it problematic for some neurodivergent folks. I would rather not be asked to do something that is beyond my reach, and I would not ask my students to do something that is beyond their reach.

I like encouraging students to think or step outside their comfort zone, but I also know that some can't. This is why my compassion approach stems from acknowledging limits and assigning familiar work like a journal prompt that only the teacher reads or a prompt that ask them to analyze a specific passage in a reading. I have to remind myself that I am working with 18-21 year olds who are still trying to navigate their way out of high school and their parents space. This is one way I try to foster gentleness in the classroom.

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I read the article from TES Magazine – “What is pedagogy?” which has a systematic way of conceptualizing pedagogical styles. Every teacher brings a unique energy to their students, and the “trick” of working alongside that energy as opposed to against it is beneficial (plus, this practice falls in line with compassionate approaches). The pedagogical styles covered were:

1.       Behaviorism – Teacher-centered pedagogy; lectures, discrete/explicit teaching, modeling, and demonstration, “traditional”

2.       Constructivism – Student-centered pedagogy; based on Piaget’s studies that students come ready to learn and the instructor must act as a facilitator of activities, “progressive”

3.       Social Constructivism – Student and teacher blended; based on Vygotsky’s work that learning is not just social but also built through collaboration between teacher and student

4.       Liberationism – Critical approach that places a student’s voice at the center; developed by Paolo Freire, seems to encourage student choice and student-guided self-discovery

I think I am a social constructivist. However, as I’ve gotten more comfortable with teaching the past few years, I find myself applying more liberationist techniques in my pedagogy. For instance, I’ve worked to develop more activities that give students choices and options. My teaching in ENGL101/102 tends to emphasize developing skills which I believe are equally important to writing; some examples are problem-solving activities in various group sizes, major project collaboration options, and freedom to choose topics.

I have learned to trust my students over time, discovering that when students are given the freedom to make independent decisions and employ creativity in their own ways, projects tend to flourish to degrees unexpected. With that said, there are always students who crumble under creative freedom, and I can personally relate to being one of those undergraduates who really enjoyed a tight-knit systematic, sometimes predictable approach. For those students, I also make sure to employ moments of modeling and demonstration, which I believe are equally valuable.

One big lesson I learned this semester was about handling student writing in Chat GPT. Subconsciously, I went into the SP2023 semester thinking that if I didn’t talk about it, and just said “no” that they wouldn’t write in Chat GPT. Unfortunately, I received three essays that were direct copy-and-paste results from the AI, and not a single essay met any of my rubric guidelines. I think a technical or business writing course (in-person) would be ideal for an AI-inspired curriculum because of the focus on explicit genre forms.

Regardless, the next course I teach in-person will be AI-centered. I want students to learn to celebrate the humanity that only they can bring into their writing; I want them to think critically about what they think makes writing “good” and what goodness they enact through sharing their ideas. It may be useful to teach GPT as a research tool, and after submitting a major writing project, students could do a class activity where they attempt to rewrite their work with AI to see how a) it can make plenty of objective errors, b) fail to perform interesting analysis, c) fail to create college-level writing in explicit genre forms, and d) produce rather predictable and repetitive sentence structures. They could also reflect on benefits of working with AI systems like Chat GPT. I think the current academic integrity issue could be improved by embracing transparency and pointing out current flaws in the systems.

In a liberationist approach, I’d like to have some student-led socratic seminars on topics such as technological accessibility, the benefits and downfalls of AI, and the surveillance and data-theft issues going on with AI use (which often function to irrevocably hurt minorities and underrepresented groups on the internet). In a 101/102 course, I could see the students playing around with more traditional and multi-genre based forms, depending on what they find suits them; i.e., back to the blue-books, whiteboards, oratory, and kinetic/dance forms. It would be interesting to see how students approach traditional writing/speaking methods with a creative fervor.

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I was so glad to see this unit because I've been working as an instructional support designer of the Office of Gen Ed for a couple of years now and I helped develop some of the materials that help explain Exploring Perspectives and Building Connections to teachers so I was really glad to learn through Amelia's video that our approach to teaching ENGL 308 will encompass these ideas!

Through Ausburg (2016), I learnt that interdisciplinarity:

a) needs to be understood in connection to "disciplinarity" which refers to the unique ways of reading, writing, thinking, researching, and doing that an academic discipline follows.

b) given a), "interdisciplinarity refers to "the general phenomena of combining or integrating disciplinary perspectives".

c) when applying it inside classrooms, we need to have a process-oriented approach geared towards problem-solving.

Intergrating what I know about the Building Connections requirement of GenEd , Amelia's video on the same, and Ausburg's (2016) explanation of interdisciplinary, I am excited to make my ENGL 308 oriented towards exploring students towards interdisciplinary research. For my main assignment, I am designing an "Impact of AI tools on your professional field Report". In this report, students will be asked to choose an emerging AI tool (like ChatGPT) and explore the impact that it will have on their chosen professional/technical field.

Keeping what I learnt about interdisciplinarity in this unit, I will now ask students to find atleast 1-2 secondary sources from the field of AI studies, and 1-2 secondary sources from their professional-technical field and try to synthesize them in their report.

Finally, it was quite eye opening for me to learn that the push towards interdisciplinary education stems from UN sustainable development goals! Its so cool that the UN recommends that interdisciplinary perspectives are essential to solve the world's major problems. I think highlighting that to students in class will help motivate them to do the engaging work of integrating knowledge from the two disciplines I'd like them to explore.

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I really liked reading the Tes magazine's "What is pedagogy" essay and its covering of the four main paradigms of pedagogic philosophy: Behaviourism, Constructivism, Social Constructivism, and Liberationism. It was really helped to get a refresher on these four schools and re-think where I position myself. When I took another look at my teaching philosophy, I realized, I largely combine Social Constructivism and Liberationism in my approaches.

I am interested in integrating emergent technologies like AI writing assistants (ChatGPT) into my pedagogy for teaching ENGL 308 this semester. This reading helped me develop an approach to the various ways that I should integrate it. Using tenets of social constructivism, I should ensure that I scaffold the use of these technologies through mini-activities, each of which are in the learners' zone of proximal development. Using tenets of liberationist pedagogy, I should also be mindful of how our students have varying access and familiarity to technology and thus the activities should not assume prior knowledge. Additionally, many of these technologies have important ethical concerns that need to be tackled, like their questionable privacy and data handling practices. As tech-comm specialists, I'd like to bring my students into analyzing and criticizing these policies as they engage with these tools.

I also watched Neff's self compassion theory. As someone who has researched the role of emotions in writing, especially that of academic writing anxiety, I am really inspired by Neff's work. I think her opertionaliztion of self compassion in three distinct terms: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulles is really helpful. As I teach my students to engage with these technologies, many of which can often be anxiogenic, I will remember to scaffold them within a language of self-compassion to help tackle any difficult emotions that arise during the process. Many commentators predict that AI writing assistants could cause massive unemployment for technical writers which is a big source of anxiety for many of us so taking a self-compassion approach will help us be prepared for the long run.

Thanks for these wonderful collection of resources, Amelia!

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I am responding to "Assessing Student Writing" by the Writing Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

A positive: “Instead of acting as an editor, suggest options or open-ended alternatives the student can choose for their revision path”. This idea confirms the correctness of a change I have made in my assessment practices. Previously in my first year of teaching I used to heavily edit student papers, mostly earlier drafts, but found out that this is causing students to lose control of their own papers. Since then I have abandoned this practice and adopted the strategy of suggesting open-ended alternatives.

A critique: I agree with all of the things suggested in the article. If I have to critique it somewhere, I’ll say that a sentence in it needs to be explained, maybe with a few more sentences and/or one or two examples. The sentence is “it is also important to remember that rubric writing (especially in writing classrooms) is more art than science”. I am interested in the idea and want to know more about why the author thinks so.

One application to my teaching materials or approach: I will use the idea of asking students to talk about their process of writing, or ask them questions about their work, before giving my feedback. Normally I explain my feedback and then ask them questions, which I think is then impacted by the feedback I have just given them. Instead, I need to make them talk first, so that I can gain better insights into their process and then we can talk more about what they say, as well as about my feedback.

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It was interesting to think about STEM as a coalition of disciplines, how the United Nations mindset frames interdisciplinarity, and how that frames multiple perspective-taking in GenEd at UArizona. Bearing that in mind, I decided to read the Grau work which analyzes the university as being socially responsible. This is a 500+ page report, so I don't profess to reading it all here! I will describe some brief takeaways here, though.

I focused on the chapter by Vilata which is about how a Catalonian university built a system which is based in specific challenges related to the Catalon society. For example, social and human development was used to create networks within the university through Education, Research, and Transfer. It seems that the university wanted to ensure their place within the larger role of ACUP member universities (which is akin to UArizona being an ABOR institution).

All that to say, I'm not really feeling this chapter as one which I would teach my students, due to the dense and abstract language, but rather I would like to talk to my classes about the role of their units in relation to the college and university. I would probably pull the fancy Venn diagram that the WP often uses to describe the relationship between English and SBS.

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First off, I really appreciated Amelia's discussion of the blind man and elephant parable in the overview to this module--especially the embedded video! Students will find this particularly useful and I'm super excited to introduce this to them while learning "foggy" concepts like genre (as per my last post).

I chose to read the Oswal & Palmer piece for this one; I've had dinner with Sushil and engaged with his work multiple times throughout my early career, so it was refreshing to get a chance to see the work in this mini-course.

My favorite piece of the chapter is the 7-point heuristic. In fact, as someone who has served as a peer reviewer on articles on the topic of disability/access, it's nice to have a framework from which to construct my reviews to potential authors. For instance, #3 strikes a chord: "[Does the article] simply [evoke]...disability as a trendy topic, or where [does the article] suggest concrete steps to counter ableism, inaccessible designs, and exclusionary pedagogies?" In fact, not only does this question serve to offer up a bunch of useful constructive critique for the author, but it also pretty much [hedging again, thx Hyland LOL) outlines the introduction to a book introduction I am currently writing about disability and the teaching of writing.

