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Authors’ note: Please note that all authors contributed equally to this article; we simply chose to go in reverse alphabetical order.

Abstract

Although we had not shared ideas before the 2021 ATTW conference, we noticed during our panel that we had considerable overlaps in our pedagogical approaches and goals for encouraging students’ social justice advocacy. This reflection discusses those overlaps while acknowledging how our different positionalities affect our approaches. One takeaway of this article is deliverables from our presentations, including citation lists and illustrations that might help other educators. The other takeaway is seven of our overlapping pedagogical approaches (three that affect course structure and four that concern day-to-day interactions) that we hope will provide other TPC educators with ideas on how to adapt to students’ positionalities while fostering students’ ability to see themselves as social justice advocates.

Introduction

In the early 1990s, when usability was beginning to have an impact on technical communication practice in industry and on technical writing pedagogy in academe, one of the ways nascent usability and technical communication professionals sought to both justify and define our roles on product development teams was as the “user advocate.” The user, we argued, needed the same advocacy on a development team as stakeholders such as product support, marketing, manufacturing, engineering, and management. Although technical and professional communication (TPC) has largely adopted the idea of user advocacy, only recently have TPC scholars argued that students, as users of our pedagogy, need similar advocates in our pedagogical designs (e.g., Crane and Cargile Cook in press, De Hertogh and DeVasto 2020, Jones 2018, Shivers-McNair et al. 2018). Even rarer are articles that provide strategies for encouraging our students to recognize themselves as advocates for oppressed groups, although some TPC scholarship in community engagement has discussed it as an aside of community-engaged projects (Grabill 2003, Swacha 2018). And most recently, scholarship from social justice reminds us to be advocates with oppressed groups–not speaking for them but building coalitions with them in order to do advocacy work (Itchuaqiyaq 2021; Walton, Moore, and Jones 2019).

Our panel discovered that the three of us were each, in radically different ways, attempting to empower student advocates in our classes. Prior to the ATTW conference, our three presentations weren’t coordinated, and none of us had seen each others’ papers or even proposals. Yet during the conference, we discovered that all three presentations intersected around encouraging TPC students’ awareness of their abilities to become advocates for social justice and change. As we wrote this reflection, we also realized that our strategies for encouraging our students’ growth were based on the idea that we should adapt our pedagogy to our students’ needs.

In this reflection, we will first provide a high-level overview of each individual presentation, then we will reflect critically on common themes we discovered despite our diverse perspectives and positionalities, and finally, we will offer specific suggestions that teachers of professional and technical communication courses can use in their classes.

Tharon’s Presentation: An Overview and Critical Reflection

Tharon’s presentation described an undergraduate course on Content Strategy where students in the Writing and Publication Studies program developed a content strategy for the Department of English and became advocates for students’ perspectives on how the department should present its face to the world. The class followed six steps in developing the content strategy plan for the department. First, we met with the client’s leadership to set the goals for the plan and get their “buy-in.” Second, we conducted a persona research study (using Redish’s 2012 approach–see Appendix A below) and built a UX journey map (using Kalbach’s 2016 approach–see Appendix B below). Third, we conducted a content audit (using Halvorson and Rach’s 2012 approach). Fourth, the data collected was used to determine which types of channels the department needed to develop (e.g., websites, Facebook, Slack, Twitter, blogs, YouTube channels, etc.). Fifth, we researched and recommended content targeted at recruiting more majors. And finally, we produced the branding logos, look-n-feel guidelines, templates, sample content, a content calendar, and a personnel plan.

The ultimate goal of Tharon’s presentation was to provide a model which other faculty can use to organize their syllabi around the six steps over the course of a semester. He showed how he had used the same structure successfully with clients such as the Ripple of One (an organization dedicated to helping low-income families learn how to maintain their finances), Bosom Buddies (a breast cancer survivor group), and PFLAG (a support group for “Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays”). In his presentation, he discussed how using this six-phase process with real clients has allowed him to successfully integrate social justice problems into conservative institutions, something we will discuss in more detail in the section below on pedagogical strategies and tactics.

