"You can't really do that, but ok."

No one likes to be told they can't do a thing. In this case, I had just said "I'm going to distill [this major research project] into [one] summary article." My colleague looked at me and, knowing full well what I was thinking, said: "you can't really do that."

The most intriguing thing about the exchange for me was that I knew she was right. I just couldn't act on her "rightness." In fact, despite knowing this, I also knew I still had to try and fail before I could figure out what I had to do.

This is an old lesson, one students may never really recognize as an explicit part of their learning process but teachers know it must be true for their students and struggle with it (trying to prevent the failure or prepare a sufficiently clear "I told you so" when the student realizes they haven't "done it right." As a teacher, I have to let a person try a thing and fail in order to learn.

It's weirder when you're a teacher who is also a student. You begin to see yourself as "another" person. As a full time university lecturer and a PhD student I began to have moments where Teacher Beau would turn and say to Student Beau, "You need to do the thing you tell your students to do and [fill in the blank]" Student Beau would usually respond, with an "aha, of course I'll do that." (Though, of course he often would respond with some frustration, "I thought I WAS doing that!" A tense silence would then ensue in this case because every Teacher knows you can't make Students learn anything.) 

As an early career researcher and scholar, this same dynamic persists. I can feel Teacher Beau pushing me to draft and send out articles I know that will either be rejected or will require substantial revision to be published. Because precisely in the trying and failing--or, perhaps better, not succeeding fully--and getting productive feedback will you improve/learn/impact. Teacher Beau knew my colleague was right. But Student Beau didn't have another course of action in the moment.

The amount of courage and/or chutzpah needed to persist in such a system is only beginning to occur to me.

And that said, seeing one's self as another is helpful but not inevitably so. I'm realizing how crucial the outside voice is in those moments. I'm grateful for my colleagues' willingness to serve as the outside other so patiently and creatively.

One of the stated objectives for the course I'm teaching this fall, "Professional Report Writing," requires that students be able to "present information orally." Given the course's focus on written reporting and our rhetorical approach to thinking about professional writing, I wasn't entirely sure how to make this component of the class stand out from my students' prior experience in speech and debate classes.

Most of my students are in the field of business, trekking dutifully, twice a week, to the English/Philosophy building. They have taken a number of courses on presentations and public speaking, especially in business contexts. They are juniors and seniors and so, at this point, have given a number of presentations of their individual and group projects throughout their coursework here at Tech.

I had thought of several activities we could do where students engage in micro-presentations and then use the follow up critique and discussion as a way to explore how professional reporting orally relates to the concepts we had explored in class. But my concern was that the amount of time this could take, given our obligations to meet other course objectives, wouldn't leave us enough time for--or worse, wouldn't naturally lead us to--a discussion about how the professional oral report is both rhetorical and related to the previous written work they had done. My fear was also that we'd get hung up on the micro-physics of presenting: how should I stand, should I use note cards, how do I cope with pre-presentation jitters, do I have to dress up, and so on.

Whenever I am struck by some conundrum regarding what I want students to learn and the limitations I face in helping them learn it, I often try to make that visible and invite students to think through the challenge with me. It isn't always helpful for students to see the pedagogical mechanics at work "in" or "underneath" assignments. But I think that--especially with students late in their undergraduate career--it is important to get them thinking in a meta-existential way about what they are doing and why and how the artifice of a class does or does not prepare them to do the thing we're learning about.

So this semester I invited my students to co-create the rubric for the oral presentation with me. I told them that of course it would be easier for them (and me, frankly), if I just sat down and wrote out what I expected of them for the assignment. I told them that some instructors have an enormous amount of courage and co-create entire course syllabi with their students. While I don't have that kind of courage, I thought this would be an opportunity to practice a kind of shared power in evaluating that I hope to move towards more and more as I grow as an instructor.

Me: Oh, sweet! You only need three seconds to warm up a pop tart in the microwave!

Narrator: He would need more than three seconds to warm up a pop tart in the microwave.

Classrooms, challenging, fraught spaces though they may be on any given day, can be thrilling, invigorating places to be. Places where something new (even if just new for you) begins and points you toward a better way.

Yesterday was one of those days. 