So in terms of WID, I would like to help engage my students in terms of analyzing disability/access, not because they HAVE to (as per Dolmage's notion of checklisting), but because it's so key t o get writers on the same page with their audiences.

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I read Hyland's piece in order to have a refresher on genre. It was really helpful to read the various models which are outlined in there, and I can't wait to go through some of this stuff as the basis for theoretical framework during lectures.

For some reason I immediately thought of ye olde rhetorical fallacies while going through what Hyland terms "Hedges and booster." Essentially, hedges are devices implying commitment (e.g. might, likely, possibly) while boosters imply certainty (e.g. certain, definitely, demonstrate). I hope to teach the students how to strategically use these terms in their discourse as argumentative devices.

Hyland also lists off advantages of genre-based academic writing instruction. I won't list them all here, but "supportive," "empowering," and "explicit" for some reason (there I go with hedging LOL) stuck. If there's one thing I love it is to make sure that my classes follow a routine that most any random observer can detect, and that students know early on so that they feel comfortable and supported.

The takeaway from this reading will be how to teach genre effectively, and so borrowing from Hyland's models will be effective.

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Dev-Topic 1 Pedagogy & Teaching Persona 

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Dev-Topic 1 Pedagogy & Teaching Persona 

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I was immediately drawn towards the introduction to bell hooks's book, Teaching to Transgress. Of note hooks mentions that teaching is performative, not as entertainment value but rather "a catalyst that calls...[for] active learning." To teach requires passion, and as hooks points out, it isn't seen as the primary goal for the academic. But what's especially important to remember is that our students are real people who are part of a community of learners, and as hooks reminds us, "the engaged voice [of these learners] must never be fixed and absolute but always changing." hooks describes the shifts in education for Black women following desegregation, and as a Black woman, her role as a college students was seen as proving herself to be on par with White students. There's so much to say here, but for now I can only hope that with the 5 classes I've been assigned to teach this semester, I can take away with me the inspirational power of hooks's work.

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Toward a Socially responsible University

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Toward a Socially responsible University

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(Teaching) Ethics and Technical Communication

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(Teaching) Ethics and Technical Communication

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Rethinking the Articulation Between Business and Technical Communication and Writing in the Disciplines

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Rethinking the Articulation Between Business and Technical Communication and Writing in the Disciplines

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I read Dreher's "Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom."

Positive: In this article, I appreciated how Dreher focused on the ethics of communication and how Plain Language Communication (PLC) can help assist in reaching some of those goals of ethical communication, i.e. access, action, and trust. Though I've often thought about the ethics of communication, (for example is there a point at which persuasion is so powerful that it becomes unethical?) I hadn't really thought about it in terms of technical communication, so seeing the ways that PLC can be leveraged for a more ethical technical communication overall excites me! (Not to mention the ways that it can help facilitate social justice!!) I also really appreciated the practical examples Dreher gave.

Critique: Dreher's discussion of social justice and PLC made me wish that they had explained this a bit further, especially as it relates to the teaching of technical communication. I feel that this discussion was a bit stunted, as the examples were mostly about governmental or business situations, which, though helpful to visualize, it did leave me wanting more as it applied to the classroom. However, I do get that their purpose was to cover a lot of ground in this paper.

Application: I loved Dreher's section on Plain Language, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication, starting on page 55. Dreher gave excellent suggestions regarding how to tech technical communication as it intersects with rhetoric, specifically how we constantly need to interrogate what we even mean by "plain," because that word itself "has been deployed to meet different goals over time. Introducing even brief histories of plainness can reveal for students the idea that through plain language, we are promoting a conception of the term that embeds and conceals contemporary values within it" (56). I think that this would be a great place to start when it comes to introducing technical writing, because this same idea can be leveraged to ask "what do we even mean by 'technical writing' or 'technical communication'? I could imagine this working as a valuable exercise to get students reflecting on their current conceptions of the word and then having them reflect again at the end of the course to see what they think about then.

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In “Ways of Doing and Knowing in the Disciplines,” the author ushers us through a contextualizing history of how the “specialized domains” of disciplines came to characterize the current paradigm. This made me wonder about the WID focus on “procedural” writing. The article challenges us to find connections, and maybe portals between the practice of writing and its use in other disciplines. From conversations with a friend who teaches in the Philosophy department, it seems that other disciplines have taken part in some training on some of the prevalent pedagogical values in our department, and may even embrace some of that. The resistance that this article conjures is imaginable, and I was inspired by the idea that in their Gen Ed reimagining, we might make headway, and provide some exposure to our ideas regarding assessment, which has real student benefits, and allows for a more unified, holistic learning experience beyond ouro own classrooms.

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I really enjoyed the topic 5 video: Putting it Alll Together. I was also  interested in the Grading Conference, and most especially in the idea of students being responsible/accountable for their own notes, which might be another meaningful text to be used in an activity in a project sequence. The assessment as conversation/collaborative even. Of course, assessments are usually discussed (and grievances  sometimes aired) after the fact. The process in the conference allows all parties to arrive at the same page. One of the compassionate aspects of this process is that we can walk the walk. For example, I spend significant time at the beginning of the course discussing labor-based assessment, and this gives students the opportunity to see that the process is not an arbitrary ranking, but a transparent tabulation of effort.

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I chose the reading by Dreher "Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom". The aspect I found most interesting was that, by implementing this type of language, writing becomes more inclusive, even aiming for "social inclusion and justice". Also, as described in the video, by implementing this aspect of language, provides student´s with awareness of their own perspectives and the way they are making themselves understood within the field that they are being part of. Still, I thought it was a very new and a little difficult topic for me, since I am still learning about rhetoric and writing. It´s super interesting, however, even after reading this chapter, i still find it a little complex to develop activities and materials with plain language. Yet, I agree that it´s super useful for these student´s to develop their own sense of writing and communication in their respective professional fields.

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I chose Hyland´s article "Genre and academic writing in the disciplines". Personally, I found it interesting since "genre-approach" learning was something new for me when I started teaching at the writing program. I think the reading describes all of the affordances that genre-approach brings into the writing class. The author mentions that "looking at specific genres tells us a lot about how we create meanings; both the purposes writers are trying to achieve and the language they are using to do it"; which I think it helps develop student´s sense of writing and be more accurate in their own writing process to develop a good product. Another advantage that the author mentions is that, by using genres that students might use in their professional lives, the material is authentic and the writing is more meaningful and helps student´s see the their writing translated to "real world" products.
One observation I have about this reading is that the explanation of genre, communities and translating into "teaching" practice is a little too broad or difficult to implement, as a novice teacher, myself.

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I read Augsburg, T. (2016). What is interdisciplinarity? and I found it really eye-opening. I think I used to have different idea of interdisciplinarity. I learned about the background of the content of the BTW classes, which is the United Nations sustainable development goals as well as STEM and other disciplines. I thought the explanation of interdisciplinary study goals were interesting and straightforward, stressing the importance of including perspectives from different disciplines and studies to address a problem. Also, the reading suggests that implementing interdisciplinary studies, the students tend to "transfer" their learning into other areas making the learning more meaningful and "applicable" to different disciplines. The author points out the "holistic" and creative affordances interdisciplinary studies bring into education.

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I read Carter's "Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines."

Positive: I am struck right away by his articulation of faculty frustrating with becoming "writing teachers" in their own disciplines and courses--something that I've always wondered about/struggled with because I've met so many highly intelligent and caring faculty who expressed this frustration, but I and they couldn't exactly put a finger on why it frustrates them so much. It makes so much sense now when you realize that much of their writing skills were learned through what Carter (via David Ransdell) identifies as a "slow acculturation through various apprenticeship discourses" (para. 1). Thus, if this is the case, then of course they wonder, "why on earth do I need to give students direct instruction in writing? Aren't they just going to learn through osmosis as we go along in the course?" (Has significant resonance with my experience working with engineering students at the writing center at Cal State Long Beach during my MA). Moreover, the historical background that he gives on the effect that German higher education's focus on disciplinary knowledge had on academia in the United States, which then pushed out rhetoric as a field of study, instead moving toward general freshman comp, is very fascinating--it helps give some more context to my critiques/questions I posted in my Topic 2 response. Furthermore, I LOVE his distinction between knowledge and knowing---a much more eloquent way of putting some of the things I said in my Topic 1 response. When he says that "the focus of WID, in contrast, tends to be on procedural knowledge, writing as a way of knowing in a discipline" (para. 5)--that to me, seems to be the true nature of education and learning--when you don't just "know" content, but you "know" what to do with it--how to apply it--how to think about it. Furthermore, I love how he gives such great examples with the lab experiment, and then the course outcomes for psychology and zoology... Man, I must say--there were SO MANY great one liners in this article!!! I am definitely going to ponder this one for a while.

Critique: Carter is very, very thorough in this article, and I really appreciated all the examples he gave to flesh out his concepts. A critique I have is not necessarily a critique about his work per se, but an elaboration on a problem he identifies. Toward the end of the article (not sure what para #) he says, "The new university, with its focus on the delivery of highly specialized declarative knowledge and on writing as outside the disciplines, tends to promote a relatively language-poor educational environment. The emphasis on knowing, doing, and writing in the disciplines may be seen as an attempt to return to that earlier language-rich environment when writing and speaking were at the center of education. From another perspective, however, this emphasis maybe understood as a part of a broader critique of the modern university and particularly the disciplinary structure of knowledge on which it is founded, a move toward postdisciplinarity or nondisciplinarity (Delanty; Ford; Mourad; Readings; see also Samuels)." I feel that this speaks very well to my critique I outlined in my Topic 2 response--this tension between highly specialized disciplines and a general educational knowledge that can pull a bit from everywhere. I know that we need both, and one cannot exist without the other, so I feel that he's given me a great answer to ponder. The answer to this tension, lies in the "emphasis on knowing, doing, and writing in the disciplines may be seen as an attempt to return to that earlier language-rich environment when writing and speaking were at the center of education." The work to make this happen though? A whole other story....!

