Social Justice though Technical Communication: Teaching Resources

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Revision as of 14:29, 3 July 2017

Social Justice through Technical Communication

The resources shared in this entry were developed by a graduate special topics technical communication course at the University of Texas, El Paso. The course was titled “Social Justice through Technical Communication.” The course description is as follows:

This course will introduce students to the field of technical communication through a specific focus on justice, empathy, and ethics. The purpose of the course is to help us think about how technologies are are created based on specific ideologies, and to provide a space where students can collaborate to design technologies that purposely work to counter injustice for marginalized populations. In this course, we will approach social justice from an intersectional feminist perspective, meaning that we will consider to issues of class, gender, race, and ability intersect in the creation and dissemination of technical tools and documents. Class conversations will be grounded in an understanding that we seek to develop tools and technologies to facilitate justice for populations that are marginalized based on race, class, nationality, ability, sexual orientation and identification, among other factors.

Through this course, we will begin to answer questions such as: How do technologies both facilitate and limit the work of specific communities? How are power and privilege embedded in the tools and technologies we use to communicate? and How can we design tools to ethically influence these dynamics?

Student Introductions

Because this was a special topics course offered in the summer, students in the course came from various disciplines and backgrounds.

Sam Mata: pursuing Interdisciplinary Studies Degree, focusing on Financial Fitness (helping people get out of debt, stay out of debt, and become financially fit for life).

Shelly Mansfield: mother of five who previously worked in the field of public relations. Currently pursuing an MAT degree and will be a teaching assistant at UTEP in the Fall. Eventually planning to teach high school or college English.

Lionell Manlutac: an army veteran with a Bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education-English/Language Arts and pursuing a Master’s degree in Rhetoric and Writing Studies.

Aaron Goulette: experienced English teacher of 10 years with a majority of his work focused on multimodal literacy pedagogy and social justice oriented lessons in AP classrooms. Serves as the English department chairperson at Pebble Hills High School. Currently pursuing the MAT degree for English.

Laurie Garcia: mother of two and pursuing a Masters of Art in Teaching English with a personal focus on social justice and civic education. Currently an Advanced Placement English Language and Composition teacher and U.I.L. academic team coach.

J. Sonya Patino: High School Teacher certified in Business, Speech, and English Language Arts currently teaching at Bowie High School, a Title I school. Holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication Studies from UTEP and currently pursuing a masters in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at UTEP.

The materials shared in this entry will provide both an overview of specific readings and potential applications for this work both in and beyond the field of technical communication.

Course Readings

The materials shared in this entry will provide both an overview of specific readings and potential applications for this work both in and beyond the field of technical communication. Course readings were divided intro three major units, including "Foundations in Technical Communication," "Foundations in Social Justice," and "Social Justice and Technical Communication on the Border," which is the unit that we used to localize technical communication and social justice conversations in our own community in El Paso.

Foundations in Technical Communication

Hart-Davidson, W. (2001). On writing, technical communication, and information technology: The core competencies of technical communication. Technical communication, 48(2), 145-155.

Historically, technical communication was considered to only be the companion of engineering. Now it is becoming part of the whole creation process of information technology. Hart-Davidson identifies four kinds of value-added activities that technical communicators perform: experimentation, collaboration, abstraction and system thinking (p. 150). He establishes writing as the integral competency necessary for effective technical communication. Technical communicators are able to bring in their own identity into the equation by incorporating social, ethical and political discourses of technology (p. 152).

Experimentation uses research that questions the results but not just the meaning of the information or the delivery (p. 150). Collaboration is the ability to work in teams, which focuses on collaborative success and a commitment to improve the product (p. 150). Abstraction is finding and stating patterns, structures, and relations in large amounts of information (such as articles and research) that is compiled together without restricting the use of the information (p. 150). System thinking is finding and stating patterns, structures, and relationships across specific problems, projects, and tasks domains, which focuses on strategic thinking that can impact large social structures (p. 150).

Hart-Davidson establishes value for the role of the technical communicator in this article, especially in reference to the importance of writing. He speaks of writing as a technology, saying, “writing might be understood as an array of technologies focused on the production, display, distribution, storage, and recall of information. It is no accident that the five ancient canons of rhetoric isolate these very features: invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery. We might think of the canons of rhetoric as the basic operating system features of writing” (p. 147-148). Technical communicators are able to understand their audiences and tailor the information accordingly to address and articulate user needs and preferences.

Hart-Davidson also lays out the idea that there was a theory gap for the field which lead to under recognition of the importance of the contributions made by technical communicators in the workplace. Hart-Davidson looks to Johnson-Eilola’s four kinds of value-added activity that technical communicators perform to explain their competencies and what they look like in action. Hart-Davidson also uses Nardi and O’Day’s comparison that technical communicators are like gardeners in the field of information technology because they help to nurture productivity of their work by using tools and skilled expertise to create efficiency.

