Helen Foster

1. What classes are you using TJP in?

I’m using it in two hybrid Professional Writing and Rhetoric classes, Business Communication 3355.

2. What are some of the goals/purposes for the class?

Professional Writing and Rhetoric has the following goals:

·        To foster a view of writing as situated action (people acting through writing within organizations to create and maintain relationships)

·        To foster educational practices that demand a consideration of ethics

·        To create contexts for writing that are real and sophisticated (e.g., through the use of cases*, real people/situations)

·        To recognize the importance of technology in workplace writing and in the classroom

·        To advocate reader/user needs

·        To create contexts for effective collaboration

·        To teach visual and verbal argumentation

·        To teach research practices

*Many students come to English 3355 with little exposure to technology and the internet, especially as used in the everyday activities of workplace organizations.  Students thus need greater exposure to technology and the internet, as well as to experiences that teach how technology and the internet change the nature of workplace communication.  Additionally, students need curricular opportunities that help to bridge the gap between the classroom and the workplace, which “cases” do by mimicking “the real world.”  For example, rather than studying persuasion, argument, ethics, decision-making, genre, punctuation, grammar, and writing style in isolation, students integrate the study of all of this and more as they work collaboratively on a case to identify and solve a complex workplace problem.  Thus, the marriage of technology/internet and the case approach fills both institutional and pedagogical needs while offering students’ a unique yet practical experience.

3. How are you using it in the class?  A specific exercise.

(Because I’m using TJP for the first time this semester, I’m discussing planned activities and my reflexive pedagogical considerations for using them.)

  a.       Process Strategies:  A student completes a set of heuristics intended to guide their inquiry of a particular case project.  They upload their responses to TJP and a class colleague then responds to their responses.  The class colleague may, for example, choose to challenge a response, to pose queries that will lead their classmate to consider alternatives, to provide their classmate an alternative through their own analysis, and/or to re-direct their classmate’s inquiry, altogether.  The classmate then follows with a response to the reviewer’s comments.   

      Advantages: One is that I don’t really grade these strategies, although credit is given.  That is, I don’t grade students for what they write so much as I grade them on the quality of the effort they put into completing a strategy.  Having the word count really helps with this, then, as a portion of the credit they get for the strategy can, indeed, be painlessly tied to a word count.  (My experience is that the more students write the more novel are their analyses and insights.)  Another advantage is that their collaboration is written and thus archived.  This not only provides students more opportunities and real exigencies for writing practice, it also provides physical texts upon which to practice reflexivity.    

b.      Peer Reviews:  The method for these is basically the same as for the process strategies described above.  There is, however, also a significant difference.  With cases, a sensitive problem is often being addressed that calls for a high degree of subtlety and diplomacy.  This is, needless to say, truly a challenge to write.  To help students become more aware of their impact upon an audience, I like to have student peer reviewers read the document the first time, registering alongside a particular line their exact emotional and visceral responses, based on themselves as the intended audience.  In other words, this response does not carry with it the onus of rational justification.  Then, these peer reviewers do a second read-through, and, again, at each appropriate line, articulate a discussion about why they think the writing elicited from them the response it did.  This helps to tease out a rational explanation for what may, at first, have seemed a non-rational response.  The peer reviewer’s second reading response can fall into the second column, if the writer is required to respond to the peer reviewer’s discussion, or it can fall into the third column, if the goal is to provide the writer with a visual representation of a reader response broken out by pathos and logos.

      Advantages: (1) Most often we have peer reviewers register responses based solely on their rationale of the writing relative to the criteria indicated by course content.  This is effective, of course, in having students not only learn that content, intellectually, and incorporate it into their own writing but also in having this new knowledge reinforced through analyses of others’ writing.  (2) In professional writing, students too often view the workplace as an objective environment peopled by totally rational individuals.  Emotional and visceral responses to their documents help to counter these attitudes.  It also illuminates for the writer exactly how the reader might experience their document, which then provides good clues as to how the document might or might not produce the action the writer wanted to achieve.    

4. What percentage of the grade do you give to the journal and why?

Ten percent of the course grade is assigned to TJP, as this is a hybrid distance learning course, where strategies to achieve virtual interactivity among students, as well as between me and students, must be identified and nurtured.  Such interactivity is important not only to students’ successful navigation of the course content but also for building a stronger sense of community.  I believe that TJP promotes interactivity and can thus significantly contribute to community building.  The intention of the 10% grade allocation, therefore, is to encourage students to actively and conscientiously participate in all planned TJP activities.  

5. How does TJP help fulfill those goals?

  My course is project driven, based fundamentally on pedagogy of inquiry.  Thus, I use many heuristic strategies to carefully and strategically guide students’ critical assessment of a particular rhetorical situation.  Throughout the course, I remind students that a rhetorical approach to the workplace fundamentally focuses on relationships: establishing them, maintaining them, and, yes, sometimes even severing them.  But, these acts do not occur in the workplace in isolation.  Others are always involved.  Thus, TJP helps fulfill my goals for students by increasing and foregrounding the collaborative nature of workplace relationships and the active role that writing can play to achieve effective and ethical relationships.

6. What special insights would you like to share with a reader/fellow teacher?  That is, any special way that TJP has helped or opened the class up.

Some of the activities, e.g., peer reviews, I use with TJP I have also used with other technology, specifically, with WebCT.  There are, I believe, two great advantages to using TJP for peer reviews in a virtual environment: it is less cumbersome for me and for students and its design facilitates a different but richer sort of peer review experience.  Obviously, the outcomes of these two advantages are imbricated.  That is, a technology that is easier to use not only encourages students’ participation, but this relative ease of use also encourages greater productivity when students participate. 

Likewise, other process strategies I have students complete in the duration of a project are also positively altered in the TJP environment.  For example, with WebCT, these strategies are uploaded directly to me.  Interaction among students on the strategies is, therefore, virtually nonexistent.  But with TJP, students can upload their strategies and have others in the class review their work.  Their class colleagues can, for example, question them, spurring them to a better articulation of ideas or, perhaps, to alternative considerations.  Or, they might simply offer encouragement, which all of us appreciate in the tentative moments that often accompany genuine inquiry.  This heightened interactivity thus not only contributes to a stronger class community, it also serves as a material instantiation of the collaborative nature of writing.  Not surprisingly, this collaboration can lead to superior workplace writing products.