Scientific & Technical Writing (E.S. 3210 & PTC 3216)
Dr. Bill Macgregor, Instructor
1) PRIMARY COURSE GOAL: to help upper level students develop comprehensive communication skills needed in their technical professions; achieving this
overall goal requires students to master three broad communication categories.
1.1 Task Responsiveness. Students will learn to recognize and respond appropriately to specific communication tasks in different contexts;
1.2 Information Handling. Students will learn how to search for, assemble, record, analyze, evaluate/validate, and present information needed to accomplish a given task;
1.3 Quality Assurance (revising & editing). Students will learn to revise and edit documents to meet the standards expected of professionals in the field.
2) COURSE DESIGN RATIONALE
2.1 Communication tasks which students perform as a team occur in a real world context of a term long client based open ended investigative project;
2.2 The emphasis on meeting the client's needs (by performing well on the project) requires creative and critical task responsiveness and information handling, as well as systematic communication quality assurance practices;
2.3 Students' participation in course based projects that help solve community problems reconnects students' academic lives with their communities;
2.4 Complex, client based project work requires that multidisciplinary teams assigned to technical tasks learn effective small group communication techniques;
2.5 Project work requiring both individual and collaborative documents ensures that students get practice developing interpersonal communication skills as well as cooperative writing skills;
2.6 Required reviews of documents in various stages of the project replicates the widespread processes of project work in organizational contexts, and thus familiarizes students with both the genres and the sequences of both specialized and routine communications associated with such work (the "paper trail");
2.7 Requiring students to assemble work into a professional portfolio, and weighting the portfolio grade appropriately boosts students' job search efforts; reinforces individual course objectives; and emphasizes students' outcomes at the end of the course's learning cycle (rather than averaging multiple performances along the learning curve.)
3) STUDENT ASSIGNMENTS designed to achieve the course's objectives
3.1 Reading and discussion of Franklin Covey Style Guide (FC); practice using it as a reference resource to solve communication problems, and to correct errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, and style;
3.2 Course based revising & editing exercises and quizzes using samples of student writing to help students recognize common error patterns and develop revising and editing tactics to correct those errors;
3.3 Case based revision exercises for short professional and technical documents to give students practice revising entire short messages;
3.4 Application practice of rhetorical modes & genres to communication needs of the term project, including (but not limited to)
3.4.1 explaining technical terms and concepts,
3.4.2 presenting technical processes,
3.4.3 describing field (first hand) observations;
3.5 Documenting the various phases of routine work associated with the project, including
3.5.1 records of team meetings,
3.5.2 records of meetings with clients,
3.5.3 contacts with project related resources (email, phone, fax, snail mail, etc.),
3.5.4 full and detailed records for materials and sources used in research,
3.5.5 progress reports, and
3.5.6 various other documents in the "paper trail";
3.6 Preparing the specialized documents required to build towards the project's final solution to the client's problem; these include
3.6.1 a plan of work (that responds to the client's request),
3.6.2 an internal work contract among team members,
3.6.3 technical "area reports" written by each team member,
3.6.4 a final report and oral/technical presentation, and
3.6.5 a project performance appraisal document;
3.7 Reviewing & reflecting objectively about each assignment once it has been completed.
3.8 Preparing a professional quality career portfolio that includes not only all work from this class, but also relevant exhibits from the student's primary fields of study, along with commentary and resume.
Reflecting and Acting Rhetorically
The Irrelevant Required Course
Most campuses have them the upper level writing course required of students in pre professional, science, and engineering fields. For 20 years I've watched students come through these courses, most of them dreading the ordeal they expect to face. Ironically, they tend to be among the most motivated and goal oriented students a faculty member is likely to encounter and, often, among the "smartest" in various non academic ways as well. But they face the required course with either resignation or resistance. Whatever rationale may have governed the placement of such a course in the curriculum, it is to them an obstacle, a distraction, an unnecessary hurdle placed between them and their career plans.
As a faculty member of a professional and technical communication program at Montana Tech, a small engineering school in the Northern Rocky Mountains, it's been my job to fulfill both the letter and the spirit of this writing requirement, and to do so in ways that acknowledge and honor the professional culture into which these students are being inducted. Their aversion to writing has tended to fill classes with large numbers of highly experienced graduating seniors who have already completed most of the courses in their respective engineering and related technical majors even though the course is supposed to be taken in their junior year. Moreover, the engineering fields of specialty at this school don't attract students with inborn interests in the pursuit of social justice, in engagement in social causes, or in exploring the thoughts of John Dewey or Ernest Boyer about the role of higher education in society. These students expect to be hired by mining and petroleum companies, by government regulatory agencies, by resource exploration and exploitation consulting firms, and such. That's why most of them are getting a higher education degree: because they believe it guarantees them a lucrative and stable career.
