Technical Writing Teaching Philosophy—Brenna Gomez, MFA

I did not begin my teaching career as a college instructor. I taught in various learning
environments across the Colorado Springs community for four years. Each environment
provided its own unique challenges. Most notably, at 22, I became a Program Manager at the
Women’s Resource Agency (WRA). I ran the InterCept program for at-risk teenage girls ages
13-18. InterCept was offered as an elective once a week in Harrison School District Two, and
students were screened either by the program or by our partner schools. Courses focused on
obstacles to female students’ success and were as follows: relational aggression; anger
management; domestic violence; depression, self-harm, and suicide; nutrition and eating
disorders; safe sex and consent; anatomy and birth control options; and more. On the adult side,
WRA worked with women returning to the workforce after a gap in employment. We provided
resume and cover letter assistance, work appropriate clothing, and computer skills training. We
also worked with adult clients in the local jail. I was asked to fill in on occasion and work with
our incarcerated clients on resume writing and creative writing as stress relief. I saw enormous
inequity and trauma while teaching in these positions. (In my first four months on the job, I made
multiple reports of child abuse and rape to the local authorities and the Department of Human
Services.)

WRA’s client philosophy was based in social work and asked us to meet each client where they
were in their lives without judgement. Our mission was to help our clients move forward by
empowering them with the skills and the abilities to achieve their goals. I bring this philosophy
with me into the classroom when working with students at the University of New Mexico
(UNM). Students do not need to be judged in the classroom based on their previous choices or
where they are in their educational journeys. Students need to encounter assignments that
challenge them to think about the world in a new way and push them out of their comfort zones
to build new skills. In building these skills, students will become empowered to see themselves
as technical communicators who can transfer their knowledge into other courses and into the
workforce. Karatsolis et al. (2016) found that even early career technical writers were unsure of
their writing abilities after several years of familiarity with the genres in their fields (246). My
hope as an instructor is that by building metacognition—“the ability to be cognizant and
reflective of his or her learning”—into my assignments, students will become more confident in
their writing abilities as … “their knowledge about writing can be generalized over time” due to
their engagement “in the reflection of their own writing as they move from one genre to another”
(247). In order to get students to explicitly think about this kind of transference, each project in
219 is related to imagined work place scenarios with a reflection that asks them to consider how
their new skills, abilities, or knowledge might be beneficial in the workplace. However, Brent
(2011) does caution that transfer is difficult to achieve in this way. Therefore, in addition to these
structured reflections, I also scaffolded in more open and general reflection time, similar to that
of a journal. Students will be given an open-ended prompt once a month during the semester that
asks, “Write about your writing process” or “Write about your general knowledge of this genre
in comparison to the last genre.” Brent draws on the previous literature on transfer and reflection
to note that “reflection can also make general knowledge more readily accessible to transfer by
raising it to a more conscious level” (413). In combination, these two practices will make
transfer more attainable through reflection.
Teaching in disenfranchised communities, both in my past and present, means that including
aspects of social justice is essential to my pedagogy. Even if it’s not explicitly in an assignment
prompt, I’m always thinking about how I can get students to consider how inequality, privilege,
and systems of oppression are built into the fabric of society in ways they might not have
formally noticed, especially in communication. As Natasha Jones points out in “The Technical
Communicator as Advocate” (2016), as instructors and scholars we should be “interrogating how
technical and professional communication can be complicit in reinforcing which perspectives
and whose experiences are valued and legitimized” (343). One way I approach this in the
classroom is through my lesson on creating reader profiles, borrowed from UNM Assistant
Professor Cristyn Elder. The first portion of the lesson (the portion from Professor Elder) teaches
students how to create reader profiles addressing primary, secondary, and tertiary readers, as well
as gatekeepers. Students are asked to contemplate the readers’ and gatekeepers’ goals, values,
and attitudes in a female razor ad. This is a good opportunity to talk through the heteronormative
assumptions made during the creation of marketing documents. Many other inequities are
naturally discussed in this conversation. I built a second component into Professor Elder’s
activity. Once familiar with reader profiles, students then analyze college TV ads as if they were
going to design a static ad for said university. What are the assumptions the college is making?
What kind of values do they have? What does it appear that the values of their students or other
constituents are? This is an excellent way to introduce concepts of intersectionality, also touched
on in the Jones article, into a classroom discussion. Students can see how racism, classism, and
sexism, and other forms of oppression, intersect in certain ads, in addition to how well the ads
communicate a specific message. When teaching online, these types of discussions will have to
be built into journals, discussion boards, and more explicitly included in assignment
prompts/reflections. These conversations/activities are essential at the beginning of the semester,
as they can also springboard the class into conversations on ethics and professional codes of
conduct in technical communication in the classroom and the workplace.

In “Writing in Academe, Writing at Work,” Tebeaux observes that “lack of knowledge about
visual rhetoric may be a major reason for the ‘bad’ writing that employees currently generate on
the job” (216). In working towards increased knowledge of visual rhetoric, Tebeaux held
workshops with mid-level managers to revise their technical documents. She found that most
were not considering audience. Here I cannot help but think of the many UNM students who are
from disenfranchised communities that lack regular technology access. These students could
possibly be even less familiar with visual rhetoric than their peers. In an effort to combat this in
my technical writing courses, media labs will be held before projects requiring technology use so
that students do not feel further disenfranchised if they are unfamiliar with certain technologies.
Media labs provide students with a low-stakes way to experiment with these technologies by
creating actual documents requiring a consideration of audience and visual rhetoric. I will also
provide multiple options for technology on visual rhetoric projects, so students have choice and
agency over the technology they use.

In my pedagogy I also employ the best practice of emphasizing “education (learning to know)
over training (learning to do)” (172). This is discussed at length in Patrick Moore’s “Rhetorical
vs. Instrumental Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication” (1997). Moore sees this
being achieved through teaching instrumental discourse alongside traditional rhetoric. Here he
defines rhetoric as persuasive public speaking (though he concedes that it is commonly seen as
any audience consideration) and instrumental discourse as document literacy (172). I intermix
the two all semester in technical writing. Students select a workplace from a list at the beginning
of the semester and must imagine this real-life business as their audience for all assignments.
Their consideration of audience defines the visual rhetoric used in their procedures/presentations
(project two) and their recommendations reports (project three). They will do a thorough
examination of the organization’s website i.e. a readers’ profile to determine how to approach
projects over the course of the semester. This will provide insight into layout, organization, and
style of documents introducing concepts of document literacy.

My goal as an instructor is to empower students. I want them to learn that they are capable and
skilled at writing in more ways than they realize. Through the projects in our course they will
begin to see rhetorical knowledge across genres that they will be encouraged to transfer to the
workplace. They will not only learn concepts of visual rhetoric and document design, but how to
analyze communication for messages that oppress and perpetuate structural inequality. It is my
hope that they will leave 219 not only with more confidence in their technical communication
abilities, but that they will have the critical thinking skills and code of conduct to help them
become better citizens.