Academic Exchange Quarterly Fall 2004 ISSN 1096-1453 Volume 8, Issue 3
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Consulting and Collaborative Writing Connections
Linn K. Bekins,
Steve Merriam,
Bekins is
Assistant Professor at
Abstract
Collaborative
writing is a frequent and rhetorically complex activity common to most
environments. However, educators know little about how to teach workplace
activities such as collaboration, negotiation, and consultation in academic
environments. This paper presents experiential learning as a pedagogical model,
describes a program utilizing the model, and provides an example of a course
promoting academic-workplace collaborations through genre-based writing assignments
(e.g., marketing brochures, promotional materials, grants) and interactive
activities (e.g., client interviews, user and task analyses, usability tests).
Experiential learning has
been defined as a “direct encounter with
the phenomena being studied rather than merely thinking about the encounter, or
only considering the possibility of doing something about it” (Borzak,1981: 9
qtd. in Brookfield, 1983). As applied to
teaching writing, experiential learning is a pedagogy that encourages active
experimentation and applies classroom skills through the collaboration and
consultation to a community outside of the university. Many experiential learning courses ask
students to draw on the combination of coursework and their experiences to
engage the community in ways that benefit both (see, for instance, Cooke and
Williams, 2004). Community organizations often need help with the writing tasks
students are learning about, and students often need the opportunity to
practice completing certain tasks with audiences beyond the classroom. At first glance, the experiential learning
model may appear to be a market-based approach built on simple supply and
demand principles (with the student as cheap labor) rather than on established
and emerging theories of teaching composition. However, immersing students in
communication contexts outside the university—like workplace and institutional
discourse communities—can help students apply rhetorical principles of
audience, purpose, and context to their own writing practices. Moreover,
experiential learning provides opportunities for collaborative writing,
consulting, and negotiating, all skills necessary to students’ development
after their academic career ends.
It is our intention to
outline a pedagogical paradigm based in composition theory which we feel
teaches students to write within (and for) particular workplace environments
and creates lasting relationships between the university and public
communities. We begin with a brief review of collaborative and professional
writing research, then illustrate the idea of collaborative consulting in
teaching writing skills by way of example, and end with a brief discussion of
experiential learning as a model for teaching writing.
Over the past decade, research
on collaborative writing has received an increasing amount of attention in
composition research. To varying
degrees, theorists perceive of writing as collaborative, social, and context
sensitive.
To discuss teaching writing
through experiential learning, we begin with the following assumption:
discourses are developed, communicated, and practiced out of a particular
social identity informed by rhetorical situation, which is to say that literacy
is a social practice emphasizing the habits of discourse communities in
response to the context informing communication acts. Thus, discourse is communicated out of
particular social identities and social institutions, such as schools,
businesses, research labs and so on, to perpetuate specific values and
beliefs. Participation in such discourse
communities, therefore, involves learning how specialized communities represent
and display knowledge and practicing the specific conventions of language use.
When students participate in discourse communities, they learn how those
specialized groups represent and display knowledge and practice the specific
conventions of language use.
To learn a discourse
community’s communication conventions—i.e., to participate as a community
member—one must first become familiar with the rhetorical strategies that mark
a discipline’s discourse and govern the production and dissemination of
knowledge within that community. This knowledge is very helpful to students as
they become better collaborators and consultants. While research has shown how
undergraduate and graduate students learn disciplinary writing (e.g., Berkenkotter, Huckin &
Ackerman, 1988; Blakeslee, 2001; Casanave, 1990), few
studies have addressed the transitions writers make from academic to
nonacademic settings. Anson and Forsberg (1990) suggest that while certain
surface-level writing skills are portable across diverse contexts, writers show
a consistent pattern of expectation, frustration, and accommodation as they
adjust to new writing environments. This is not surprising since writing
differs substantially across contexts.
Because of the enormous variety of written discourse, we suggest that
experiential learning can be used profitably to teach students a body of skills
and knowledge about writing to account for (and interact with) a variety of
rhetorical situations, both in and out of the academy. Through such teaching, students learn to
write for audiences and purposes outside of academia, and to practice the
conventions of a particular discourse community by collaborating directly with
its members. And, as they work to address “real exigency in the community and
meet their client’s expectations” (Williams and Love, in press), students
frequently create writing that exceeds course expectations, since they begin to
recognize the responsibilities they have to real-world audiences.
The Advanced Certificate Program in Technical and
Scientific Writing
Our experience with
pedagogical models in collaborative consultation comes from teaching in the
Advanced Certificate Program in Technical and Scientific Writing at
Most workplace writing is
collaborative; collaboration research on workplace or professional writing
assumes that language and knowledge are products of human interaction (Bakhtin,
1986; Rorty, 1979).
A primary purpose of SDSU’s certificate
program is to train students to actively engage the community by having them
collaborate with local organizations to create professional, effective
documentation. Certificate students rarely enroll in the university as full-time
students but come from the workforce as part-time evening students. As a
result, they often choose to build collaborative academic projects with their
home communities and/or constituencies in business, education, government, or
the nonprofit sector. For these students, the classroom becomes a “portal”
between the university and the community; students migrate in and out of the
academic environment, bringing in as well as extracting professional
experiences, networks, resources, and projects. Moreover, they often come to
the program to validate, link, or expand their professional knowledge of the
discipline and the university. By the end of the certificate program, students
have created a portfolio of work to show prospective employers and are poised
to enter the community as a paid communication consultant or expert volunteer.
The program has a long history of collaborating with community partners, or
“clients,” and relies on a teaching faculty active in both industry and
research.
