ABSTRACT
In The Outcomes Book: Debate and Consensus after the WPA Outcomes Statement, Barry Maid (2005) adapted the first-year composition program outcomes to technical communication programs. He expertly adapts the language of the WPA Statement to fit technical communication courses and programs by adding, modifying, or deleting specific words or phrases, staying well within the categories established by the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA). He articulates well his reasons for any changes from the Statement, using arguments clearly within the boundaries of technical communication concerns. Although certainly a very good start, we see this effort as indicative of the problem in the technical communication field, namely, that we categorize, interpret, and explain our work from a standpoint of first-year composition. It’s easy to see why and how naturally this positioning occurs because most of us receive pedagogical training for first-year composition. But when assigned tech - nical communication courses, these same graduate students don’t necessarily receive the same level and depth of training for technical communication. Despite an interest in and scholarly focus of technical communication programs, it is commonplace to require MA and PhD students to prepare and teach in first-year composition programs, most obviously due to the economic needs of departments for (cheap) composition teachers. Second, the perspective of technical communi - cation as a subfield of composition establishes a vertical hierarchy with com - position as primary for any teaching of writing. Finally, the likeliest academic explanation for a lack of training in teaching technical communication is the
academic background held by the previous two generations, namely, literature (first generation) and rhetoric/composition (second generation). Consequently, until recently, little preparation and training has been provided for technical communication instruction. Although economic factors still influence decisions about staffing and training, we see some changes shifting attention away from composition, including more and specialized knowledge of technical communication theories and practices, which means that our body of knowledge is no longer simply lessons about form and style. We are also no longer comfortable with labels that identify our field as a subdiscipline of composition because what we know about technical communication can no longer fit into that small a space. The last decade has seen demands for more space in the general education writing curriculum, a shift in perspective, as the first-year experience may not necessarily still focus exclu - sively on composition. We see local responses to the needs and to programs as the largest influence leading to these changes as directors consider (as they always have) the local conditions in which they administer their programs. Perhaps with the third, and current, generation of technical communication PhDs, this lack of training can change, because they have been able to focus more exclu - sively on technical communication theories and practices. If the same emphasis was placed on technical communication pedagogy, what would that training look like? We think part of answering this question, in a way that would aid shifting the focus to technical communication theories and practices, is the creation of our own WPA statement and outcomes; one not adapted from a composition-technical communication as subfield perspective. Our goal in this chapter is to offer up such an outcomes statement, invite discussion about it, and ultimately call for our professional organizations, specifically the CPTSC, to adopt an outcomes statement specifically for and appropriately identified by technical communication theories and practices. We decided to propose the creation of a technical communication outcomes statement out of a shared concern that a composition standpoint continually hinders efforts in the field to define technical communication, its theories, its practices, and its identity. This hindrance is evident in our ongoing conversations to define the field and to identify the field’s value-our value. Even as we are calling for the creation of technical communication-specific outcomes statement, we are well aware that this call is also in response to seeing the similarities between what motivated the creation of the original WPA Outcomes Statement and our current issues in technical communication. In other words, we are optimistic that creating a technical communication outcomes statement will help us address some of the same issues that the WPA Outcomes Statement did for composition. For example, the WPA Outcomes Statement was intended to speak to those inside and outside the discipline about the essence of composition programs, to speak to these stakeholders in a language that showed the status of the field, and to be a step toward professionalizing the field of first-year
composition at a time when the professional work of flourishing graduate pro - grams seemed to be denied or dismissed. In “The Origins of the Outcomes Statement,” Edward White (2005) explained that the
Like the orig i nal WPA Out comes State ment, we in tend the tech ni cal com - munication out comes state ment to pri mar ily ad dress an au di ence of writ ing pro - gram ad min is tra tors and writ ing teach ers, while also sup ply ing in for ma tion to other stake holders in tech ni cal com mu ni ca tion-stu dents, other ad min is tra tors, parents, leg is la tors, the pub lic at-large-who have some right to know (Rhodes, Peckham, Bergmann, & Con don, 2005). As a re sult, the tech ni cal com mu ni ca tion out comes state ment and the dis cus sion/de bate we hope en sues serves to prog ress the on go ing con ver sa tions about de fin ing the field and the field’s value to the fore front by es tab lish ing a ba sis for eq uity-for what tech ni cal com mu ni ca tion teach ers share in com mon and a mea sure for what stu dents should be able to do after going through a technical communication program. In what follows, we first discuss what we have identified as an essence of technical communication-techne-the theoretical, practical, and pedagogical aspects of making. This is, for us, in the broadest sense, what we share in common as technical communication teachers and program administrators. Starting with what we consider to be our field’s enterprise, techne allows us to frame an identity for technical communication that speaks to who we are and what we do. Building on this discussion of value, in the next part, we discuss what we con - sidered when composing a technical communication outcomes statement, or what we have termed the TC-WPA Outcomes Statement. We discuss in more detail the stakeholders we considered and two specific factors that shaped the construc - tion of the statement: the students served by technical communication programs and the decision to create “outcomes” versus “standards.” In the last two sections, we discuss our rationale for the categories and the individual statements we composed as well as the importance of adapting the outcomes to individual programs by illustrating how each of us has done just that. We conclude with an invitation to continue this work and a specific call for our professional organization to take on this task.