Application: At the very end of his article, in the very last paragraph, he has a couple lines that were such great takeaways for my own teaching. He states, "It may be, then, that writing is located neither fully in nor fully outside the disciplines because disciplinary boundaries themselves are porous and in flux; the disciplines are not fixed containers at all. Projecting the disciplines as ways of knowing, doing, and writing tends to emphasize not disjunction but junction, the intersections of disciplines, the connection between research and teaching, and the ties between writing and knowing. From this perspective, it is not so much writing in or outside but writing of the disciplines." How much more clearly can you articulate the mission of BTW? I don't think much more clearly. Therefore, my intent for teaching BTW would be one that aims to teach "writing of the the disciplines." This connects so nicely with my application for Topic 2, where my intent is to constantly educate myself on and remember that the students in my classes are ones who come from disciplines themselves that have their own philosophies and methodologies, etc. So, in order to be a great teacher, I think that the onus is on me to make sure I understand the ways of knowing, doing, and writing in the disciplines that intersect with and inform the writing I am teaching.

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For my fourth response I read “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom.” The ideas in this article are on point with some of the expectations and goals I would like to apply to my own BTW course. I agree that using plain-language strategies in technical communication courses can better prepare students for experiences outside the academic realm. The author asserts, “I argue that plain language is an important framework for technical communication teachers and students because it is an opportunity to see our field anchored to an established public movement, to use our disciplinary knowledge to critique and address the movement’s limitations, as well as to interrogate assumptions about social justice, “plainness,” and access with our students.” (Kira Dreher 46). She goes on to claim that given the wide use of plain language at the international level, that it will provide a global connection and engagement opportunity for students. What is most appreciated is looking at the way language impacts students outside the classroom and providing ways to develop links that will help them advance in their careers. The examples on plain language in fields of government, healthcare, and business give teachers a good foundation on ways to approach this concept—these are effective real world examples that people can latch onto. One critique would be a need to provide better resources for teachers working with non-native English speakers. Providing fair warning that using plain language with ELL learners is good, but resources and approaches to working to bridge the necessary gaps would have been beneficial.

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For my third response I read, “Genre and academic writing in the disciplines.”  This was an interesting read on examining genre and its application in language and writing. The ideas on understanding genre and its application in writing are intriguing. I appreciate that they think a teacher’s purpose is to “demystify the genres that matter to students by making their key features salient” (Ken Hyland 560). My one critique, I do not think this source provides a good definition or example of genre. The author claims, “Genre is a concept over-burned with definitions, so I’ll keep mine simple—it is a term for grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use language to respond to recurring situations.” (Ken Hyland 544). I am still not sure if this is a simplified definition. I am also not sure how to take some their ideas and apply it into my own teaching. I will note their ideas on scaffolding as providing a foundation and road to progress for the learners is on par with some of the approaches I already integrate in my teaching. However, part of me would like more clarity on their ideas.

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I read “What is interdisciplinarity? Some Essential Definitions” for my second response. It was an engaging piece on issues with defining and identifying the term “interdisciplinary” and its application to academia and wider usage. I appreciate the that the author tries to outline some fundamental features with this term. For example, in table 2.3 they list the “Five Characteristics of Interdisciplinary Study.” These ideas remind me of some the approaches I have taken when teaching research in my English 102 courses. At the beginning of the course, I implore students to formulate research questions that incite investigation and examination. Many of these questions lead to different points of research where students are encouraged to listen to all sides of the issue they are examining. This encourages a comprehensive perspective and for some it leads to finding insights and solutions to their issues. As an educator I want to keep these characteristics in mind when supporting students in their research. The one critique is that some of the ideas seemed to overlap and repeat. The same ideas such as “asking meaningful questions” and “looking at multiple sources” were peppered throughout the article.

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I read Augsburg, chapter 2, on defining "interdisciplinarity." I chose to read this one because I am a product of a small liberal arts college, where I actually received a liberal arts BA, and I was very interested in learning about interdisciplinary studies to see if it was similar or different from the liberal arts perspective I had during my undergrad.

Positive: I appreciated the breadth of the scope in this article; it was a true introduction to interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary studies, and there were several definitions and terms that I had not heard before, such as Partial and Full Interdisciplinarity, laid out by Klein and Newell on page 23. Moreover, I appreciated how the article outlines criteria for how interdisciplinarity looks different in different settings, for example, the interdisciplinarity research effort versus the interdisciplinary classroom.

Critique: In true introduction fashion, though, there was little "meat;" there were lots of great definitions and criteria for the components, but little fleshing out of those definitions. Now, that's not really a critique, since I knew that I was likely to get that, given its introductory nature; however, I bring it up because, as a product of a liberal arts degree, I found that there was little, if anything at all, within their "interdisciplinary" definitions and criteria that I did not experience in my undergrad program. I definitely want to read further in the text to understand if they flesh this out a bit more, because, after simply reading chapter 2, I am left wondering if we're splitting hairs with all these very specific definitions and criteria for different types of interdisciplinary programs and studies? Moreover, zooming back out, it also makes me wonder about the pro and cons of research and disciplines becoming more and more specific within the academy--in some places, I feel like interdisciplinary studies/approaches are detested--and yet, the rest of these readings in Topic 2 outline the need for critical thinkers who can solve complex problems that require holding multiple perspectives in tandem. So, are we putting students in a sticky place if the world calls for evermore interdisciplinary thought and approaches, and yet the academy they are taught by continually silos them into very, very specific corners of thought? I don't really know... I see the value of specifics in disciplines, and I know that interdisciplinary then relies on the specifics of the discipline... so I guess maybe it's just a really tricky line that we have to spend a lot of time hashing out what it looks like in our programs, curriculum, classrooms, etc.

Application:
All that to say, given the fact that I am a product of a liberal arts degree, it's crucial for me to ensure that I am approaching my classes in a way that cultivates interdisciplinary thought. I believe this is extremely important in all classrooms with all content, but BTW seems especially pertinent. Thus, first off, I always have to remember the value in that. The article stated that "Disciplines frame the way we view the world" (16), and this is so true--harkening back to what hooks' said in chapter 1, education as the practice of freedom is a place where both teacher and student learn from each other reciprocally, and I think BTW courses are an especially great example of this. I must always remember the different disciplines the students come from, with their own philosophies, methodologies, etc., and by committing to learning about them, more and more, for both myself and from my own students, I think that will make the class all the richer for its diverse perspectives. All to say, hopefully, in some way, the classroom culture I create is modeling a situation that students would experience outside the classroom as well, so I am truly equipping students with the knowledge and skills that they can take with them to solve the problems the world so desperately needs solved right now.

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I read hooks' Teaching to Trangress, chapter 1: Engaged Pedagogy. I have read many other essays of hers, and I cannot believe that I haven't had a chance to read this; however, I am very grateful that this course is giving me an opportunity to dive in!

hooks's view of education as "the practice of freedom" resonates with me greatly--it reflects my own personal experience with education (for which I am exceeding grateful), and it reflects the ways that I seek to engage my students in my own classroom.

Positive: I love how hooks identifies the overemphasis of the "mind" or "intellect" in the academy, wherein the body, and thereby, wellbeing, gets left behind. She says: "It was difficult to maintain fidelity to the idea of the intellectual as someone who sought to be whole—well-grounded in a context where there was little emphasis on spiritual well-being, on care of the soul. Indeed, the objectification of the teacher within bourgeois educational structures seemed to denigrate notions of wholeness and uphold the idea of a mind/body split, one that promotes and supports compartmentalization (16)." I resonate with this--it is very easy to see ones role as an instructor or teacher as that of simply "transferring content" so that a student can regurgitate back to you. However, I'd argue that TRUE knowledge comes when both known in the mind and in the body, and, as instructors, we must do all we can to resist that tendency to make learning just regurgitation--regurgitation is not freedom, after all!

Critique: I think that the only critique I have with this is maybe something she might discuss further along in the book (I am definitely reading the rest of it this summer!) or maybe it's something that has gotten worse in the last 20+ years since she wrote, and that is, the difficulty in prioritizing wellbeing of ourselves as instructors in a world where teaching has become more and more a business, and time and money are evermore difficult resources to attain equally and in ample supply, and stability in the profession is hard to come by. More can certainly be said on this, and I admit that it may reflect my own personal views more than anything, but I would be curious to hear hooks speak more of what she envisions wellbeing to be in the academy today, given these current constraints.

Application: One thing I really, REALLY loved, that I really need to spend more time considering in my own practice, is the example she gave of her student, Gary, who ended up not taking her advice! She says, "This demand on the students’ part does not mean that they will always accept our guidance. This is one of the joys of education as the practice of freedom, for it allows students to assume responsibility for their choices" (19). I find that, in my own teaching, one way that I struggle is when students are not doing well, and it's due to lack of engagement with the course, i.e. turning in assignments or participating in lessons, I take that burden onto myself, and feel like it's my fault that they did not make the choice to participate. However, I need to start resting in the fact that there is only so much I can do, and, when I do the best I can, that's all I can do, and it truly is up to the student to choose to engage, and shifting my perspective to see that as part of the freedom of education would go a long way for me, I think.

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Although I’m not really blown-away by David Carter’s theoretical framework for the WID model he presents in “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines,” I share his enthusiasm for how WID can offer an opening toward more compelling ways of teaching and learning writing – albeit, not necessarily in writing programs like the one that employs moi!

