The article I read, Selber, Johnson-Eilola, and Selfe’s,
“Contexts for Faculty Professional Development in the Age of Electronic Writing
and Communication,” first appeared in Technical
Communication in 1995 and details the discussion that took place among the
three scholars at a symposium offered to program administrators. The symposium
centered on understanding three different contexts in which the authors believe
teachers and students alike can begin to better understand the nature of
technical communication.
Most notably, the main points for consideration offered by
the authors of this synopsis are that technology consists of a complex set of
socially situated practices that involve a variety of different groups and that
digital technologies can be innovative, but only when understood as consisting
of more than a mere set of skills or strategies which constitute proficiency.
While my article was short in length, it does highlight
three main contexts that teachers and students can understand in order to
better enable themselves the chance to become proficient teachers and learners
of technical communication. By having an expanded sense of tech. comm. as a
profession, teachers and students, the articles believes, would begin to see
that computers are more than neutral carriers of information but are also devices
capable of bringing up more complex issues of ownership, ethics, and
information flow that when considered thoughtfully, can help people realize the
“larger organizational, rhetorical, social, and ideological contexts” (p. 501)
that make tech. comm. more than a bag of skills to be gained.
Understanding the previous context also helps with the
development of student and teacher understandings of technical literacies as
being more about literacy and less about computers. This, the authors claim,
should help account for the “rhetorical and humanistic traditions that inform
technical communications studies” (502). Ultimately, this should lead to more
effective pedagogies and increased preparation on the part of teachers in their
course designs and initiations of the use of computers for tech. comm.
The final suggestion is that a robust exchange takes place
interdisciplinarily to create an environment where scholars inform each other
of their ideas and critique their ideas to understand the underlying
ideological implications and power relations that are embodied by certain
aspects of technically proficiency. Through an understanding of these three contexts,
Selber, Johnson-Eilola, and Selfe conclude that the field of technical
communications can be best enabled to become enriched by the inclusion of
computer-based technologies instead of hindered by such a curricular inclusion.
Learning using computers and technology, in general, has
lead to scholarship like that done by Robey, Khoo, and Powers, as they, in
2000, would write about the importance of recognizing the situatedness of the
technical communications field. Also, Selfe and Hawisher, in “A Historical Look
at Electronic Literacy,” further expand, in 2002, upon ideas surrounding
literacy and the reality that literacy means more than the ability to use, but
also means understanding the values and meanings underlying communications and
methods of technical communication via computers.
A question I wondered during my reading is how much do you think that the arguments in this article ended up shaping the trajectory of the field of professional writing? Another question I wondered about is to what extend did Selfe shape her career by retooling the same argument for different contexts? My assumption is that she did an excellent job informing a number of fields about the need to consider the social and contextual implications of their pedagogies.
Overall, I found this article to be a likely place where the
exploration of the underlying implications of the situatedness of the tech
comm. field really took off, leading to much of what we think we know today
about being rhetorically aware of our students’ past experiences and future
needs.
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