Hart-Davidson also references the work of David Albers, who discusses a future in which information is dynamic and, “What the reader sees is not a document that an editor has carefully groomed, but rather a dynamic document that was compiled from a database just before the information was presented” (p. 145). That particular opinion is from 2001, so it would come as no surprise to Albers that we are living in that future. One of our students is currently employed as a “flexbook author” for the El Paso Independent School District. The type of document to which he refers is precisely what she is working on alongside four other authors. The idea is that we are creating dynamic online textbooks in which multiple authors can add to, teachers can adjust to suit their specific populations, and information can be fluidly changed and updated as necessary. It is important to remember that this very intricate world of technical writing in which we are exploring is not only limited to the IT world.

Slack, J. D., Miller, D. J., & Doak, J. (1993). The technical communicator as author: Meaning, power, authority. Journal of business and technical communication, 7(1), 12-36.

Slack, Miller and Doak effectively trace the evolution of the role of the technical communicator, which apparently is still very much misunderstood and unresolved. The TC is seen as moving beyond an invisible, silent transmitter or translator of meaning, to a true author and articulator. The role of the technical writer is indeed a challenging and undervalued one. While integral for conveying the appropriate meaning and message in the most clear and concise manner, the technical writer gets very little praise or recognition, yet is often the first one to be blamed when the message is not accurately received.

As an articulator of knowledge, technical communicators have increased agency and power, and can even advocate for the user as a mediator of social justice. Slack, Miller and Doak trace the evolution of the role of technical communicators based on three views: transmission, translation, and articulation. Each view is defined below:

The transmission view is referred to as the possibilities and problems of transmitting of conveying meaning from one point to another. (i.e.: Developer to Consumer)

The translation view, in contrast, "can be understood in terms of a primary concern with the constitution of meaning in the interpretation and reinterpretation of the message" (Slack, Miller, & Doak, 1993 p. 14). For example, this view is concerned with presenting technical jargon into more streamlined terms that do not lose the original meaning, and can even include language and cultural mistranslations (especially if a word or phrase doesn't exist in a language). Translation views tend to be more complex than the transmission view implies.

The articulation view is described as the struggle to articulate and rearticulate meaning in an expressive or easy to read manner. In tandem with all views, the process of technical communication proves to be rather overwhelming. The need to not only effectively transmit messages, is fettered by the need to maintain exquisite articulation while maintaining effective translations that represent the original message.

All three views are important, but due to transmission being the view most defined, written about, and discussed, it also seems to be the crux of technical communication work (Slack, Miller, & Doak 1993, p.14-15). This favoritism for simple transmission often proves detrimental to the other views, which are often more effective when working in unison.

The article, written in 1993, highlights the necessity for and lack of writing education and practical experience for engineering students as well as a need for an ingrained sense of ethics (Slack, Miller, & Doak, 1993, p. 33). Conversely, from an educator’s perspective, there is an imperative desire to see if this deficit in learning has already been remedied. Perhaps more frightening, is the inability for corporations or non-English / writing based fields to recognize what should be obvious (the need to focus on the user’s cultural background and schema as a potential design tool). This inability to see the color of language as a tool of rhetoric through these simplistic and common sense based views proves to be quite paradoxical. If technical communicators and corporations are unable to see beyond the transmission based view, what hope is there to effectively getting one’s message across without proper translation and articulation? As educators ourselves, it has also been necessary to adapt pedagogy to the needs of our ever changing students. Simple transmission of content is largely ineffective, and often requires the need for effective translation and articulation of content to meet the needs to diverse student populations. If only developers would follow suit.

Selfe, C. L., & Selfe, R. J. (1994). The politics of the interface: Power and its exercise in electronic contact zones. College composition and communication, 45(4), 480-504.

Selfe and Selfe (1994) illustrate the true problem of language and power isolation that occurs within the Internet and several programming based on languages. Though sometimes unintentional, the implicit nature of progressing the colonial language and devaluing the culture and language of minority perspectives is real. Selfe and Selfe discuss the dominance of the English language in programming that many computer languages such as ASCII, C++, Visual Basic, HTML, and Java are exclusively written in English, which causes problems with non-English speakers.

Even knowing English proves to be a miniscule advantage, unless the user understands the programmer's original thought processes for abbreviated commands. If a person were to even consider distancing themselves from English, they automatically enter with a disadvantage and even more so if they decide to maintain an isolationist perspective. If a native/fluent English speaker gets confused with the programmer’s intention, then non-English speakers would be more so.

It’s interesting how users from non-English backgrounds not only have to learn the English language to effectively use many applications and tools when on a computer, but they also have to learn some of the imagery used by white, male, middle- and upper-class professionals (p. 481). Clearly, by taking part in this conversation, we can see how borders exist between different groups in the use of computers. If not for conversations such as these, the borders would probably continue to be normal, accepted, and somewhat invisible to most.

Sun, H. (2006). The triumph of users: Achieving cultural usability goals with user localization. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(4), 457-481.

Walton, R. (2016). Supporting human dignity and human rights: A call to adopt the first principle of human-centered design. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(4), 402-426.

Redish, J. G., & Barnum, C. (2011). Overlap, influence, intertwining: The interplay of UX and technical communication. Journal of Usability Studies, 6(3), 90-101.

Themes and Takeaways from the Course