Many of Tharon’s classes took place in 1996 before there was much literature on social justice available for classroom use; indeed, Walton and Agboka (2021) locate Scott, Longo, and Willis’ Critical Power Tools as an early turning point in TPC social justice work, and it came out roughly 10 years after Tharon’s classes were working on these projects. If Tharon were to teach the class today, he would likely have the students read “Chapter 6: Coalitional Action” from Walton, Moore, and Jones’ (2019) book Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn: Building Coalitions for Action. Walton, Moore, and Jones provide readers with specific steps for creating “coalitional action” that they call the 4Rs:  1) Recognize, 2) Reveal, 3) Reject, and 4) Replace. Another useful reading would be Jones’ (2016) “The Technical Communicator as Advocate” because it specifically discusses advocacy with LGBTQ groups. There has also been promising work at the intersection of UX and queer advocacy, such as the interesting idea of “queering consent” in Rose et al.’s (2018) “Social Justice in UX: Centering Marginalized Users” panel presentation from the 2018 SIGDOC conference. Very recently, Ramler (2021) has published on digital spaces and queer usability (in the aptly titled article “Queer Usability”). These would have been fantastic resources at the time of Tharon’s classes, and they may help other educators who want to frame their classes at the intersection of social justice, UX, and queer advocacy.

Xiaobo’s Presentation: An Overview and Critical Reflection

Xiaobo presented several cases from the Chinese social media Weibo during the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, focusing on communication design, intercultural communication, and the ethical and challenges of democratic networks (Colton and Holmes 2018 & 2018, Ding 2007, Getto and St. Amant 2014, Johns and Trice 2020, Vallor 2016). She struggled to teach the case due to her student population and the diplomatic relationship between China and the US. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sino-US relationship went down to the lowest point since they had established official diplomacy, and it was very hard to even mention any Chinese topic due to personal safety concerns within the new bilateral political rhetoric. She then had to change the topic and instead leaned more towards communication design and ethics using photo and video editing apps as a case. In her introductory service course, “Introduction to Technical Writing,” she used to invite students to choose the most popular social media platform or mobile app from a culture that is different from US culture or students’ home culture(s). They discuss in groups what features of the chosen social media and talk about favorite features and exchange ideas. She also invited them to interview someone from the home culture where the social media app was designed and used most widely, or someone who has been a long-time user of that app. Students were also invited to analyze a Chinese app because they had a ready resource.

Then, after anti-Chinese and anti-Asian violence cases were reported in major Chinese and Asian (non-mainstream) mass and social media, Xiaobo decided to be cautious when choosing social and/or new media platforms, especially topics on social/new media design. She quickly realized that sensitive political Chinese topics are probably no better choices due to the general ambivalent cultural context. She then turned to Asian beauty standards, a topic that can easily raise students’ interests in this era of Instagram and TikTok in the US. She has been using the social justice framework in the teaching of a TPC service course that she has applied for the Academic Community Engagement designation from our PACE (Professional and Academic Center for Excellence). She has also collaborated with an instructor in China in order to make a bigger social justice impact. Her students at Sam Houston State University and her students at the University of International Business and Economics were able to discuss and talk about features of the photo and video apps and their user experience.

At the Q&A, Xiaobo was asked how she managed to teach such topics, and she mentioned her experience teaching intercultural communication design at different institutions. The questions helped her think more about her current student populations and what might be better/interesting topics for them. Her positionality as a scholar from China has both constrained her ability to teach intercultural technical communication and helped her to engage students on topics that would interest them and help them become student advocates who are aware of the impact of communication design on users’/their own behaviors. With this kind of pedagogy, which is a combination of “shifting out of the neutral” approach (Shelton 2019) and the “technical communicator as advocate” (Jones 2016), students have realized the oppressive features of photo/video editing apps and wanted to fight against the intersectional oppressions brought by new media and technology as they continue to use social media using ethical dimensions of communication design.

Chalice’s Presentation: An Overview and Critical Reflection

Chalice’s 2021 ATTW Conference presentation discussed how “professional English” in U.S. hiring requirements can be a code that excludes people who are perceived to not use White English Vernacular (Greenfield 2011, Walwema and Arzu Carmichael 2021, Young 2007). Using data from interviews with 24 employers, she explored how applicants whose language skills have not been evaluated are still sometimes assumed to not use WEV based on several resume indicators: Asian or Latinx names, Spanish or Asian language skills, or wording that the hirer assumes is bad translation. In addition, one hirer impersonated African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as an example of unprofessional “slang.” To provide an introduction to the topic of linguistic racism and hiring, Chalice presented a handout with a (very abbreviated) framework of scholarship that she used to evaluate this data (see Appendix C).