The college itself sits atop a kill overlooking a mining town that has seen better days: the mines are all closed, much of the population has moved away, and the largest industry in the region for the past 20 years has been the federally mandated cleanup of toxic wastes produced by 120 years of mining and related industrial activity. The students live on campus or in town, but, except for those raised in the town, the students tend not to be connected to the community. And even for those raised here, the career trajectory is clearly written on the horizon: this is not the home they expect to live and work in (much as some of them might wish to).
Faced with students disengaged from the curricular as well as the community context, this required writing course was well on the way to becoming a mere afterthought in the curriculum, and not something that merited the status of being a core requirement for all students. Faced with students focused on external rewards, and unquestioningly valorizing personal and social behaviors that they believe characterize a successful career, the course could get by merely by providing students with communication techniques to make them better competitors in their quest for career success. Faced with a traditional campus (and academic system) culture that aims at turning out a "competent workforce," few opportunities present themselves to challenge students' notions of the "responsibilities appertaining thereto" that the school's commencement ceremony invokes the new graduates to be mindful of.
A Program of Re-engagement
Beginning in 1995, modeling some features on the highly respected EPICS program at the Colorado School of Mines, I adopted what I later learned was called a "Service-learning" approach to the two courses of this type that I taught each year: Scientific and Technical Writing (required of engineering and science students) and Business and Professional Writing (required of all other students). Several theoretical problems associated with the course subject and the pedagogy employed were instantly addressed by this development.
The instructor of professional writing teaches that the audience's needs come first, whether the rhetorical purpose is expository, argumentative, persuasive, or didactic. In the summer of 1995, and ever since, students in these classes don't have to write for the teacher. They write to meet the needs of a client in the community a real person, usually a representative of an agency coping with any of the myriad and very real technical problems facing the community. Thus students in this setting learn the most important lessons built into the course syllabus not from lecture, and not from my commentary on their drafts, but from their real audience. They also learn about negotiated meanings and about a constructivist view of knowledge a lesson they will learn more about during their professional careers, but which their academic preparation tends to ignore or suppress.
The syllabus accompanying this document details both the rationale and the workflow of the course. Addressed to students, it provides them with most of what they need to know before "signing on" to the rigors of the term's work. What it doesn't say is that the marriage of a service learning pedagogy with the objectives of this course turns it into much more than it could ever have been otherwise, without adding much, if any extra work either for me or for the students. Students learn the required writing techniques the genres, the processes, the disciplines, the specialized styles expected of them but they learn them as part of a real time workflow that grows out of the process of addressing a problem brought to the class by a member of the external community. But more than that, they learn something no other course I've been a part of teaches: they learn about ethos the hard way. First the project team adopts an ethos and a team voice in addressing the problem brought to them; but at the culmination of their work, if not earlier in their investigations, they learn to hear their own individual voices speaking with the power and authority they've earned through their engagement with the client's concerns.
For a class in rhetoric, this is a major achievement. Sometimes the power thus expressed reflects the culture that's trained students throughout their academic careers: the voice is that of the expert telling the uninformed community audience the "correct answer". But other times, some very special and very unpredictable occasions give rise to students presenting the results of their work with a voice that reflects a complex understanding of the rhetorical situation and doing so (usually) quite spontaneously. For example:
A team of students agreed to investigate the issues associated with the abandoned paupers' cemetery on the east edge of town. It was being vandalized; it was an eyesore and possibly a health hazard; developers wanted the land for condos; and so on. The team tackled it in typical engineering fashion, acquiring the facts, measuring the meters and bounds, and uncovering reams of historical data. Then something happened as they neared the time when they would present their results in a report before the Council of Commissioners. They got mad. They decided that community values were at stake: victims of poverty, disease, and social neglect were buried there, in unmarked graves hundreds, if not thousands of them. The presentation they made to the Council that night was impassioned and genuine, and cut through political posturing to achieve results: the first steps in protecting the cemetery were ordered at the end of their presentation without a dissenting vote. The prime voice was that of a petroleum engineer, a welder, a craftsman who somehow found eloquence amid the technical details of his presentation that demonstrated more skill in scientific and technical communication than I could have taught him.