I like how his WID model situates writing in disciplinary contexts where knowledge is dynamic, not static, as writing should be. So much of my job as a writing teacher is trying to de-mythologizing writing (especially academic writing), which is very challenging because of the standardized way students have been programmed to think of and do it. WID has proven to be a terrific ally in this regard – but not exactly in terms of the formula presented by Carter.

I’ve often said to students things like “It’s not so much a matter of ‘writing’ like an engineer or a physical therapist or a software developer, you need to ‘think’ like one.” In some assignments that I call simulated practicums (which Sean Rys pulls off better than I do) I challenge my students to actually ‘inhabit’ the subject position they are writing from – not in a literal sense, but in a simulated “fake-it-til-you-make-it” sense. This isn’t just a pop-psychology ploy; it’s a form of mimesis, a key rhetorical practice taught by the ancient Sophists.

Throughout the article, Carter takes pedagogical positions that resonated with me. For one example, he writes that “the goal is not simply to write a research paper for the sake of learning to manage research from sources, but to use the process of doing and writing research to shape a disciplinary way of knowing.” This statement nicely captures a write-to-learn approach to WID. Although the article is very teacher-centered, what with its end-goal on drafting lengthy discipline-specific learning outcomes to satisfy accreditation agencies, this student-centered pedagogical moment hit the spot.

The theoretical framework of the model, and some key concepts, didn’t resonate all that much with me. Much of my 2014 dissertation critiques concepts that pop up in this article such as the privileging of “conceptual knowledge” and the meta-ization (something that happens when you attach the prefix “meta-“ to a word) of common practices and categories. Just like with the other scholars he cites – Miller, Connor, Russell, Bazerman -- we get the popular narrative about how something akin to instrumental rationalism (here “declarative knowledge”) took over higher education and resulted in the “demise of rhetoric” (386). Ultimately a complex system of “meta”-genres and “meta”-disciplines comes to the rescue, seemingly descending from Plato’s “metaphysical” realm of eidos, Western philosophy’s “heaven.” Rhetoric's centrality is re-established, but it's the result of the triumph of episteme over techne.

His drawing on Russell and “North American genre theory” (408) as a way to resurrect rhetoric and nostalgically return to “the education system of the old college [that] encouraged a language-rich teaching and learning environment” where recitations “dominated” classrooms and fed into the “intensely competitive declamations and debates outside class”(409) today might be considered a systemically classist or racist idealization. Several prominent (white) rhetoricians of this time period (1990s-2000s) advocated this kind of glorious return to olden days’ practices as a way of advancing the discipline of rhetoric; they didn’t conceive this vision as systemically “white” – hence ostensibly racist and classist -- but more of a renaissance of classical rhetoric. They were armed with an ideology that stratified knowledge work into “higher” and “lower” regions -- a classical mindset -- with their designated “meta”-regions being the highest. The bad guy in this article, “declarative knowledge,” is way down in the nether regions. This kind of dichotomous thinking permeates Carter’s article; however, that was the paradigm in technical communication scholarship (and in writing studies generally) at that time.

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For this response, I read Oswal and Palmer's (2021) "A Critique of Disability and Accessibiltiy Research in Technical Communication Through the Models of Emancipatory Disability Research Paradigm and Participatory Scholarship."

One thing I really appreciated from Oswal and Palmer (2021) was the careful parsing of the difference between impairment and disability, with "disability" including not just functional barriers, but attitudes toward disability, social stigma, and the medical community's involvement in disability (p. 246). I think that making this distinction helps to emphasize the importance of the emancipatory research paradigm in recognizing that only disabled people could accurately indicate the labor that goes into navigating ableist environments.

An added strength is that the Oswal and Palmer outline what participatory scholarship would look like when they cover the research design that Oswal designed with Kruse in Kruse and Oswal (2018), where Kruse, as a student with bipolar, became the first author through the process of disclosing as the article comes to include Kruse's participatory autoethnography as a focal point of the research collected and analyzed.

As Oswal and Palmer (2021) explain, it can be challenging to incorporate participatory design approaches in TPW class projects because of institutions' protection of  disabled students' confidentiality, but having students individually take stock of who in their lives are disabled and reaching out to those people for their willingness to share their expertise through collaboration sounds like a great idea to continue working towards accessible environments, especially in professional and workplace environments.

As this piece presented a seven-point heuristic with which they critiqued 3 other articles, it's difficult to critique this chapter on the basis of Disability Studies principles and scholarship. Additionally, I thought the structure of their piece made a lot of sense!

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I read David R. Russell’s JBTC article about rethinking the articulation between BTC and WID. I very much appreciated his comprehensive overview of the history of WID and WID-like programs, and the various models that articulate – to greater and lesser degrees – the combination of disciplinary writing and thinking and BTW curricula (and even FYW curricula). The article’s bright assessment of how WID will develop due to increased funding, expanded research, and engagement by multiple stakeholders that include cross-disciplinary faculty and external organizations made me hopeful, though I’m aware that the article was published fifteen years ago and I wonder to what extent these developments ultimately succeeded.

For example, he mentions a WID/BTC program at Michigan Tech – where I got my Ph.D. – called “Speaking of Software.” This was mostly a research project that allowed the PI to do case studies that later made it into a collection (called “Speaking of Software”) that one of my dissertation committee members, Ann Brady, edited. My understanding is that the actual program ended after three years (when the funding was over) and lives on only through one chapter in that book. So while it yielded good research in support of BTC WID, as an actual student-facing WID program it did not last.

(That said, Michigan Tech’s Mechanical Engineering Department at Michigan Tech has a great “BTC WID” program run by my former colleague Nancy Barr, so while the program in the article may not exist anymore another has cropped up elsewhere that is, to my knowledge, very successful.)

Anyway, this article does a good job of articulating and assessing the various WID models that are still out there. Of these, I appreciate most the “vertical model” that introduces students to WID principles and practices early in their college experience and then has them build on those as they advance into their major/minor fields of study. I know from my own experiences taking a WID-based approach in ENGL 102 that students are quite keen to learn how to write in ways that are unlike previous “English” classes they took, and they like being challenged (after some initial reticence due to fear of the unfamiliar) to explore new genres & conventions that they never realized constituted a very large part of “academic writing.”

The only criticism I have is not so much of the article but of the broader Rhet-Comp/Writing Studies/BTC field’s “articulation” (I will use his key term) of “writing-to-learn,” a key concept that occupies the first quarter of this reading. As someone who came into the composition field when the Expressivist movement was in full swing, I’m a big believer in writing-to-learn as articulated here (and elsewhere). But I feel that “brief responses, reflections, summaries, or syntheses or parts of large writing projects, such as methods sections, data analyses, or textual analyses” (254) don’t necessarily translate back into learning-to-write, which is quite important in a writing course. Students learn to write “about” things and hence learn "about” those things, but this approach doesn't guarantee that they will learn about writing.

Borrowing a term from an old expressivist compositionist, Donald Murray, with whom I've had a love/hate relationship with for three decades, I would like to see students adopt a “reading-to-write” perspective – not just where they read “about” things, but actually read with a palpable awareness of how written texts operate at all levels -- not just "meta" levels. Reading in this palpable, multisensory manner has been largely marginalized by writing programs, which privilege a linear writing process over any kind of reading process (not reading but its “process”) and hence deprive students of valuable insight in how writing actually works -- insight that they don’t necessarily get by conducting standard rhetorical analyses of purpose, audience, genre, and so forth. Anyway, I’d better stop now because this post is too long for Padlet.

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For the fourth topic, I read Oswal and Palmer’s article “A Critique of Disability and Accessibility Research in Technical Communication Through the Models of Emancipatory Disability Research Paradigm and Participatory Scholarship.” I enjoyed reading this article and found that even with my limited knowledge of Disability Studies I agreed with many of the points the authors made. In the current PDC for 307, one of the assignments is to write a group report that focuses on two areas of accessibility. This past semester one of the students in the class is autistic, and he was a valuable member of his group because he offered experiential knowledge on accessibility issues. This is one of the main points of this article is that research on disability and accessibility often does not include those with disabilities; consequently, the research falls short due to second-hand knowledge.

The first half of the article focuses on critiquing three articles, using seven heuristics to guide their analysis, and overall, examining inclusivity.  In the second half of the article, they provide examples of how to incorporate participatory design into a technical communication curriculum. “We endorse participatory design activity between designers and disabled users as a viable proposition for conceptualizing accessible and useable products, processes, and spaces because participatory design research is not about, or on behalf of, disabled users; it is disabled users taking the front seat on the drafting board with professional designers to employ their distinct know-how about disability which originates from their bodily differences and diverse contexts of purpose and use”  (252). This part of the article discusses academic values, which don’t fully include those with disabilities; they are more like “invited guests.” The example of how to include a participatory approach gives me several ideas of how to design activities that would add another layer to the current Accessibility Report Project. For example, students engage in primary research such as interviewing someone who has a disability or someone at the SALT Center or DRC; this would not only add credibility to their report, but the students would develop an awareness of inclusionary practices. As the authors state, “The adoption of disabled-centered participatory action research for our pedagogy will not only prepare our students for a more just and equity-oriented practice but also lessen ableist attitudes in the academy and in their future workplaces” (262). This idea ties in with one of our goals—acknowledging and respecting others’ perspectives. I don’t have any criticisms of this article.

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I read Engaging Plain Language in the
Technical Communication Classroom by Kira Dreher.

I really liked the way the author discussed the steps that are delineated for communicating in plain language. These steps, i.e.,

Step 1: Identify and describe the target audience

Step 2: Structure the content to guide the reader through it

Step 3: Write the content in plain language

Step 4: Use information design to help readers see and understand

Step 5: Work with the target user groups to test the design and content

could be used to work with a variety of content in a writing class. From an instructional design perspective, this would be very useful in defining learning outcomes, for example, since these are supposed to be written in a jargon-free way and from the student perspective. It could also be used to revise learning activities, especially since asking for the kind of testing described in step 5 lends itself very well for the context of teaching and learning.