New assignments are always a source of anxiety for me. The thrill of trying something untested is always undercut for me by the concern that the tasks or activity itself doesn't really meet the learning objectives for the course. Or that some unforeseen dynamic will derail the idea. And that anxiety is always compounded when you're trying to work outside your specific area of specialization.

I am not a design person. I love design, but it's not my wheelhouse professionally or personally. But Tuesday was Document Design day in Professional Report Writing.

So I had students break out into 4-5 groups of 3-4 people and assigned them a space on the whiteboards that line the walls on the west and north of the classroom. I drew three blank spaces, an enlarged rectangle to simulate an 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of paper, a 15.6 inch laptop screen, and a 6" smartphone screen. All enlarged to a scale roughly 4:1.

In my new position with Texas Tech's stellar Technical Communication and Rhetoric program, I have the good fortune to be surrounded by stellar colleagues. Passionate, intelligent people they care very much about the field, what we are doing, where we are headed.

I've appreciated the moments of serendipity that comes from working in the same building as the bulk of my co-workers. From the just-in-time suggestion about a classroom activity or an insightful comment about how to refine a web search, it has been, by far, the best part of my short time here.

My colleagues Drs. Greg Wilson and Rachel Wolford recently published an article, "The Technical Communicator as (Post-Postmodern) Discourse Worker, with the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. In this article they continue to wrestle with the question of what it is technical communicators do and the extent to which the heretofore ubiquitous "postmodern" approach to positioning the technical communicator as subject in the workforce is still a valuable way to consider their position, the nature of their work in the economy. It showed up for me just as I was wrestling with Jeyraj's article about which I posted last time. They challenge my thinking in very productive ways.

Wilson and Wolford give a very useful overview of how and the extent to which "postmodernism" gave technical communicators the ability to "map the terrain," if you will, of the social, cultural, and economic dynamics with which this kind of "knowledge worker" had to contend.

Yet they note there is a substantial limit to the value of a "hermeneutics of suspicion" that po-mo theory advanced (Henry, 2006, is the exemplar here). Rather, the shift needs to be to one of "action" a "hermeneutics of situation," a post-postmodern perspective which Nealon (2012) proposes be an: "active engaged praxis within existing conditions" (p. 111, quoted in Wilson and Wolford, 2017, p. 18). This dovetails, according to Wilson and Wolford, with Gramsci's "war of position" whereby "all societal groups can engage in counter-hegemonic action to redefine the commonsense assumptions that constrain what is possible and sanctioned by the most dominant societal groups" (p. 18).

If postmodernism enabled us to position technical communicators "critically," (and here I think Jeyraj's positioning of tech comm knowledge workers as "liminal" still holds), the pivot to a "post-postmodern" provides a "theoretical base whose critique is generative and not suspicious" as well as built on a "set of skills that provide access to workplace discourse, and "a workplace whose interest in distributed efficiency coincides with a worker's interest in discourse authorship" (Wilson & Wolford, 2017, p. 21).

If the post-postmodern terrain is a space of discursive guerrilla warfare (to paraphrase and apply Gramsci here), then Wilson and Wolford propose mêtis as a tactic we teach students to use. A Greek term defined as "cunning intelligence" (2017, p.  22). Here Wilson and Wolford call upon Dolmage (2009), DeCerteau (2011), and Brady (2003) to flesh out what using this  "flair, forethough, subtlety of mind, deception, cleverness, opportunism, and experience might mean for technical communicators (Dolmage, 2009, p. 5, quoted in Wilson and Wolford, 2017, p. 22) . 

They see in Slack (2003) a gesture of what this might look like:​ 

The lesson that is revealed for technical communicators by these lines of flight is, to my thinking, that technical communicators need, apart from the more obvious technical skills (basic writing and speaking skills for example) a finely tuned sense of what it means to negotiate the affective terrain within which their discipline is composed. (p. 205, quoted in Wilson and Wolford, 2017, p. 23)

Greg and Rachel's article came at a kairotic moment for me as I am trying to take advantage of this brief lull between the completion of my PhD and the full onslaught of obligations that beset tenure-track professors. Given my interests in Activity Theory and Actor-Network Theory I am all here for a focus on praxis and activity. I fully support the notion that "operationalizing" postmodern categories of critique is of limited value. But I think the suspicious "mapping" practices of critical theorists still need to be in the curriculum, tech comm or otherwise.

