consider Libby Allison's review after this one
A Review of Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication
Melody Bowdon and J. Blake Scott
NY: Longman, 2003
ISBN 0-205-33560-8 $44.00 pp. 416
Review by Chidsey Dickson
Lynchburg College
Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication (SLTPC) describes itself as a rhetorical toolbox for those in academia who need guidance in "developing, executing, and evaluating service-learning projects" (xii). As someone who has done small-scale writing projects that involve the world outside the ivory tower (or cardboard textbook), I can confirm that this book is a thorough presentation of what teachers and students will need to know to research, develop, problem solve and reflect on writing projects outside academe. I was immediately pleased to learn such practical suggestions as:
- How to find and communicate with non-profit (NP) agencies and what roles teachers play in this process (oversight, instruction in software applications, etc.).
- How students can invent projects – in effect, problem solve with NP's – OR select (and revise or expand) already existing projects. For instance, in some cases, given time constraints, is a NP better served by students producing a public document or doing the necessary legwork (research, design, grant money, etc.) to produce such documents sometime in the future?
- How much visiting of field sites is required (it turns out, not a lot)
- How collaborative learning can be an essential part of apprenticing as a technical/professional writer
- How to deal with every conceivable bump in the road
- How to present one's work to the college community and so promote service-learning objectives across the curriculum.
At the end of Fragments of Rationality, a book that explores how discourse analysis might alter the teaching of writing, Lester Faigley points to a dearth of research on the intersection of ethics and rhetoric. Ethics is missing at the heart of many composition textbooks. How many composition textbooks – whose purpose, after all, is to help students acquire a privileged discourse – ask writers to consider the ways in which rhetoric implicates them in social networks, in "power relations"? To put the question with less jargon: what are the obligations that impinge on how writers decode and encode public texts? How do writers learn of the obligations to the various people affected by a public text?
Without question, there are now textbooks that approach writing as "social action" (e.g., Trimbur's Call to Write or Mauk and Metz's Composition In Everyday Life), but how many of these move off the abstract plane into the nitty-gritty? How many embroil researchers/writers enough in the material circumstances of a rhetorical situation so that they can grapple with how rhetorical choices are "meaningful only within the interpersonal and collective contexts of [a document's] use" (as David Bleich writes in a recent article for Pedagogy). Bleich is adamant (and I find myself in sympathy with his position) that
-
What is now being taught [in most composition courses] by direct instruction is this: Choose your words carefully for your audience. This dictum suggests manipulation rather than kinship, as audience is always an abstraction. Unless we are made to feel the consequences of the language choices themselves through our direct address to the audience – those with whom we are in contact – we do not, finally, understand the processes of language choice. (134)
- Set up the terms of the community service in a way that discourages the "notion of the service-learner as a crusader who can simply march in and immediately handle an organizational or community problem" (5). For instance, the participating agencies are called sponsors, which inverts the usual assumption about who is "serving" whom.
- Include numerous opportunities for students to assess a proposal, a plan, a group dynamic, and the actual public documents, as well as be good critics for their peers' projects (in a feedback memo) and conscious learners themselves (in field journals)
- Suggest how the invention stage of writing involves research into the "roles" of the organization's readers ("Are they primarily learners, implementers, decision makers, transmitters…"?), as well as inquiry into the kinds of "discourse communities" of which the readers might be said to belong. See Ulmer's Internet Invention.
- Provide cases where writers have encountered ethical dilemmas concerning the "obligations, ideals, or consequences" of technical communication (225).[1]
For professors contemplating whether to use this book, a central question is whether or not they can provide or arrange tutorials in Frontpage, Publisher, Paintbrush, etc. – the applications that will enable students to produce the documents sought after by NPs that SLTPC mentions. In a second edition (or in an instructor's guide or Web site), I think it might prove helpful to provide teachers using the book with suggestions about how to use class time and, equally important, advice about when to introduce seminars on computer applications or research skills, etc., in the course of a semester. It might help to know at which points in most service projects students generally need the most intervention from their professors (for instance, when they're just finding sponsors or when they're mapping out a proposal).