I'd like to use this framework, along my other instructional design-derived tools, to work on the curriculum and the content of my BTW courses.

I wish the writer developed her thoughts on the ethics of plain language a bit more just because I believe that this aspect of plain language use/theory/methodology, is an integral reason for why it's worthwhile to use it. I think it's probably due to a fact that this would make a conversation about this method (using plain language) not as value neutral and thus "scientific" as it needs to be in order to be part of BTW philosophy/theory.

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I read David R. Russell's "Rethinking the Articulation Between ..."

What I appreciated about this text are discussion about collaborative teaching/planning, team teaching, expert feedback for such "service" courses as business and technical writing. I would very much support any kind of initiative at UA for collaboration between, say, a WP employee and an Eller faculty member, in designing and teaching BTW. Expert feedback from people who actually study business, for example, would be extremely helpful for the humanities-based teachers to help with assessing BTW students' writing in a way that make sense for writing as a traditionally humanities-based discipline/skill (grammar & rhetorical devices), but also as a business or a technical discipline-based skill set (designing specific documents, such as resumes & manuals, etc.).

I partially liked the idea of how to incorporate "writing to learn" theory in your own courses -- I would love to hear some more specific ideas, other than doing more writing, in which writing can be used as a means/key to better/more efficient learning.

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I read "(Teaching) Ethics and
Technical Communication" by
Derek G. Ross, and after having read the article, "What is Interdisciplinarity? Some Essential Definitions," I am wondering if the worthy zeal for ever-expanding inclusiveness is becoming difficult to manage in theory and practice. I really appreciate the author's engagement and consideration of so many different experiences when it comes to ethics and his interest in how each of the backgrounds situates and influences students and instructors. This is a valiant way to guide ethical writing and teaching of writing.

This becomes problematic, however, when each and every student and instructor comes with a specific set of experiences, differences, situations, etc. While we strive to be open and inclusive, I wonder at what point it might be reasonable to decide upon less porous boundaries. The author brings up Harraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," and other texts which, as far as I am concerned overstep some ethics with their lack of accessibility to non-academics. Perhaps that is his point and I have removed it from context, but I feel the importance of ethics can be as simple as removing the heavy, purposefully exclusionary jargon from instruction, and that would go a long way toward equity and ethical teaching/writing. I think this article is light on the consideration that learners bring their inclusive intentions to share backgrounds and information, and learners do not expect to have instructors cater to them individually. I have always thought that communication and interest is the most phenomenal aspect of higher education, the shared learning even in the margins and working through misunderstandings and differences.

This article definitely expanded my sights as to what was exclusive and to whom, and I think that it will be a consideration as I build my courses. I appreciated the author's address of the various types of ethics, but I found myself lingering over the student and instructor lists of expectations:

1.No passive-aggressive attacks.
2.No malice.
3.No attacks on character.
4.No degrading your classmate’s point(s): All views are worth hearing.
5.Discussion and debate will remain civil and academic.

1.Listen to comprehend, not respond.
2.Learn to interrupt respectfully.
3.Consider every option as valuable. Some opinions are based in moral
outrage, some on education, but a fairly offered opinion should be fairly
considered.
4.Be able to entertain a thought without necessarily agreeing to it.
5.Avoid ad hominem attacks, and do not make assumptions about each
other based on our in-class discussions.
6.Class disagreements end at the doorway—take the ideas away, not the
outrage.
7.If it’s a personal story told to make a point (or ask a question), leave it in
the classroom.
(82-3).

The article was useful, overall, but the expectation to take in all of the world's variety and ethical understanding is overwhelming.

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For the third topic, I read Ken Hyland’s “Genre and academic writing in the disciplines.” This article is informative as much of it centers on teaching. In the Writing Program curriculum, genre is included in most assignments, and this article offered several ideas for discussing genre in the classroom.

I appreciate that Hyland mentions the following scholars’ contributions, and even though they are older sources, the message is still relevant. He writes, “Swales (1990) has made clear, however, that we need to see community and genre TOGETHER to offer a framework of how meanings are socially constructed in writing. This draws on Faigley’s (1986: 535) claim that writing ‘can be understood only from the perspective of a society rather than a single individual” (547). In our first-year composition courses, there are a couple of assignments that ask students to investigate a community and identify what that group values and how they communicate. This aligns with Swales and Faigley’s claims that a part of the writing process is understanding a community’s values.

The four teaching practices needs analysis, grammar and writing, consciousness-raising, and mixed genre portfolios provide guidance on how to avoid prescriptivism when teaching genre.

Also, I find the several examples of how writers in various fields write, including the pronouns, verbs, and word choices they use frequently useful.  In a BTW class, students could examine and compare various texts from different disciplines and analyze the values.  I do not have any critiques of this article and would consider all the above teaching practices in the BTW courses to help students make informed writing choices based on an awareness of who will read their work and meeting the expectations of that community.

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Kevin's Topic 2 response to plain language

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Kevin's Topic 2 response to plain language

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I chose to read “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical communication Classroom” because I feel, as the authors do, that writing clearly is empowering. I also feel that writing teachers need to engage with plain language not just as teachers but as writers themselves. From my work as a reviewer for Rhet-Comp publications, I’ve notice how more than a few writing experts seem to be quite, um, “challenged” when attempting to communicate their ideas and experiences in understandable prose.

This article was OK but, like other things I’ve read that come from the Plain Language Movement, it tends to idealize simple, straight-forward discourse at the expense of other rhetorically important attributes of effective – hence, inclusive and empowering -- communication. The focus is on brevity and conciseness, using “readability metrics,” ignores vital elements of the before/after example they provide on pp 47-48.

They don’t mention that the revised public-facing document is written in dialogue form, asking questions of the readers; that it uses personable – not just “plain” – language that includes personal pronouns, inflected phrases that one can ‘hear’ as if in a conversation, by using punctuation marks such as quotes (new “smart” water meters) and exclamation points. It ignores the use of bold font and other formatting features that appear in the “after” version of the document. Clearly, the writers who revised this document made rhetorical choices that this author doesn’t attend to (enough) but which I feel matter immensely in making it more readable, more user-friendly.

I also worry that the emphasis on brevity can send to students the message that shorter is better, which is often not the case in many professional genres. I frequently find myself asking students to elaborate thinly phrased explanations, which encourages them to add on and not cut down.

Yes, in an editing unit I often do in my BTW sections, I ask for them to consider ways to cut down wordy sentences by identifying common features of verbosity; however, I pair that with sentences that need to be “built up” with discerning details in order for them to work equally effectively. One example where elaboration trumps concision (that we are probably all familiar with) is the new section in “Students’ Guide to Foundations Writing” where the Student Learning Outcomes are “translated” into “conversational terms” so that students can understand them. Most of those translations gain their clarity and student-friendliness by using more, not fewer, words.

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Kevin's Topic 1 response to UNebraska's assessment webpage

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Kevin's Topic 1 response to UNebraska's assessment webpage

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I read the page called “Assessing Student Writing” on the University of Nebraska – Lincoln’s website. I chose this reading because it seemed less ideologically entrenched than the others, more “neutral.” While that was the case generally, it imploded once I got to the sample holistic rubric.

I’ll begin with what I consider to be the pedagogically sound about this reading, which seems to be addressed to beginning instructors.

First, they ask a number of questions that I think are  appropriate for people who are new to the craft of teaching writing. These include: “What do you want [students] to know? What do you want students to be able to do? Why? How will you know when they have reached these goals? What methods of assessment will allow you to see that students have accomplished these goals?”

Second, the site supports having purpose-oriented learning goals, telling readers to “plan and implement activities that support students in meeting their learning goals” and advising them to think about how they can “help students meet these goals.” New instructors who are designing their own assignments that might be consider “major projects” need to keep these questions in mind as they scaffold the steps that contribute to the building of that project.

Third, it tells new instructors to “[b]e open with students about your expectations and the purposes of the assignments. . . . Be explicit about your goals for them as writers and why those goals are important to their learning.” I can’t begin to count the number of assignment prompts from instructors across disciplines that are vague and generic, filled with abstruse language that make perfect sense to the instructor who wrote it but are lost on their students.

Fourth, the site tells instructors to "talk with students about methods of assessment.” Letting students know early on how they will be assessed on a specific project, which includes sharing with them the grading rubric on the assignment prompt, is both vital and ethical. In addition, it promotes the importance of providing “multiple types of feedback early in the writing process.” In my experience, in-person verbal feedback is very important. It also helpfully tells instructors to “try to choose one or two things to focus on when responding to a draft.” So true.

All this helpful advice is undermined, however, by a seemingly unconscious (Western) proclivity to stratify student writing. “What will distinguish the strongest projects from the weakest?” This questions betrays the writers’ entrenchment in stratifying and dichotomous thinking that, in my view, is one of the prime reasons for the catastrophic global issues we are dealing with today.

What Martin Heidegger called “calculative thinking” – a logic based in rationalistic instrumentality – comes across in the horrible (but currently in-vogue) “holistic” rubric they share. Although they describe their rubrics as “narrative” and “chart rubrics” (whatever that means!), in fact this one is just a stratifying document that slots students into the traditional categories of Above Average through Below Average and heaps scorn on those who come up short. Notice the negative language in the criteria for project that are deemed to fall within the D grade level:

“A "D" project discusses a public event and a family/community, but the connections may NOT  be clear. It shows LITTLE audience awareness. The form and structure is POORLY chosen or POORLY executed. The piece includes MANY ERRORS, which regularly compromise the comprehensibility of the piece. There is an attempt to incorporate other voices, but this is done AWKWARDLY or is drawn from INCOMPLETE or INAPPROPRIATE research. There is LITTLE evidence of revision. Writer's notes and learning letter are MISSING or show LITTLE reflection or growth.” (EMPHASIS MINE!!!)

