ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a pedagogical approach that engages the concept of advocacy as a lens through which to teach technical communication students to interact with and create texts in a more thoughtful, critical, and socially just way. Online and social media texts have certainly become the mundane texts that we engage with daily and, as they are both crafted through and shaped by technologies, they are of course, never neutral. As mundane texts, these communication practices often become naturalized and, therefore, remain largely uninterrogated. Using social media as an entry point into considering advocacy in technical and professional communication (TPC) may engage students with the way in which seemingly inconsequential, mundane texts. The field of TPC has a long-standing commitment to determining the role that technical communicators play in mediating knowledge and values. The chapter describes the author’s attempts to use social media analysis in an introductory technical communication classroom in order to engage with existing student interests and literacies.
