Re-e(value)ating Approaches to Teaching

Intercultural Technical Communication

Jennifer Sano-Franchini | Virginia Tech | @jsanofranchini

Key Questions• How are technical communication

students being prepared to engage issues of cultural variation in the workplace?

• How might an intersectional cultural rhetorics approach to teaching intercultural communication help instructors reach their goal of encouraging in students an awareness of cultural differences in oral and written communication (Matveeva, 2008)?

Culture is important. Besides the vast amounts of technical communication scholarship that attest to this point, so do the ethics guidelines of many of our professional organizations.

ATTW Code of Ethics

STC Ethical Principles

ACM Code of Ethics

This work also responds for Haas’ (2012) call for “further inquiry into the institutional contexts within which courses are designed, named, and delivered […] in both our local places and our professional spaces.”

2-Part Study• survey of how technical

communication programs engage issues of culture within their curricula; and

• study of my experience deploying—as Haas (2012) suggests—a cultural studies approach to teaching intercultural communication.

Data

• Degree requirements of 30 programs.Degree requirements and core courses are important statements about what we value and what we believe our students need to know as future technical communicators.

Programs Chosen

• STC Academic Database

• Bachelor of Arts (141 Total)

• Carnegie Classification RU/VH and RU/HMostly due to time constraint, I prioritized my own institution.

• Degree in Professional and Technical Communication and Writing, or Emphasis/Track/Concentration in this area.Did not include extension or outreach programs.

Institutions RepresentedCarnegie MellonClemsonColorado StateGeorge MasonLouisiana TechMiamiMichigan StateMichigan TechNew Mexico StateNC State

North Dakota StateNorthern ArizonaOklahoma StateOld DominionPenn StatePortland StatePurdueTexas A & MTexas TechU of Central Florida

U of CincinnatiU of Colorado DenverU of Mass-AmherstU of North TexasU of South FloridaU of Texas-San AntonioU of Wisc-MilwaukeeUtah StateVirginia TechWashington State

Departments• English (23)

• English and Comparative Literature (1)

• Communication (2)

• Journalism and Media Communication (1)

• Humanities (1)

• Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures (1)

• Technical Communication (1)

Degree TitlesBA in English, Rhetoric & Writing ConcentrationBA in English, Rhetoric Track; Professional Writing CertificateBA in Journalism & Media CommunicationsBA in Language, Writing & RhetoricBA in Professional & Technical WritingBA in Professional & Technical CommunicationBA in Professional Writing (4)BA in Scientific and Technical Arts; BA in Communication, Culture, & MediaBA in Technical CommunicationProfessional Writing, Rhetoric & TechnologyRhetoric & Professional Writing Track

BA in Communication (2)BA in English (3)BA in English with Concentration/Emphasis/Area/Specialization in Professional &/or Technical Writing/Communication (6)Professional Writing, Technical Communication, Technical Writing, Professional and Technical Writing, Professional and Technical Communication; Professional Writing and Technical Communication

BA in English-Technical BA in Digital Technology & CultureBA in English, Concentration in Professional & Media WritingBA in English, Emphasis in Rhetoric, Digital Media, & Professional CommunicationBA in English, Emphasis in Writing & Publication StudiesBA in English, Emphasis in Rhetoric & Professional Writing; BA in Digital Technology & Culture

Preliminary Observations

• Requirements in professional and technical communication ranged from 12-48 credit hours with no correlation between degree title and number of credit hours. This range in number of credit hours were likely contingent at least in part on university requirements or departmental requirements.

Preliminary Observations• Cultural coursework existed at 4 levels:

- University/General Education requirements (including foreign language requirement)

- Major requirements in areas other than professional and technical communication, i.e., literature

- Requirements in professional and technical communication

- Electives

Preliminary Observations

• Cultural issues interrogated in at least 2 ways:

- Explicit course focused on culture and intercultural communication.

- Implied learning outcomes embedded throughout curriculum (less visible), i.e., “Embedded Learning Outcomes”

Preliminary Observations• Of 30 institutions, 2 had a core professional and technical

communication course with “culture,” “diversity,” or “racism” in the title.Many programs thus did not require or did not offer courses in intercultural technical communication, sending the message that issues of culture are an option or someone else’s responsibility.

• One had a robust Gen Ed requirement of 18 credit hours in Cultural Understanding (6); Social & Political Worlds (6), U.S. Ethnic Diversity (3),Global Diversity (3).

• One housed in Technical Communication department, no stated requirement in culture or intercultural communication.

Required Course Titles

• Rhetoric, Persuasion, and Culture

• Rhetorics of Racism

• Digital Diversity

• Media, Culture & SocietySignificant variation in required course titles.

First two titles have a rhetoric focus.

Challenges & Limitations

• Professional and technical communication terms used in different ways.

• Terminology can be contingent on institutional politics.

• No standardized way of presenting degree requirements.

• Website usability varied.

Questions Raised• Is there a disconnect between scholarship on culture

and technical communication and how culture is engaged within our undergraduate programs?

• Should there be a cultural requirement in professional and technical writing core coursework?