The “voice” of this criterion harkens back to the olden-days' forms of assessment where teachers with red pens would rip apart student writing and write DO BETTER! at the bottom just above the twice-circled D grade. So many holistic rubrics I've seen are like the ones featured on this website -- incarnations of Old Testament declarations of what is Right and what is Wrong.

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For the second Module, I read Augsburg’s “What is Interdisciplinarity? Some Essential Definitions” from the University of Nebraska Writing Center. Interdisciplinarity is a topic that I think I know a little bit about, but after reading this article, I realize I have more to learn. This article provides a few definitions, and while I appreciate reading these, I question who the audience is for this article. The explanation for not using a dictionary or Wikipedia seems somewhat obvious for an academic audience. Also, the number of definitions seems unnecessary, especially with full and partial interdisciplinary studies. That being said, I do appreciate learning the connections between interdisciplinary and discipline, and I think it is important to impart that distinction to students. I would share the two tables that have the five characteristics of each. Also, having previously read some of Foucault’s work, I find the connection to Foucault and identifying that universities are “disciplinary environments” a perspective worth exploring further.

Connecting this article to the BTW courses, I understand that it will be important to have students synthesize information from the disciplines that they are connected to and to critically engage with different perspectives on a particular issue. I see the importance of having students work within a framework and make connections to how another field of study may deliver another view. This article offers some good points about interdisciplinary studies, but I would like to have some examples and even some specific connections to teaching.

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I read "What is interdisciplinarity?"

I found the way the article described the context/background behind why we need interdisciplinary work in general quite persuasive. Especially, the "inherent complexity of nature and society" and a desire to look into problems that are not easily confined to one discipline are good reasons/motors behind this trend in education.
One critique: I think that what is often missing in considerations of such complicated concepts/idea(l)s is examples of practical uses of this approach to learning/teaching/doing research. Adding more vagueness to an already vague concept, is not very helpful ("establishing common ground," "keep lines of communication open," etc.)
This reading inspires me to be more specific in my own teaching: give examples in the form of scenarios, application, anecdotes, etc. wherever and whenever I discuss some principle or framework for doing things to my students.

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I read "Assessing Student Writing" from the University of Nebraska. I liked the way the author distinguished between the different roles that a teacher inhabits in the process of assessment: "motivator, collaborator, critic, evaluator, etc." This is helpful for me when thinking about my teaching persona for BTW because while I feel confident about the latter two roles when it comes to foundations writing courses, when it comes to BTW courses, I much rather assume the roles of "motivator and collaborator." My one piece of criticism would be about giving students feedback early in the writing process. While, in theory, that is a good idea, it very often happens that the initial idea is changed/transformed very much in the process of working on a long-term project, which renders the initial feedback irrelevant. So, I would say that initial feedback should be kept to the minimum and maybe even given to those who explicitly ask for it.

One application to my teaching approach: making sure to plan a BTW so that I have an opportunity to give my students feedback at multiple steps in the project and be strategic about when this feedback-giving happens (at what specific stages in the project).

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Hello!

I read the article  about Assessing Student Writing, mostly because it was the first link. I also watched the TEdTalk about compassionate pedagogy.

positive: The article about assessing student writing talked about different times in the student writing process to give feedback as well as the different ways to give feedback. I appreciate that it discussed how creating a rubric is difficult and ever-evolving.

It was nice to hear the science behind why self-criticism is used. Certainly, it works to motivate you, but it affects other aspects of your life negatively. Whereas self-compassion supports relationships better.

Critique: There was not a lot of new or interesting information I found about assessing student writing. This was a very brief overview, more or a reminder.

I did not buy the example the speaker used about compassion. Does compassion motivate learners?

Application: I always (for the last three years) have students evaluate their progress as a form of self-assessment. But I think I need to explicitly teach self-compassions. I see room for it when we talk about "writing contexts:"

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D.R.'s Topic 4: Engaging Plain Language with Dreher

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D.R.'s Topic 4: Engaging Plain Language with Dreher

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The author argues we should use plain language and acknowledge it as a strategy. She believes that this helps us to see our field as part of "an established public movement."

She explains the guidelines for this system as proposed by the CPL--Center for Plain Language: know the target audience, structure content accordingly, write in plain language, use information design to present it, and test it on a trial audience.

This seems a reasonable plan. Readability formulas have actually been around since the 40s (who knew, when trying to read all those crazy instructional manuals that made no sense at all?). The issue is important in all areas of study, including the law, government, etc. This all serves as a reminder to embrace Martin Buber's insistence on the prominence of an I-You relationship (I'm communicating directly to you) rather than an I-It relationship (that privileges the text over the act of communicating).

One might be tempted to think that the importance of using plain language would be a given, but Dreher argues that we have to do more to promote PL.

I would have to agree as well. We're often faced with texts that are more like labyrinths--we wander in and might not be able to wander out. Instead we need to teach writers to help readers--and that goes back especially to the CLC's first point--you have to know the target audience well enough to understand what they know and how best to speak to them. For the most part, that's going to include speaking as straightforwardly and transparently as possible even at the risk of sounding too basic.

This article is a smart reminder of the practicality that comes with using the right kind of writing for its corresponding audience. It's something we should always keep in mind when creating our assignments and making them as viable as possible.

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In "Ways of Knowing," Carter argues that we should present disciplines of ways of doing--in other words, in terms of their function. Usually we think of something generalizable from one topic to another, which would mean we acquire conceptual knowledge, but we should concentrate on procedural knowledge as well--meaning, how things actually work. Carter argues that it's up to the WID professor to bridge this gap.

Certainly we have to go beyond merely teaching essay structure to include various ways to structure various kinds of texts for various genres. We can't assume that what seems to one discipline as a normal use of writing will seem anything close to normal to the next. Instead it's a matter of negotiating between the lines. It might be compared to figuring out the best of both worlds. It doesn't mean throwing out everything we know about writing--it means adding in new layers and nuances until different audiences can be hit from within different functions.

Carter also states that our best bet is to re-conceptualize the work of writing in terms of meta-genres and meta-disciplines. Instead of thinking in terms of boundaries, as we might have in the past, we need to locate writing as the intersection of the disciplines.

Just as individuals we are called upon to know how to use computers and apps and cell phones and everything else technological, we're also supposed to learn how to shift among kinds of writing and purposes and genres. This is a laudable mission. Learning to do more, however, requires more work, more research, more brainstorming. The overall effect should be a good one, but there will be growing pains in the meantime. We should not only expect them but be prepared to navigate between them. The biggest takeaway for our own teaching, indeed may be to grant ourselves the time to adjust to new technologies and incorporate them as needed.

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I read from Higher Education, World Context: "Globalization, Trends and Drivers of Change." Federico Zaragoza insists that universities are at the forefront of the mobilization to shift our world from one of force to one where the word is what counts. He argues that more education will set us free by reversing present trends. He claims it's our duty to take the next generation into account. Relatedly, he explains that "a culture of peace is a set of values, attitudes, traditions and modes of behavior" based on respect for life, development, etc.

He also notes that "the fundamental mission of the university is to pave the way for this new era, the era of the people."

While I would like to go along with Zaragoza, I'm not sure how all this can happen. I don't see universities setting people free when it seems that their most important function (from their standpoint) is creating revenue. Students are invited to take classes, but how much support do they get to achieve those goals? How is their education liberating them when their attendance is abysmal?

I think in theory the universities would like to pave for a new era, and I suppose they are more inclusive than ever before. But what are students really getting out of their education when their curricula lack critical thinking?

The current education model calls for students to produce work, but to really be free, their work has to include free thinking. We have  ways to go on that. We should keep that idea in our heads--almost as if it were a thesis and we were writing an essay--as we design our units and lead students to higher levels of writing.,

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I'm skeptical of the OECD Pisa framework, but I can see the merit in applying its ideals to the work we do with our learners. I’m on board with the need for greater information literacy in our overconnected world, and I still believe that conversations across philosophical divisions should be an ideal, though too often this exercise compels us to pretend that the other side of that fence is not just a pit of fascism, bad faith, and omnicidal corporate greed. So the dimensions of global competence Fig. 1 looks like a hamster wheel because it is. The purpose of the OECD Pisa framework is to center sustainability as a core competency alongside literacy, math and science. This shuffling of the onus to the individual, who is given tasks such as engaging with multiple realms of influence, engaging across different perspectives and cultures, and sharing on social media are positioned as meaningful contributions or solutions as California investigates Exxon for perpetuating the lie that recycling plastics is a solution to the waste and destruction to the living planet caused by industry.

Putting that pessimism aside, I believe that our efforts to provide utility and meaningful applicable contact time with the genres of business writing, to prepare our learners for the real world scenarios that lie ahead should be tempered with these kinds of examinations of the ethical implications of the work we are doing in business and technical communications.

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I read the bell hooks chapter on "Eros, Eroticism and the Pedagogical Process," simply because I didn’t know what to expect from it. Hooks makes clear from the beginning of the chapter that Eros in this context refers to the body, and to passion in teaching. A rejection of the supposed Western mind-body split.That one need not separate their mind from their body and indeed to teach in a transformational manner, that is to say in a way that transcends the classroom, the teacher must invoke their own passion, and recognize the body as a presence, as a fact.