Of the thousands of miles of mine shafts, tunnels, and other workings under the city only a few remain open today; most access points are sealed. One student team responded to a somewhat whimsical request from the extension agent of the state bureau of mines and geology to explore the feasibility of developing one of the open tunnels as an Underground miner training center. His idea hit home with a number of the students whose families had worked for several generations in the underground; with the mines closed and the average age of the existing domestic underground mine worker hovering just below 50 years of age, the need for such a facility made sense. Unaware that this was "just a class project" or that they were "just students" they prepared a proposal that was handed off to an aide to one of the state's U.S. Senators, and ultimately was included as a multimillion dollar portion of an appropriation bill to establish suck a center. The sense of empowerment that these students showed as this process unfolded (it was well underway before the end of their term in the course) was more than mere pride in a job well done. The tangible results yielded by their collaborative effort to transform a complex of community needs into an
opportunity left them connected to the community, the school, and their disciplines in ways unimaginable outside of the service learning environment. The Underground Miner Training Center, by the way, expects to hold its first classes this year.
Impacts, Outcomes, Excursions
Since 1995 in merely the two courses mentioned here, 123 projects have engaged 422 students in tasks that challenged their technical skills, that forced them to hone existing, and learn new communication skills, and that, at their best, transformed them in ways that no previous pedagogy I've tried has accomplished. But these numbers speak only of students and projects; and for each of those projects, community partnerships were deepened and strengthened; for each of those students, the faculty in their major fields began hearing about these opportunities, and the benefits of this approach; for the town gown relationship, the tangible benefits in sharing opportunities and resources in the curricular context has led to the drafting of a memorandum of understanding with the local government that will help subsidize future students' work, and a similar agreement is being worked out with at least one federal agency that has benefited from such curricular 6ased student work.
Again, in 1998, during my faculty fellowship, I attended both a regional Campus Compact meeting, and the meeting of a group I'd never heard of, The Invisible College both held at Portland State University. While I've found much of value over the years in the work of Campus Compact, my experience of the Invisible College's National Gathering was an epiphany. It modeled the best learning practices in the form it chose for its meeting sustained discussions of issues that mattered to the participants. At that first Gathering, I was asked to lead one of the two day learning circles, and I was hooked. At the end of the Gathering, when the invitation went out for new members, I joined the steering committee. I began assuming more and more responsibilities, including coordinating the organization's listserve, and ultimately being elected to serve as an officer in the organization. I now am serving my year as national chair of the organization that is now known as Educators for Community Engagement, or E4CE. Last year, while serving as Chair elect, I also served as program chair for the Eighth National Gathering, which was held for the first time at Salisk Kootenai Tribal College in northern Montana, and engaged a hundred faculty, students, staff, and community partners in 22 days of intensive learning circle based dialogue.
At the first annual service learning research conference hosted by LIC Berkeley in fail of 2001, I rediscovered what I had really known all along: that my notion of scholarship is not the scholarship of control groups and statistical validation. It's not that I don't accept the relevance of that sort of research to answer certain questions; it's just that those aren't the questions that interest me. My questions are most often local and topical, and they remain for the most part contextualized within the framework of my identity as a faculty member. They often have a theoretical, ethical, or philosophical bent, even though they may arise out of mind numbingly boring practical course design and course implementation details: under what conditions (if any) can service-learning legitimately partner with for profit entities? Are the notions of distance learning and community engagement through service-learning mutually incompatible? If the service learning movement is successful on a grand scale, how will our notions of political economy be transformed?
My scholarly goals remain grounded in the task of applying what I've learned about service-learning to new problems and new situations, both in my community and farther afield. The more I learn about the causes of intractable strife in perennially troubled areas of the world, the more I am interested in testing the potential for service learning to transform a society. To that end, I have requested a sabbatical leave for next year and have begun seeking sources of support through which I might implement elements of service-learning pedagogy in the university system in the Republic of Yemen, one of the poorest of the Middle Eastern Arab states, and, based on recent research conducted by the World Bank, a nation that is actively reevaluating the relevance of its system of higher education. Much like my home in Montana, Yemen's current poverty, its political and economic history, and the richness of its culture and its natural and human resources represent a new challenge that could test the limits of service-learning pedagogy. That's a test I'd like to take on.