Experiential learning also
helps students identify the skills they may already have and bring those skills
to a mutually beneficial consulting relationship with a community or industry
partner. All certificate course material underscores the importance of
collaborative consultation. Since as much as 75 to 85% of workplace writing
involves collaboration (Burnett, 2001), students in the core certificate
courses develop writing projects as teams, and their public and private
reflections on how those teams function become part of class discussion and
assessment. Through structured, interactive classroom and workplace activities
(e.g., collaborative writing, client interviews, user and task analyses,
usability testing) students can test collaboration strategies in non-academic settings.
They also teach their clients how to collaborate by creating supportive
environments for active experimentation and joint problem solving.
The emphasis on
collaborative consulting, we argue, helps students break the isolation,
independence, and hierarchy of a traditional consulting relationship. Among our
pedagogical goals is to inform students of the similarities and differences of
academic and workplace writing issues, to perfect and model listening skills so
that students may effectively learn to interact with clients, and to develop
targeted problem solving strategies benefiting both students and clients, such
as illustrating the interface between a business plan and a grant proposal. The
experiential learning process results in a mutually beneficial solution:
through their collaboration, the student/consultant develops skills and
professional documents and learns about clients’ needs and problems; the
client/partner learns how to communicate their identity effectively to
outsiders and receives a model deliverable from the student, a professional and
customized documentation project.
In the course we describe
here, the teacher took full advantage of the potential of experiential
learning, thereby helping students develop skills that challenge the
traditional hierarchies of professor/student or client/consultant relationships
to create win-win situations for both parties. The graduate-level course
“Technical Communication in Nonprofit Organizations” has become a popular
elective in the certificate program and is designed to help students develop
specific written and presentation skills needed in nonprofit organizations (NPOs). In today’s competitive funding environment, these
organizations require many of the same key skills and experiences developed by
for-profit technical communications specialists, such as program and project
management; documentation; writing for the media, the public, and specific
constituencies; developing communication plans; etc.
This course requires
students to conduct research on a local organization and to help it with its
documentation needs; the final writing project is a submitted grant proposal
for the organization. Since students undertake
this writing in strategic consultation with their community partner, they learn
to become well-rounded NPO consultants, familiar not only with typical
nonprofit communication genres but with NPO organizational needs as well, and
learn such skills as promoting volunteerism, interacting with boards, and
adhering to state and federal regulations. To help teach such skills, the
course relies on both presentations by regional experts and on the student’s
public and private reflections about the direct experience of putting
coursework theory into practice. On a pedagogical level, then, structured
consulting allows students to test their academic abilities—both in
interpersonal communication and in writing—within non-academic contexts and use
the technical communication skills needed by community organizations to create
lasting partnerships in the communities where they live and work.
Next, we provide an example
of what we consider to be a successful student-client partnership, illustrating
experiential learning activities and potential outcomes of such a pedagogical
approach in the teaching of writing.
Akiko’s collaboration with
an NPO is typical of the engagement students create and sustain with their
community partners well after the end of the semester. During the second week
of the course, she began researching local social service nonprofits and made
several false starts until she found a cause she was interested in. Akiko
trains dogs as a hobby and chose to work with a service-dog training organization.
She selected and approached Paws’itive Teams, a local
group that trains dogs for developmentally disabled clients.
During initial meetings,
Akiko worked closely with the group’s Executive Director to prioritize needs
and agreed to write a grant to a national funding organization. The result was
a set of goals and objectives for the organization arrived at through
collaboration. Moreover, in order to understand Paws’itive
Teams completely, Akiko immersed herself in their work: she worked with the
Executive Director to create budgets and strategic planning documents, then met
with stakeholder families, actively helped train the dogs, and eventually
participated in graduation ceremonies for the service dogs. In short, she
became a volunteer who served in many areas of the organization rather than
simply a grant writer.
Coursework supported her
extracurricular work. Writing a grant comes only as a last step in a process
that begins with the student understanding the needs of both constituents and funders, a fact our readings and presentations emphasize.
That understanding is best reached by the active listening we believe is vital
to effective consulting. Often, students undertake sometimes exhaustive and
intense analysis of the various stakeholders involved, using principles
presented and discussed in class. For instance, Akiko’s extensive interaction
with her client enabled her to articulate the purpose of the NPO more clearly
as well as identify potential audiences who might be interested in funding the
NPO. In other words, the process through
which Akiko researched and wrote the grant represents her direct
experimentation with rhetorical strategies she developed in class, strategies
that helped her discover how best to tell the constituent’s story in a way that
funders might hear amid the noise of many requests.
Because she had a foundation in rhetorical principles that could be applied to
specific contexts, she was able to approach her community partner as a budding
communication expert and model the collaboration strategies within the
organization’s stakeholder, constituency, and funder
communities.
For teachers interested in
preparing their students for “real world” writing situations, the challenge
becomes how to train students as rhetoricians able to navigate among and within
specific discourse communities. Experiential learning can achieve this. Akiko’s
success, both as an academic and as a writing and communication specialist,
demonstrates the power of collaborative consultation in institutional settings.
Classes such as the one illustrated here provide students with direct
experience in developing standards and regulatory materials, and develop their
skills in planning, estimating, and/or managing complex technical documentation
projects. Additionally, through the experiential learning process, students
soon understand that knowing how to plan and format a report is not enough. As
they discover how to conduct rhetorical analyses of documentation projects and
to effectively interact with partners from varied backgrounds, they come to see
that each project and genre is different in ways only direct community
engagement can illuminate. Learning about, understanding, and practicing
several basic rhetorical principles (e.g., audience, purpose, context) behind
technical communication, and then putting those skills into practice in
communities where students work and live helps them identify, communicate, and
solve problems more meaningfully. We believe that experiential learning serves
as an excellent model of collaboration and consultation between post-secondary
educational environments and public communities outside the university.
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