Although hooks does not state this explicitly, I can see one obvious need for body acknowledgement in teaching: the denial of the body perpetuates ableist thinking, or the notion that bodies can be a non-factor for every person. I appreciate that in coming to terms with the body, accepting it, and inviting passion into pedagogy, the teacher becomes more than a disembodied brain: the awakened spirit is whole, and thus wholehearted, to paraphrase hooks. Hooks offers another metaphor for the way in which body is described: that the human is an animal, compelled to body forth, just as a bird is compelled to migrate, for example. Hooks alludes to complaints about past behavior—favoritism, mostly, and gruff behavior toward a student to whom she was attracted. I don’t have the reverence for hooks (and I have known too many narcissistic activist types) to not pause at this flawed, and troubling behavior— there was a lot going on here to be sure, which she does not fully interrogate, and upon which I will not speculate? Still, I appreciate the Thomas Merton quote, that the “fruit of education is in the activation of that utmost center” - the inner life that education might awaken.

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I read “Assessing Student Writing” from the University of Nebraska Writing Center. Assessment continues to be a topic that I want to learn more about. This article defines writing assessment, offers suggestions, and discusses developing rubrics. Even though the article is written in a simple structure, I found it to be a good review of the different ways to give feedback. As a writing instructor, I find that I struggle with offering helpful feedback, and I have experimented with written and verbal comments.  One of my areas of interest is learning styles and how they can be used effectively not only in the classroom, but in all aspects of teaching.  Commentary is one area where knowing a student’s learning preference can help determine the most useful type of feedback to provide.  I want students to improve their writing, but more importantly, I want to support their learning and writing.  I work hard to be very clear and concise in my written comments and blend comments from a teaching perspective and a reader perspective.

The rubric discussion and examples tie in with what the Language Awareness CLC has focused on this year. In my view, the rubrics could be revised, and careful attention paid to word choice and how students might interpret them, especially if the students are international students. Words like “unobtrusive,” “awkwardly,” and “weaves” may make it difficult for students to fully understand what is expected and how they ae being assessed. That being said, I appreciate that the concluding paragraph acknowledges some issues with the rubrics and rubrics in general. I continually revise my rubrics and work to make them clear to students.

Reading this article gives me confidence that I am offering feedback in appropriate ways and that varying methods of feedback and reflecting and revising often are important for not only my growth as a teacher but students’ success.

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I read "Rethinking the Articulation
Between Business and
Technical Communication
and Writing in the Disciplines
Useful Avenues for Teaching and Research" by
David R. Russell

Coming to this as a professional technical/business writer, this was an interesting insight into how universities view the practice through interdisciplinarity. There are so many ways to implement the training and I think it is great to know that university programs are considering writing to be a part of other studies like engineering. It is also interesting to me that there are so many different routes to take in giving students the experience and knowledge.

I have worked as a professional business and technical writer for most of my adult life, and I will say that most of the other writers were like myself, not trained as engineers to be writers, but as writers to translate the language of the engineers. I feel strangely uncomfortable about the idea of writing instructors moving into the other disciplines and then disappearing after the engineering (or other disciplines) instructors are able to teach writing. This feels like siloing rather than inter-facing/inter-acting across disciplines. I would think that after the writing is taken in-house, so to speak, it becomes exclusive to that discipline, and no more useful in creating diversity of thought or cross-pollination.

I am not sure how I might apply this, other than to be mindful of how I approach the usefulness and intention of what I am teaching.

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I read Hyland's (2008) Genre and academic writing in the disciplines.

I'm aware of Hyland's corpus linguistics approach to analysis of academic discourse having read a 2007 piece on the prevalence of hedging and boosting across disciplines—which this piece referenced as evidence—but I wanted to take this chance and become more familiar with Hyland's approach to genre, which is looks to be situated more within the applied linguistics side of genre studies (as opposed to rhetorical genre studies (RGS) ).

Positive: The genre-based approach that Hyland takes emphasizes the social approach to writing, while including also its cognitive function of making explicit the schema that individuals use to categorize texts and their relationships to recurring situations:

"GENRE is a concept over-burdened with definitions so I’ll keep mine simple – it is a term for grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use language to respond to recurring situations" (Hyland, 2008, p. 544).

Critique: This is perhaps an obvious critique (more like a guiding principle) and one I could apply to BTW as well just because it is so general, but in order to employ a genre-based pedagogy effectively, teachers need to take the time to understand what genres students are familiar with and what genres they might be approaching. Yes, it's true that teaching "genre awareness" rather than individual genres helps because it teaches students how to approach any genre, but students likely won't be satisfied without that clear application to their own work, so instructors have to be ready to deal with multiplicity. Generally, I just think it helps to be familiar with students' contexts.

Application: Because Hyland uses clear language as well as quantitative data to explain genre-based differences between different academic discourses, I could see myself adapting this article to a few Google slides to include in my mini-lectures on genre. I think the data would appeal especially to BTW students. Additionally, Hyland (2008) recommends "comparison tasks" as being helpful for raising students' awareness of the differences in different academic discourses on the level of language features, which seems very useful (p. 560).

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I read "What is Interdisciplinarity? Some Essential Definitions," as I have been wondering about the increasing connectivity between fields. The extended definition of the term, and linking it with military uses was really interesting, as was the the separation of "Team-based," "partial" and "full."

My critique is that the definitions and detail quickly became confusing, and the spelling errors were plentiful, which was distracting and made me take the content less seriously than I would have otherwise.

"According to Klein (2005b), the intersection of integrative learning and interdisciplinary studies is called intergrative interdisciplinary thinking, which includes the
following cognitive capacities:
• The ability to ask meaningful questions about complex issues and
problems.
• The ability to locate multiple soures of knowledge, information, and
perspectives.
• The ability to compare and contrast them to reveal patterns and
connections.
• The ability to creative an integrative framework and a more holistic
understanding. (p. 10)"

I believe I can apply this information into a better understanding of the students and toward the creation of a course that approaches BTW and technical writing in ways that students from any discipline will find useful.

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Teaching to Transgress:
hooks is right in that teaching is a kind of freedom. An education frees us from social pressures because we can transgress them. It frees us from the communities where we grew up because it allows us to surpass them. It frees us from economic pressures and leads the way to the opportunity for a more stable and secure life.

All of that is true. But education doesn't turn out to be a freedom for everyone. Especially now, in an age where students are experiencing a lot of mental problems, education can also be a trap. Students are trapped into thinking that they must get a college degree, for example, but that's not always the case. That's not what every single student can do. Students think that since their friends are in university, they should follow them and do the same things. That thinking does not always work. Some students need something different from a college education. They need to study in an environment in which they can thrive. But if they're so worried about test-taking (for ex.) that they're on anti-depressants, then they're trapped in the myth of education. Should they strive for an education at a university or JC? Probably. But not always. And they should feel the freedom to make a different choice if that's what they really feel they should do.

I would apply this to my classroom in the first two weeks of the fall class. This is a great topic for discussion, so I envision using hooks' work as a prompt--probably after spending some time discussing the notion in class. I would have students journal about: in what ways is coming here a freedom? In what ways did you feel it was justifiable to sacrifice some of your freedoms in over to come? And once you have the degree in hand, what freedoms would you have earned for yourself? It's never too late to start thinking about where you want to four years from now.

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I put this GIF from "The Good Place" here to reflect some of the weight I felt in reading UNESCO's (2017) Education for sustainable development goals: Learning objectives.

I suppose that I should not be surprised that in teaching a lot of business and STEM majors, a lot of these students will be tasked with solving big-picture problems in terms of sustainability. These problems include access to food, clean water, energy, quality education, gender equality, infrastructure, climate change, etc. Some of those problems can be addressed within paradigms of the humanities, however, many of them will require ingenuity and technical know-how, which is why it surprised me at first to be seeing these kinds of learning objectives included within our reading materials to teach business and technical writing.

After watching the video for this section, however, it made sense to me that the ENGL 307 & 308 courses, as major intersections between disciplinary thinking (rhet/comp and STEM, business), would teach students to think in collaborative ways, drawing on the subject knowledge of their majors as well as the facilitative, communicative practices that could be fostered through a rhetorical lens.

So while solving the Earth's problems seems like a very tall order for my ENGL 308 course that I'm gearing up to teach, perhaps helping students make connections across disciplinary knowledges is a concrete first step towards those goals:

What ESD requires is a shift from teaching to learning. It asks for an  action-oriented, transformative pedagogy, which supports self-directed learning, participation and collaboration, problem-orientation, inter- and transdisciplinarity and
the linking of formal and informal learning. Only such pedagogical approaches make possible the development of the key competencies needed for promoting sustainable
development (p. 7).

Positive: This document is organized very effectively, with cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral learning objectives according to UNESCO's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Each goal also includes suggested corresponding topics and examples of learning approaches and methods. Additionally, the final section provides further suggestions and guiding principles for implementation of the SDGs with examples from different countries.

Critique: I feel like I've never heard of these before and I'm not sure why.

Application: I feel these objectives would be very helpful for imagining project-based learning approaches in the context of ENGL 307 or 308 and maybe beyond.

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I chose Chapter 4: What Labor-Based Grading Contracts Look Like. I thought it was really interesting how the author explained that giving grades is "detrimental" for learning since students shift their focus on the grade rather than their effort and the learning. Provides a descriptive framework on how to implement labor-based contracts for students learning, which I thought could lay off the instructor´s pressure on constant grading and provide agency and independence on the students learning and how they might be doing in the class. Even though I have never used this type of alternative assessment, I think is provides the students a sense of "commitment" that might be a greater motivation than just getting the highest grade. I first stumbled upon this grading method during my master program and I thought It made me aware of the compromise I am making to focus on my work and my learning. Last, I thought the observation about extra credit made by the author and that sometimes this is not as beneficial for the students nor the instructors as we might think, even though we provide these opportunities to be comprehensive with the students.

