Technical Communication and Post-Structuralism: Conducting Research under Contingent Conditions

Carol Johnson & Nancy Coppola & Norbert Elliot

Post-Structuralism, Foucault and the Articulation Model

Somewhere along the way, we lost the author.  For awhile it was OK, because instead we had the grand archetypical patterns of structuralism, so although we may have lost one important thing, we gained another.  Then we went one step further:  in post-structuralism, we finally came to see language as a fully-contextualized network of statements, Foucault’s utterances, statements inextricably woven into discourse environments.  In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault wrote:

 . . . there is no statement in general, no free, neutral, independent statement; but a statement always belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role among other statements, deriving support from them and distinguishing itself from them; it is always part of a network of statements, in which it has a role, however, minimal it may be, to play (99).

The author, then, became a construct, a construct sometimes used, sometimes disabled, a construct that categorized and valorized certain forms of writing.  But what about us, in the field of technical communication? 

In “The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority”, Slack, Miller and Doak query the role of the technical communicator.  Do we merely relay knowledge, invisibly transmitting necessary data from the user to receiver, both of whom are stakeholders an we are not?  Or do we translate, like middleware, between sender and receiver?  The authors postulate a third position, one in which the technical communicator is complicit, an articulator within an ongoing articulation.  I think their aim is to gain some power and authority for technical communicators.  However, this power is not a given, it must be claimed.

Conditions of Uncertainty

At New Jersey Institute of Technology, we have, during the past three years, worked in conditions of uncertainty: our department was subject to be dismantled at any time.  A statewide commission sought to unify New Jersey’s three research universities—NJIT, Rutgers, and UMDNJ (the University of Medicine and Dentistry).  The proposed merger called into question the very existence of our unit, an interdisciplinary Department of Humanities that was slated for merger with the more conventional disciplinary departments at other institutions where English, history, and philosophy had, in a manly fashion, organized themselves into homogeneous units for the production of knowledge.

Reaction to Uncertainty

In reaction to uncertainty, we decided to rearticulate the meaning to technical communication for ourselves and our students.  Beginning in 2003, a time concurrent with the planned eradication of our Department, we launched two research initiatives: 1) a reconstruction of the design of our undergraduate junior-level service course in technical writing, English 352, and 2) an investigation into the variables of technical communication in our graduate master of science program in professional and technical communication (the MSPTC). Rejecting narrow views of positivism as an inherent evil, we sought to capture and measure both of these research initiatives. We sought curricular accountability in defining the basic technical writing abilities of our students, and began to articulate the variables of technical writing, a project that has culminated in online portfolios for all of our technical communication students (both undergraduate and graduate).

Undergraduate Technical Communication

In the undergraduate course, we have long been reading and scoring best papers for an ongoing program assessment.  The history of this assessment effort is published in two papers, "The Assessment of Technical Writing:" by Norbert Elliot and Robert Lynch in and "Setting the Discourse Community: Assessment for the New Technical Communication Service Course" by Nancy Coppola.  The latter article is available online, but the former is hard to find and thus I have provided copies here for those of you who are interested.

As we began modifying the curriculum of the undergraduate technical communications course, we continued the holistic scoring of best papers.  However, the rubric that we were using for scoring was developed for papers within the Humanities Department as a whole (slide1).

It was a holdover from previous times and we knew that it was not appropriate for scoring technical communication.  With its focus on thesis, argumentation and proper MLA style, his rubric is appropriate for research papers, but not for manuals, proposals and web content.  Moreover, it said nothing about layout, design or any of the other visual elements that are so important to our reading processes today.

We read and scored best papers, holistically, every semester.  Once a year we read and scored the entire paper portfolios analytically, using this scale (slide 2):

This scoring guide had also been developed for the humanities program as a whole and it, too, was of limited value for what we were trying to teach in technical communication.

The Personal Side

There had been a hiatus for several years before I came to NJIT during which there was no assessment at all.  The effort I am describing here began in the midst of our department’s dissolution.  I had just arrived as a Visiting Professor, a stop-gap measure to fulfill existing obligations.  I had been working very hard teaching the undergraduates and I admit I knew nothing about assessment.  Then, suddenly I was asked to produce best papers from each student for an assessment that I knew nothing about and then I was also asked to collect portfolios.  Of course, I was irritated, as were the adjuncts and instructors.  To my surprise, however, the assessment brought us together, in the same room, discussing the meaning of what we had been doing all semester, comparing notes and assignments, solving problems.  As we read each other’s papers, I realized that the assessment was socially very important; it was a forum for knowledge exchange, consensus making and mutual support.