A question during the Q&A, though, evolved her thinking about how this issue applies to TPC classes. Someone asked how educators could implement her findings in classes, because teaching students to resist “professional English” could hurt their job prospects. At the time, she admitted that the best we can do is make students aware of this issue and let them decide what to do with it as they apply for jobs. She recommended that audience members read scholarship that challenges myths about the supremacy of WEV or the demand that students should use it, including Greenfield’s (2011) exploration of the racist underpinnings of WEV and Young’s (2009) argument against requiring code-switching. Baker-Bell (2019) also provides a lesson plan designed to help educators 1) challenge specifically anti-Black linguistic racism and 2) resist the narrative that students will only be successful if they use WEV.

Since the Q&A, this question of students’ ability to resist “professional English” requirements has made Chalice (re)consider that students are not just powerless applicants; one day, some of them will be in positions where they hire other people. Those students need to be aware of the exclusionary potential of the “professional English” requirement so that they can enact social change when they start to hire others. That realization coincided with Chalice’s move to a university with a more conservative student body. As she discusses below with Tharon and Xiaobo, this shift meant that she needed to be wary about discussing racism and social justice with her new students. She was concerned that recent Republican attacks on theories that are tied to social justice work (e.g., Critical Race Theory) could mean that students might wholesale reject important concepts of social justice advocacy. So, her contribution to the below strategies/tactics are the result of a confluence of 1) realizing how students will be responsible for social justice in hiring and 2) having to apply that with a more conservative student body.

On Differences and Overlaps: Pedagogical Strategies and Tactics We Use

During our reflection, we discussed two concerns that we often hear from other TPC educators about integrating social justice into courses. First, some educators are concerned about student pushback to social justice ideologies, whether in the classroom or in course evaluations. Second, educators who have not personally experienced oppression sometimes feel that they have no right to discuss it. We noticed both of these issues in our own positionalities. Compared with Xiaobo’s intersectional experiences, Chalice and Tharon feel less equipped to discuss oppression. For example, neither Chalice nor Tharon has to be concerned about the very real physical threat of anti-Asian violence. And all three of us feel vulnerable to students’ pushback, but all three of us have actively sought ways to overcome that fear.

We would encourage other educators to overcome these fears because not discussing privilege and oppression allows systems to perpetuate physical, psychological, and material violence on oppressed groups (and, as we mention below, oppressors). In addition, many scholars and educators of color do not have the choice about whether to discuss privilege and oppression: for example, as Xiaobo has pointed out, her Chinese heritage marks her as a potential target of anti-Asian violence. White scholars and educators, like Chalice and Tharon, need to overcome their concerns about “not having the right” to discuss oppression so that they can confront privilege and oppression in coalition with their colleagues of color.

In order to address the above concerns, we noticed seven strategies and tactics that we used in our classrooms to foster students’ awareness of their ability to become advocates for social justice. We include them here as suggestions for people who are willing but anxious about integrating social justice into their courses. The first three are about how to integrate social justice issues into the general structure of the class while the last four are strategies/tactics we used for day-to-day interactions with students who might potentially push back against social justice ideologies. Each strategy/tactic has been implemented by at least two of us, so they represent overlaps in our approaches. However, we also found differences in what we can achieve with each approach because of our positionalities (Walton, Moore, and Jones 2019).

Adapt Your Theories to Your Institution

TPC instructors often teach courses based on theories other than antiracism or social justice, and sometimes those other theories can be used to our advantage. For example, Chalice began teaching business ethics at an institution with students who are amenable to Republican attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Theory (CWT). Although both of these theories are central to her data analysis of WEV and hiring discrimination, she relied on ethical theoretical lenses to demonstrate that “professional English” requirements can lead to unethical hiring decisions. Adapting theoretical lenses to institutional contexts can help broach social justice topics with students who might otherwise resist these discussions.

Use Real Clients

Many of us who teach Technical and Professional Communication courses are accustomed to the idea of working with actual clients in our classrooms; however, we often ignore the ways that we can choose clients who help engage our students in social justice issues. For example, Tharon has had his students work with clients like PFLAG, a group dedicated to the needs of “Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays,” and Ripple of One, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to breaking the cycle of systemic poverty by mentoring a generation of low-income families in budgeting and workplace practices that middle-class families take for granted. The upshot is that because students perceive themselves to be engaged in “service learning” projects that support their communities, they often overlook the fact that they’re actually working to solve “wicked problems” involving social justice. Students are so pleased to be working on something that matters in the real world, instead of just another “academic exercise,” that ideology doesn’t matter.