Also, given the number of writing assignments suggested by the book (I counted 15)[2], there should be more information about how the institutional context of the course might shape the selection and sequence of assignments. For example, I imagine that it is important to equip students with some computer, research and writing skills BEFORE the projects begin – BEFORE students try to pitch a project (because can the students say they have the skills necessary to help?). It might also be good to bolster students' skills before hitting the pavement so they have more confidence when they do communicate with their contact people. On the other hand, I feel that if I were to spend a lot of time on exercises (which is, frankly, all that most technical writing textbooks offer), then the class would get off to a slow start. To convince students (and myself) that the project will be worth the logistics and frequent scheduling and numerous project adjustments, in some sense you have to hit the ground running; a lot of training before the fact will dull the appeal of doing service, of learning how to serve the community while also developing important writing skills and work experience.
One additional reservation I have about the book is about setting up collaborative projects. From my experience, you can only count on a handful of students arriving on the first day ready to work with others in a productive, self-directed way. What if certain students take a back seat to others and never learn sufficient leadership, brainstorming heuristics, or computer skills because they rely on the students already prepared in those areas? A substantial amount of the work students do according to suggested assignments in SLRPC is collaborative; thus, the editors might provide additional insights about how to stage collaboration and trouble-shoot the problems of this writing arrangement.
My comments are my steps toward putting this book to use. Thus, in some sense I misrepresent what the purpose of a textbook is: it is not to try to anticipate and answer all of our context-dependent pedagogical quandaries. Still, it would be nice to see a companion Web site with opportunities to blog for students in different schools and countries who are using the book and another blog for teachers who share pedagogical strategies, particularly how to respond with resistant contacts and students.
A final reflection: Bowdon and Scott debunk the notion of the service-learning student as earnest citizen and substitute in its place two possible roles or personas: (1) the intern who is learning ethics and problem solving on the job, and (2) the careerist who does this or other projects to stud the résumé with nifty gems. I'm wondering if it is possible to conceive of service-learning outside these two roles. For example, could there be a sense of humor to service work? Or, could there be a political impulse beyond making your skills available and useful to those who contribute to the community (non-profits)? Could one's service be REVOLUTIONARY – a kind of monkey-wrenching? Could a student, say, volunteer to work for an advocacy group you feel is morally wrong (Neo-Nazis) and use her/his skills to derail their public relations efforts? Could a student join a group, do work to support their mission, but as a part of her/his reflection on the service work create a savage critique/lampoon of the group? Or are these subversive agendas excluded in "service-learning"?
I truly hope that this book takes off, gets used by a lot of people early on who communicate their teaching experiences using the book to the editors, because the kinds of projects this book will make possible are extremely important to First-Year and Advanced Writing Curricula. These are the kinds of projects that help students learn by helping them overcome their alienation with the busy-work (and meritocratic assumptions) of academia – the debilitating notion that school work is hum-drum, individualistic, and leads to nothing other than a grade. After all, there can be no ethics without connection.
[1] The one opportunity to relate rhetoric to ethics that I feel the editors miss is over the matter of plagiarism. They give an example of a group putting together a patient information packet for a cancer association and because the NP did not have previous documents in this genre, Bowdon and Scott suggest that writers "refer" to "similar client packets produced by United Way and other agencies for design ideas" (151). I'm wondering if design ideas include sentences, organizing concepts and rhetorical strategies and, if so, what are the ethics of using someone else's ideas? See Rebecca Moore Howard's work on the question of writers taking over the material of other writers and when it is ethical and when it is not.
[2] Here is my list (together with possible percentages of total semester grade): Research report (10%), Résumé (print and electronic) (5%), Project Plan (5%), Trip report (5%), Discourse Analysis Memo (5%), Progress Report (10%), self and group-evaluation (5%), draft of project documents (20%), usability test and/or report on feedback from contact, revision (20%), evaluation of project (5%), [Note: # 12-16 are grouped into a reflection portfolio (10%)], letter to Dean (inviting campus dignitaries to a presentation of projects), Presentation, letter of transmittal, Reflection.
Bleich, David. “The Materiality of Rhetoric, the Subject of Language Use” in The Realms of Rhetoric: The Prospects for Rhetoric Education. Edited by Joseph Petraglia and Deepika Bahri. Foreword by Wayne C. Booth. State University of New York Press: 2003.
Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality : Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. University of Pittsburgh Press: 1992.