Note: to those of you who are unfamiliar with assessment, I am talking about program assessment, not student assessment.  We are not grading the students – that is the teacher’s responsibility – we are charting change in the program as a whole, searching for patterns, in order to make it work better.

Shortly thereafter, I became the director of Eng. 352 with responsibility to revise the course and continue the assessment.  First, I required a common textbook.  Next, we began teaching common modules (the procedure, the proposal, oral presentations, technical marketing, etc.).  And the following semester, we began requiring that each student have at least a single webpage on the NJIT servers.  This last semester we required that each student have an online portfolio with all of his or her work in on the web.

New Criteria

In order to give validity to the variables that we were assessing, we needed new criteria.  Thus together, through an online modified Delphi (a Delphi is a method for structuring a group communication process so that it is effective in allowing a group of individuals, as a whole, to deal with a complex problem) we came up with a new set of criteria for the undergraduate technical communication curriculum (slide3). 

We needed to do this to include attention to visual clarity, presentational logic, audience-awareness, appropriate use of voice, and editing competency.  We then made these new criteria into an analytic scoring method for the online portfolios (slide 4).

This December, we read online portfolios, scoring them for thirteen separate variables, with these new criteria.  I know, since Norbert Elliot has just finished writing a book on the history of assessment, that this is the first time this has been done.  These are samples of student portfolios (slides 5 & 6).

Graduate Technical Communication

In the MSPTC program, we began two forms of assessment: formative assessment, based on the students ongoing work, as discussed and recorded by professors, and a summative assessment based on criteria and portfolio readings.  For this, we also created a new set of core competencies that are spread across the program (slide 8). 

Formative Assessment

The list of core competencies was distributed to each professor.  The professor then made comments and collected examples of student work to provide evidence about the competencies of each student.  Then we all got together and discussed each student individually, with these notes in front of us.  The session was tape-recorded and the recording provided the basis for the final “report card” comments that are given back to the students (slide 9).

Summative Assessment

The summative portfolio assessment was scored analytically for traits (slide10).

Report Cards

Those statistics were also reported to each student on the “report card” along with the formative comments (slide10).

Conclusion

In sum, our assessment program in the Department of Humanities provides a basic structure for sustainable curriculum improvement.  By assessing programs (not the students—that is the job of the instructors) our community can initiate changes that will be used to continually improve the program.  We will continue to refine our assessment metrics: our goal is to discuss, debate, and present assumption of core competencies that drive assessment, and (in turn) to revisit, refine, and clarify the construct validity of the existing predictor variables.  Our strategies will include engaging in face-to-face and electronic discussions among faculty about the design of programmatic standards and the methods used to ensure that they are being met.  And, as always, we will communicate our curricular goals to those most impacted by our decisions: the students.  When will the process be complete?  Never.

The absence of transcendental signifiers, we found, led us to explore ways to more fully articulate the variables of technical communication; the shifting nature of context brought us to a deeper understanding of how audiences should be both served and constructed (Slack, Miller, and Doak).  An acknowledgement of the polyvalence of power brought a renewed certainty that arises from craft, a sense of self-confidence that resists oppression (Johnson-Eilola); and the deconstruction of causality brought new definitions of association that challenged us to re-think cause and effect relationships in assessment (Culler). Our research suggests that, in a post-structuralist world, it is possible—as Brian Huot might claim—to (re) articulate (technical) writing.

If the author is an occasional construct and we, as technical communicators, are articulators within an ongoing articulation, then we can choose to make use of the state of contingency – the shifting sands beneath our feet – as a base on which to build an always evolving concept of communication.  Contingency may be unsettling but that is its strength as well.

Works Cited

Coppola, Nancy W. "Setting the Discourse Community: Tasks and Assessment for the

New Technical Communication Service Course." Technical Communication Quarterly 8 (1999): 249-67.

Culler, Jonathan.  On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.  Ithaca:

            Cornell UP, 1982.

Elliot, Norbert, et al. "The Assessment of Technical Writing: A Case Study." Journal of

            Technical Writing and Communication 24 (1994): 19-36.

Foucault, Michael.  The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language.

            Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Huot, Brian.  (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning.  Utah:

            Utah State UP, 2002.

Johnson-Eilola, J. “Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a

Post-Industrial Age.” Technical Communication Quarterly 5 (1996): 245 - 270.

Mirel, Barbara, and Rachel Spilka, eds.  Reshaping Technical Communication: New

Directions and Challenges for the 21^st Century.  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002.

New Jersey Commission on Higher Education.  New Jersey’s Long-Range Plan for Higher Education.  Trenton, NJ, November 2003.  16 March 2004 http://www.state.nj.us/highereducation/lrp1103.htm

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, David James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak.. “The Technical

Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 7 (1993): 12 - 36.