Use Real Products

Our textbooks might have different product examples, but allowing students to play with or use real products can give them a much better understanding of the design principles behind them. Not until they use and/or compare different products can they really be able to become advocates for social justice causes. For instance, in Xiaobo’s session on communication design in her service course, students were asked which U.S. and Asian photo/video-editing apps they use most often or like the most. They then listed features/functions they love the most from their favorite photo/video-editing apps. After negotiating a workable time, students were invited to attend a Zoom discussion session with students from China who were asked the same questions earlier. The two groups of students (from China and the U.S.) introduced each other briefly and were put into different chat rooms with designated photo/video apps.

When Students Push Back, Make Your Response About the Product and Not Them

One of the fears we hear from faculty about integrating social justice themes into their courses is how students will respond and whether they will disrupt the course, complain to administrators about ideological bias, and/or give the class poor course evaluations. They worry that students will make comments during class that are disruptive and potentially inappropriate. For example, in Tharon’s class where students were designing a brochure intended to make the public more aware of support for parents and friends of gays and lesbians (PFLAG), one student offered a suggestion that could have been interpreted as potentially homophobic. The student was immediately attacked by others in the course, and the situation had the potential to spiral out of control. However, as the instructor, Tharon was able to diffuse the situation by turning the conversation away from whether the student’s comment was inappropriate to a rhetorical question about how the audience would receive the information. Was it appropriate in the context of the brochure we were creating; how would it be received? In this way, the response was about the product we were working on rather than making it about the student.

In a similar situation, in one of Xiaobo’s first-year composition classes at a previous institution, students were discussing a documentary they had watched titled Mardi Gras, Made in China. There were a lot of global issues, but one student stood up amid the discussions and said, “How is this relevant? These are all China’s problems.” Before Xiaobo was able to start talking about the fact that we are all connected and that this is a global world in global capitalism, another student stood up and asked the previous student, “How are you not seeing the relevance? This is the 21st century and we’re all connected.” Xiaobo then calmly stated it was understandable to think countries can have their own issues to work on by referring to the interviewees’ comments in the documentary, but she reminded the class of some of the discussion topics such as global capitalism, global travels, global labor, and how they were relevant to current world affairs and regular citizens’ life.

Juxtapose and Compare Cultural Attitudes/Values (Differential Logics)

Xiaobo has been doing intercultural TPC since she began her BA in translation and interpretation. She finds ways to compare and contrast cultural attitudes/values using an audience-based strategy. The most important thing she has learned in her teaching and research is to focus on commonalities, i.e., shared topics/issues of importance to all human beings, such as beauty standards, psychological well-being, communication style, spirituality, etc. In her classrooms, because of her positionality, she draws students’ attention by giving lost in translation or cultural shock examples before she invites them to dive into specific TPC topics. Icebreakers such as terrible translations are essential to her regarding intercultural TPC. One of the examples she used is the “white elephant” example. A Chinese company couldn’t figure out why their batteries branded “White Elephant” could not sell because “white” and “elephant” are such perfect concepts in Chinese and Asian cultures. A company from Western culture, though, would recognize the “white elephant” gifting tradition, which is usually associated with useless, undesirable, or joke gifts.

Show That Socially Unjust Practices Also Affect Majority Groups

Although we strongly emphasize that educators should *not* re-center majority concerns or equate oppressors’ trauma with that of oppressed people, scholars have noted that oppression causes trauma to both the oppressed and oppressors (Du Bois 2007, Segrest 2001). We noticed benefits to showing students of majority positionalities how they could also be affected by socially unjust practices. For example, Xiaobo incorporated the topic of “beauty standards and communication design of photo/video apps,” which negatively affects white U.S. app users as readily as Chinese app users, especially millennials and Gen Z populations. In her discussion of “professional English,” Chalice included articles about how different vernaculars are judged “unprofessional,” including Appalachian vernacular as well as AAVE. Showing majority students how they are also affected by oppression helps them understand why dismantling systems of oppression is important (although, ideally, we would like them to internalize the idea that they should fight oppression for more than their own gains).

Foreground Our Positionality by Sharing Our Stories of Systemic Oppression

People (not just students) are better at understanding social justice issues when they can observe how systemic oppression affects someone they actually know. Some TPC educators might not be comfortable with sharing their experiences, and some educators may not have useful stories of oppression to share. But for Xiaobo and Chalice, sharing personal experiences has been useful for helping students understand why social justice is worth pursuing. Chalice’s experiences are admittedly limited, but she shares personal stories of sexism in things like course evaluations or advertisements. She also foregrounds her whiteness and her fumbling attempts at social justice, which (she has been told) has sometimes helped her white students accept their own discomfort when confronting racism and white privilege. Xiaobo has been sharing her stories as a first-gen Chinese immigrant who has to deal with constant ideological conflicts and intercultural misunderstandings between the US and China.