• How can programs without the resources for adding another course requirement engage culture across the curriculum?

“We believe that curricular change needs to accompany student and faculty diversification in technical communication programs. It entails considerably more than adding a few courses in international or intercultural technical communication, translation and localization, Global English, and the like.”

— Savage & Mattson, 2011

How do these types of courses play out?

Here’s one example of an undergraduate course on Intercultural Issues in Professional Writing.

Learning ObjectivesBy the end of the semester, you should be able to: • Articulate how culture--whether based on race, ethnicity, gender,

sexuality, class, nationality, or (dis)ability—shapes professional interactions, and how professional interactions, in turn, shapes culture.

• Describe the relationship between culture and communication. • Understand intercultural communication as always situated within

contexts of unequal power and privilege. • Negotiate the cultural and ethical implications of professional

communication in the production of documents. • Analyze complex interactions between people of different cultures,

and design communication that facilitates understanding across a range of audiences.

• Reflect on your own cultural background and its impact on how you think, interpret information, and communicate.

Assignments & Major Projects

• Weekly Blog Posts • Discussion Facilitation • Analyzing a Local Culture • Partnership with Cranwell

International Center • Developing an

Information Campaign

Intersectional Approach“Intersectionality was introduced in the late 1980s as a heuristic term to focus attention on the vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of sameness in the context of antidiscrimination and social movement politics. It exposed how single-axis thinking undermines legal thinking, disciplinary knowledge production, and struggles for social justice” (Cho, Crenshaw, McCall, 2013).

As Savage & Mattson (2011) have articulated, “Insofar as technical communication as a practice and as an academic discipline participates in and seeks to benefit from globalization, it also shares responsibility for globalization’s effects, whether good or ill. The broader obligation, within which globalization is implicated, is to social justice for marginalized groups of people who may lose more than they gain from globalization’s effects.”

Raises questions about the ethicality of separating intercultural communication from issues of race, diversity, and social justice.

“We often like to believe that technical communication, like legal writing, is written objectively and is void of culture, thus making it more accessible. But just as legal scholar Williams (1991) demonstrated that legal writing is indeed not void of culture but is instead saturated in white male culture, I argue that technical communication also has a history of ignoring the ways in which our work is saturated with white male culture—which has real effects related to privilege and oppression on the lives and work of designers, writers, editors, and audiences of technical communication” (Haas, 2012).

Challenges“Teachers who attempt to address questions of ideology and resistance in advanced and professional writing courses face a number of difficult problems. Theories of resistance and ideology are all too often dogmatic and structure the course as a confrontation between oversimplified positions. Teachers also face the fact that not only are the ideas of resistance and the ideological construction of discourse very difficult for students, the notion of critique threatens their cultural position, their values, their desires and expectations” (Herndl, 1993).

Challenges“Unfortunately, making critical race theory central to our inquiry can be uncomfortable for professors and students, depending on their socioeconomical, geographical, racial, gendered, political—and otherwiseembodied—location.

“Regardless of their ethnic backgrounds, professors are always already held up for scrutiny as to their motivations for teaching ethnic texts, whether it be white liberal guilt, the anger of a professor of color, or some other rhetorical trope used to justify resistance to radical pedagogies, social justice pedagogies, or pedagogies of the oppressed. We should expect at least some resistance, even if minimal, and prepare for these moments, if possible.” (Haas, 2012)

Challenges

“A third challenge relates to the Writing in Communities and Cultures track in the major, the least-populated emphasis area. Many students are passionate about working with nonprofits, within advocacy organizations, and with local and state government, but we have not done as robust a job as necessary for helping students understand the connection between their interests and this academic path, or in helping students fully conceptualize and articulate the cultural situatedness of discursive acts and design choices” (DeVoss & Julier, 2009).

Points of Tension

• Balancing complexity with simplicity

• Assessment: Assign grades for weekly written responses to readings or credit/no credit?

• Managing my own emotional response while also paying attention to emotional labor of students.

Next Time• Assign grades for weekly responses.

• Use private class forum instead of public blogs.

• Do more with less.

• More attention to students’ emotional labor.

• More connections between readings and projects.

• Foreground analysis/connection building.

Questions Raised• Are these sorts of challenges combined

with a general lack of preparation for dealing with these challenges a reason why these issues are interrogated in our curricula in limited ways?

• How can we prepare technical communication instructors to deal with the challenges of teaching (inter)cultural issues in technical communication?

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Ethical Issues in Codes of Ethics

“tolerating diversity of opinion” reminds me of DeVoss, Jasken and Hayden critique of how intercultural communication textbooks sometimes construct intercultural communication situations as problems to be dealt with.

Cultural critique forces us to interrogate what public good means for different groups of people, and what it means to talk about “truthful and accurate communications” as a real possible outcome.

Future Directions• Study course requirements in professional and technical

communication and how those courses engage issues of culture in perhaps implicit, perhaps explicit ways.

• Research courses focused on intercultural communication, including course descriptions, syllabi, instructor responses, student evaluations, etc.

• Comparison among kinds of institutions.

Thanks!