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Though I am familiar with Asao Inoue's work, I wanted to take the opportunity to read up a bit more on some specific teaching artifacts of his, so I poked around in the resources of "Asoue Inoue's Infrequent Words Blog," where I looked at two resources:
1) "Stories About Grading Contracts, or How Do I Like Through the Violence I’ve Done?" (2020)

2) Labor log template (version 13)

I'm familiar with the wording of Inoue's grading contracts, but I'd never actually seen one of his labor logs, so I was interested to see what it included (type of work, location, engagement, mood, time, etc.). I've read critiques of this specific practice before and how though it honors student labor, it can be a little too much and might need to be modified to work well, especially for students who might already feel overwhelmed (Kryger & Zimmerman, 2020).

As for the first reading ("Stories"), I was interested to hear more about Inoue's anecdotal experience relating to contract grading as I've begun to implement it more seriously in my FYC classes this semester. This piece does a good job of illustrating how "White habits of language" sustain inequitable ecologies of assessment. Additionally, what I will carry forward from this reading into my own practice is some advice that Inoue includes from Peter Elbow, which is to actually like your students' writing. I'll include one series of bullet points that Inoue quotes from Elbow at length:

It's not improvement that leads to liking, but rather liking that leads to improvement.

It's the mark of good writers to like their writing.

Liking is not the same as evaluating.

We can often criticize something better when we like it.

We learn to like our writing when we have a respected reader who likes it.

Therefore, it's the mark of good teachers to like students and their writing. (Elbow, 1993, p. 201)

Inoue explains that in order to build students' confidence with writing and languaging, they have to like themselves and their writing, which is very difficult if they aren't encouraged.

There is a lot packed into this reading, but the number one takeaway for me right now is that students deserve to have their language valued as it is. Yes, we can teach students skills and we can help students practice evaluating their own writing, but the first thing that we should do is to encourage our students without needing them to sound like us.

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I chose bell hooks’ Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. The chapter I read, “Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words” speaks to the conflicts of the standard English language and the levels of oppression people of color experience in and out of the classroom. Students need to acknowledge that there are no perfect forms of language and that they have a right to cultivate and take ownership of any language they use to communicate. hooks engages her readers with a few lines from Adrienne Rich’s poem, “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” to identify and acknowledge that standard English is a language of oppression. Rich’s poem explains that to speak with another one must have a common thread, this is the “oppressor’s language.” English is the oppressor’s language and a colonizer language. hooks goes on to explain that the oppressor’s language had to be adapted and used among slaves because each one came from a different language background, thus necessitating the need for common ground. She explains, “[…] yet I imagine them also realizing that this language would need to be possessed, taken, claimed, as a space of resistance. I imagine that the moment they realized the oppressor’s language, seized and spoken by the tongues of the colonized, could be a space of bonding was joyous.” (hooks, 169). The moment of knowing and celebrating a common way to connect went on to be a moment of rebellion. This is a point I would like to apply in my teaching; language can be a joyous form of rebellion that unites people. Rebellion can shift in shape and become a moment of when people can “beg[in] to reclaim their personal power within a context of domination” (hooks, 170) and eventually use this language, once belonging to their oppressors, as their own form of resistance. This idea of language as being owned and cultivated flips the power dynamics around owning or possessing a language. Such a notion can empower students and lead to more investment and engagement in their work. This is further highlighted when hooks explains the significance of rap music in Black communities and the harm mainstream music, specifically white musicians cause when taking a language, Black vernacular, cultivated in resistance and using it as a form of profit; it dilute its value (hooks, 171). This example is greatly appreciated, however, this where I think using Gloria Anzaldua’s ideas from “Borderlands/La Frontera” would have had a greater impact. Anzaldua exclaims that to hurt her, one must only speak ill of her language. For those unfamiliar with this piece of writing, she is speaking of both her own Spanish language (not the Spanish from Spain, but the one she was taught and that she cultivated) and Spanglish language. Like Black vernacular, Anzaldua, speaks and values a language(s) that she cultivated, took ownership, and uses as a form of resistance. To criticize not only causes harm but questions the integrity and value of this language. Because it is a prime example of colonizer and oppressive language, it is shame that it is not used to emphasize how it too has been harmed by mainstream society.

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I read Teaching to Transgress, but was most struck by the introduction, particularly the following:

“To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone" and "Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself” (3).

These words really got under my skin, and I have been twirling them about for a few days. I really like the idea of education as subversive, transgressive, and instrumental as being weaponized. Considering how  socio-economic inequalities impact education, this feels empowering and valid, and I want to carry this feeling, and understanding into my own teaching philosophy.

One critique about these sentiments is that while transgression creates shifts and ruptures, I think we have a system within which bell hooks' educational circumstances are rare, and most often students do not have the experience of engagement and agency, but bell's latter experience where education becomes rote and stale. Without both educational experiences would students realize the difference? Teaching to transgress, opens up a host of considerations, and the need to be mindful of both instructor and student intentions, experiences, and communities, and this seems a monumental task.

I would like to use this in my approach to teaching by adding more teaching materials that address or broach the idea of writing and reading as not just performative, but active and transgressive, and asking students to engage with texts in culturally and community relevant ways.

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I completed the “What is Pedagogy?” The positive–provided four brief pedagogical approach categories: behaviorism, constructivism, social constructivism, and liberationist, and a brief overview and links for additional reading when subscribing. A critique–the article suggests that Vygotsky believed learning is a collaboration between student and teacher and fails to mention the two principles associated with the pedagogy: the more knowledgeable other (MKO) and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The MKO is a person who knows more about the subject matter. The ZPD involves what they know and do not know. The MKO needn’t be just the teacher but also a peer (Orey, 2010, p. 11).

I use Vygotsky’s constructivism in a class by recognizing the ZPD and, as the MKO, providing support (scaffolding activities) to move them through the ZPD. In a BTW course, it’s essential to allow students the chance to be the MKO and help peers move through the ZPD and respect the nature of collaborative work. Especially in the online learning course where learners are non-traditional adult students and have been working professionals.

Orey, Michael. (2010). Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching, and Technology.

The Global Text Project. EDP 540 Learning Theories and Instructional Strategies. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://textbookequity.org/Textbooks/Orey_Emergin_Perspectives_Learning.pdf

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For Topic 4, I read Oswal and Palmer (2022) titled: "Chapter 9: A Critique of Disability and Accessibility Research in Technical Communication Through the Models of Emancipatory Disability Research Paradigm and Participatory Scholarship." I found this article incredibly useful as I'd written a disability studies paper about my experiences as a graduate student and instructor with bipolar II disorder and found my main source to be written by Kruse and Oswal (2018) and then analyzed by Oswal and Palmer (2022). One critique I have of this work is that Oswal elaborates their positionality more explicitly in Oswal and Palmer (2022) than in Kruse and Oswal (2018). I feel this should be consistent across writing, however, this is a minor critique. One application to my teaching approach from Oswal and Palmer (2022) is to keep working with participatory action research and participatory design since I'm a disabled instructor and am interested in helping fellow disabled students thrive in the TPC classroom.

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For Topic 3, I read "Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines" by Carter (2007). I found the concepts of metagenres and metadisciplines useful as they help WID to flourish through common outcomes-based assessments that involve things like problem-solving, empirical inquiry, research, performance, etc. This perspective helps me to "see the broader learning situations of the disciplines" and how that "may provide the basis for helping them use the various individual genres in a metagenre more strategically throughout the curriculum" (403).

One critique I have about this reading is that it felt pretty dense, as if it were trying to address every common way of knowing, doing, and writing in the disciplines. The robust examples were fantastic in helping support the content, but as a reader, my attention waxed and waned throughout my reading of this piece because of the sheer amount of content packed into the 35 pages of the article.

I understood integration with WID from this reading better than with Topic 2, and in teaching BTW/PTW, I will use this awareness and apply it to "create appropriate learning situations" for my students (407). One example of this application would ensure that any tasks align with BTW's outcomes since the courses have outcomes-based assessments.

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For topic 2, I read chapter 2 “What is Interdisciplinarity? Some Essential Definitions” from Becoming Interdisciplinary and was happy to further understand the concept of interdisciplinarity as “refer[ing] to the general phenomenon of combining or integrating disciplinary perspectives” (18). In addition, having a working definition of interdisciplinary studies was insightful as it’s the application of interdisciplinarity in academic contexts.

One critique I have about this reading is that its explanation of integration and integrative interdisciplinary thinking was a bit confusing to me, particularly with references to partial and full interdisciplinarity on pages 23 and 24. However, the Topic 2 video helps with my understanding of integration.

One application to my teaching approach is to acknowledge how BTW is interdisciplinary and how this type of learning is integrated into the curriculum for learners who come from STEM and other fields that aren’t English.

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The cover of "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" (1994)

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I read chapter 11 of Teaching to Transgress (1994) by bell hooks titled: "Language: Teaching New Worlds / New Words."

From this chapter, I gathered that it’s important to consider linguistic justice as hooks notes that “recent discussions of diversity and multiculturalism tend to downplay or ignore the question of language” (hooks, 1994, p. 173).

My positive response to this piece is that I was able to connect the Thich Nhat Hanh quote included in Inoue’s “Antiracist Writing Assessment Technologies” that reads: “sit close to the one you love, hold his or her hand, and ask, ‘do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please tell me so that I can learn to love you properly’ (80). Imagine this kind of assessment practice in your classrooms with your students. Assessment might be a problem-posing process that continually attends to questions such as: Do I understand you enough? Am I making you suffer? Please help me to read your languaging properly” (Inoue, 2019, p. 363).

Thinking of the application of hooks' claims about language, I feel labor-based grading contracts help to promote linguistic justice. Connecting hooks to Asao Inoue's work, it becomes apparent how labor-based grading can be a way to alleviate the pain we place on students in using/teaching standard English and encouraging it in our classes by using Inoue’s labor-based grading resources, one of the other suggested readings for this task.

One critique I had related to reading Teaching to Transgress was that the whole book was suggested as a reading, which is around 200 more pages than I currently have time to read :(