Conclusion

Our advice might not be useful (or acceptable) for other educators, depending on their and their students’ positionalities. Indeed, we noticed that our different positionalities affected the strategies/tactics we implemented. For example, of the three of us, Xiaobo has the most insight when juxtaposing and comparing cultural attitudes/values.

Despite these differences, we also noticed commonalities, and in identifying strategies/tactics that overlapped among us, we realized that they stemmed from two values that we hold in common. First, paralleling UX’s user advocacy, all of us adopted the idea that we need to be advocates for our students because they are users of our pedagogy (De Hertogh and DeVasto 2020, Jones 2018, Shivers-McNair et al. 2018). This philosophy can be seen in our strategies/tactics, which adapt to students’ capacities, values, and beliefs. Second, we align with social justice’s goal of pushing the growth edge of students’ capacities, values, and beliefs in order to foster their ability to see themselves as coalitional advocates with oppressed groups. We realize that students are at varying stages of their social justice paths, and any TPC class is just one step in that direction. Hopefully, some of the suggestions we provide in this reflection can give other TPC educators ideas on how to adapt to students’ positionalities while fostering their ability to see themselves as social justice advocates.

References/Bibliography

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Jones, Natasha N. 2016. “The Technical Communicator as Advocate: Integrating a Social Justice Approach in Technical Communication.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 46(3): 342–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047281616639472

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Appendix A: Sample Persona from Tharon’s Content Strategy Class

Appendix B: Sample Journey Map from Tharon’s Content Strategy Class

Appendix C: ​​Citations for an Antiracist Framework on Language, Race, Hiring, and Pedagogy

Raciolinguistics

Alim, H. Samy, John R. Rickford, & Arnetha F. Ball, Eds. 2016. Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Flores, Nelson & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education.” Harvard Educational Review 85(2): 149–171.

Flowers, Katherine S. 2019. “Resisting and Rewriting English-Only Policies: Navigating Multilingual, Raciolinguistic, and Translingual Approaches to Language Advocacy.” Literacy in Composition Studies7(1). https://doi.org/10.21623/1.7.1.5

Language and Race

Delpit, Lisa & Dowdy, Joanne Kilgour, Eds. 2008. The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. New York: The New Press.

Gilyard, Keith. 1991. Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Grogger, Jeffrey. 2011. “Speech Patterns and Racial Wage Inequality.” The Journal of Human Resources46(1): 1–25. Retrieved from JSTOR.

Herbst, Philip H. 1997. The Color of Words: An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United States. Boston, MA: Intercultural Press, Inc.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ebonics: Why Definitions Matter.” The Black Scholar 27(2): 7–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1997.11430852

Language and Hiring

Stein, Sarah K., Amir Goldberg, & Sameer B. Srivastava. 2018. “Distinguishing Round from Square Pegs: Predicting Hiring Based on Pre-hire Language Use.”  Stanford Business. Retrieved October 22, 2018, from Semanticscholar.org website: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f0db/befd6692429df6d2a53b213d5a88f6dd8b80.pdf

Language, Race, and Pedagogy

Gilyard, Keith. 2013. True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy. Oxfordshire: Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203834619

Greenfield, Laura. 2011. “The ‘Standard English’ Fairy Tale: A Rhetorical Analysis of Racist Pedagogies and Commonplace Assumptions About Language Diversity.” In Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Karen Rowan and Laura Greenfield, 33–60. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.emich.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=392468&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Hinton, Kip Austin. 2016. “Call It What It Is: Monolingual Education in U.S. Schools.” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 13(1): 20–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2015.1124021

Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, & John Trimbur, J. 2011. “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach.” College English 73(3): 303–321.

Horner, Bruce, Samantha NeCamp, & Christiane Donahue. 2011. “Toward a Multilingual Composition Scholarship: From English Only to a Translingual Norm.” College Composition and Communication 63(2): 269–300.

Inoue, Asao B. 2015. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse.

Inoue, Asao B., & Mya Poe. 2012. Race and Writing Assessment (Studies in Composition and Rhetoric). Volume 7. New York: Peter Lang New York.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. 2006. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” College English68(6): 637–651. https://doi.org/10.2307/25472180

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