The implication of Nealon's claims that it might be possible to take "rampant commodification of fast, late, or just-in-time capitalism as a neutral beginning premise" (Wilson and Wolford, 2017, p. 15) doesn't sit well with me (Wilson and Wolford, to be fair, note it is "provocative"). And I may just be beholden to notions of value inherent to systems that may not be justified or warranted. There is something exciting, joyful, and potentially productively transgressive about the idea of mêtis. 

But I am still gripped by the idea that we as writers, technical communicators, citizens, persons generally should be able to control our processes with precision. I'd be curious to see if or how you can "systematize" a pedagogy of mêtis. Because I am still obligated to meet learning objectives, to homogenize to one extent or another my teaching practices so that the commodity of a "technical communication education" can be assessed across students' experiences (ultimately by those who own the means of knowledge work production, if we are honest).

I will certainly need to keep wrestling with this. You should too. Read Greg and Rachel's article. Cite it in your published work, early and often. If you have thoughts, leave me a comment!

​Cheers.

I studied rhetoric and composition/writing studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. Early in my coursework, as does every student, I came face to face with the question "what is 'rhetoric'?" I joke that the way most people use the word "rhetoric" they mean something like "lying." So when I tell people I have a PhD in "Rhetoric," I wonder what they think. The exceptions to this assumption, I have found, are theologians and lawyers who understand the nature of rhetoric historically and as part of their fields. I'll leave you to your own counsel about whether rhetoric-as-lying still applies in their cases as well...

Midway through my PhD coursework, I slowly began to wonder if rhetoric as a field of academic study had any substantive content of its own or if it was simply "parasitic" on other fields. I was relieved to know this was a common concern and that the field did indeed have answers to the question what does rhetoric provide as a matter of substance.

As my research and study took me into the sub-field of "technical communication" the sense of what it is I independently as a researcher and scholar provide returned, though somewhat muted. This question is fraught with implications from the personal to the social and cultural as well as the political (the value of the humanities is perennially the subject of derision among politicians). So it's one that recurs occasionally.

Recently, while revisiting Angela Haas's 2012 article "Race, Rhetoric and Technology" I found myself chasing down citations in her bibliography in more depth than I had before. There Joseph Jeyaraj's 2004 JBTC article "Liminality and Othering" caught my attention. Here he makes the case that "technical writers" are "liminal subjects" (p. 15). He summarizes Turner's (1974) definition of "liminality" as that "state of flux that emerges at a particular stage in the temporal process of a community" (p. 15). He also builds on Gaonkar's argument "that all rhetorical knowledge is characteristically liminal" (p. 16). For Jeyraj, rhetoric "as a liminal discipline, is able to freely interact with the discursive practices of different disciplines so that new ideas and fresh knowledge of these discursive practices may emerge" (p. 17). 

This article resonated so fully and suddenly anew because I've been recently wrestling personally and professionally with being a "liminal" person, someone who has always found himself inhabiting "in between" spaces, physically, socially, culturally, intellectually. I suffer with bouts of insecurity (as I imagine everyone does at one time or another) about what it is I do. Academic research is very much about pushing out past the boundaries of what is known and accepted so you often find yourself trying to think and write things with very few people around you, conceptually--perhaps only a few luminaries pointing the way, equally lonely themselves. As a profession it simply exacerbates our natural anxieties circulating around meaning in our lives.

I suspect also that this question lingers because we value the concrete, the material, that which can be built and "cited" more quickly. But as Jeyraj and others have noted, the liminal work of rhetoric--or really any kind of "translation" work, be it conceptual or linguistic, is extraordinarily valuable. At least, that is what keeps me working day to day...

My name is Beau. If you're here you've probably clicked through the page and learned a bit about me. This blog section exists, frankly, to get me to write a bit each week outside my usual professional writing. I'd like this to be a place where I can tinker with thoughts publicly. Thoughts related to rhetoric, intercultural encounter, technical communication, public rhetoric, and other things I am interested in professionally. 

Blogs, though, are most fun when people are involved in such a way that they become a community of thinkers, writers, and active members in public life. So feel free to comment, add your thoughts, etc. I will do my best to be interesting if nothing else...