Malaka Friedman’s Teaching Philosophy

When I focus on what my teaching philosophy is as a technical

communication instructor, I first need to consider what type of instructor I was
coming into my master’s program at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Prior
to teaching at UNM I worked for a non-profit that was focused on creating college
and career skills for high school students. As such I ended up teaching a lot of
professional documents students were perceived to need in the workplace such as
resumes and email templates. This focus on praxis was something I carried through
with me to my master’s program as I started to develop assignments through a
genre focused lens. While my peers chose to create assignments framed around
hypothetical rhetorical situations that students would never experience, I
attempted to think of assignments that could still resonate with students after they
left the classroom. I would ask myself what I wanted to know as an undergraduate
student at UNM that would have prepared me for my first “real world” job after
college. I also wanted to avoid what Clay Spinuzzi refers to as
pesudotransactionality, “writing that is patently designed by a student to meet
teach expectations rather than to perform the “real” function the teacher has
suggested” (295). Spinuzzi suggests that in order to create transactional writing
there needs to be a focus on different theories, one of which is activity theory that
considers subjects, objectives, and outcomes. One of the suggested ways this can be
done is through considering tools that help these
processes. Through brainstorming about my previous
job at a non-profit, I realized I needed to know how
to craft cover letters, proposals, emails, tutorials, etc.
Not only did I need to create these materials, but I
was often asked to create them in multimodal ways
using digital tools. I wanted to as a result adapt my
lessons and teaching philosophy to include these
items to create more instances of transfer knowledge
for my students.
Throughout my master’s degree I attempted to focus on my understanding
of multimodality and how it related to my own teaching pedagogy. In doing so I
have come to agree with commonly expressed views that multimodal pedagogy is
necessary for technical communications courses, as well as English courses in
general. Multimodality works to “bridge the gap” between possible rhetorical
situations students will have to compose documents in their future and academic
lives (Bourelle et al. “Multimodality in the Technical
Communication Classroom”). While I was able to take
practicums on teaching online and teaching in general,
the teaching practicum on technical and professional
writing continued to elude me. As an instructor, I felt
frustrated that I could not strengthen my teaching in
ways that would benefit students for the types of writing they would experience in
the workplace.
Luckily, I was able to take this practicum right after my graduation. When
I did sign up for this practicum however, people questioned why I chose to take a
practicum for a class I did not plan to teach at UNM in the fall. My major
reasoning was that in my PhD program at NC State University I would be teaching
students classes on technical documents and communication and I wanted to have
as much insight into it as possible. Despite my best efforts to create my own set of
“best practices” for students in my classes, I still had no idea what it meant to be a
technical or professional writer and what it would mean for students with future
goals different than mine. More so, I would be working with a student population
much different than any I have taught before
and thought the more instruction I had before
then would benefit me in the long run.
So, what does it mean to be a technical
or professional writer? When I taught high
school students I had to focus more on the
presentation of a person themselves, the
clothes they wore and how they visually could
be presented as professional (usually depictions
of themselves wearing glasses was a common
response I received). No one instructed me that
a major component to technical
communication is literacy, specifically multiple literacies. Kelli Cook discusses six
main literacies: basic, rhetorical, social, technological, ethical, and critical literacy
that work together to created layered literacies that address issues technical
communication teachers may experience in the classroom. Two that I felt drawn
to were ethical and critical literacy. Ethical literacy encourages students to become
more aware of how they critically view technical documents while power
structures need to be consider with critical literacies and how they function in
different contexts according to Cook. Challenging students to think critically
about the documents they were producing in my class caused me to realize that in
order to become a better instructor, particularly of technical communication
courses, I needed to have my students challenge documents to see how they
function in society.
Part of the challenge that I experienced when thinking of how to adapt my
own teaching philosophy was a question of how to allow my students to bring in
their identities, and other individuals’ identities, into the classroom. Identity is
always something I’ve struggled with discussing with my students due to my own
personal issues with my own identity. The more I read over the past two weeks
however, I have come to realize that part of being a technical communication
instructor is to have difficult discussions
within the classroom. Natasha Jones
emphasizes the importance for a social
justice perspective to take place in the
classroom in her article “The Technical
Communicator as Advocate: Integrating
a Social Justice Approach in Technical
Communication.” Jones argues that
discussing social justice needs to create a humanistic perspective, one that needs a
decolonizing framework when discussing topics like critical race feminism.
I needed to confront my own identity, not only as an instructor, but as a
biracial instructor attempting to teach ethical and critical literacy in addition to
the other layered literacies Cook outlines. Two of the readings that helped me
consider my own identity were Steven Katz’s article “The Ethic of Expediency:
Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust” and Tiffany Bourelle and Evan
Ashworth’s article “Utilizing Critical Service-Learning Pedagogy in the Online
Classroom: Promoting Social Justice and Effecting Change?” It is rare for me to
find readings within any type of class I have taken that have applied to both my
Jewish and my Muslim identities. In fact, I believe this class is the only case where
this situation has happened. Katz’s article references how rhetoric as a “practical
art (praxis) rather than a theoretical science)” could be used to create questions on
ethics of technical documents, in this case of Hitler’s rhetoric leading to the
Holocaust (260). Where Jones mentions a need for humanistic perspective when
discussing social justice in rhetorical documents, Katz analyzes the opposite of how
technical documents were used to dehumanize Jews and others as “undesirable.”
This reading emphasized the importance of how rhetoric can be used for
manipulative and harmful purposes, something that today’s society is experiencing
now under the current government. In comparison Bourelle and Ashworth look to
how students attempt to broach social justice projects to help create a more
humanistic perspective to find pride in the technical documents they were
producing. While ideally well thought out as a concept according to Jones, this
article highlights how there will always be students whose biased views and
possible prejudice (in this case potential Islamophobia) could infringe on the
progress they make towards changing their own identity and understanding
others. While the student John at the subject of this article did show some
reflection after the class ended, it still highlights how bringing identities in the
classroom is not an easy task and it something I will need to work at when
continuing to evolve my teaching philosophy.
As I myself reflect back not only on this practicum, but on my teaching
philosophy overall, I have come to shift my views on what makes someone a good
technical communication instructor. Initially I believed that focusing
on praxis through the repetition of skills would be the best technique. Now I have
to realize that it is not as simple as that. Technical communication requires
instructors to teach not only how to create these documents, but also to instill a
sense of critical awareness in students as to why these documents are created and
for whom. In order to do this, students have to learn multiple literacies and learn
to create documents to produce well thought
out technical documents for themselves and
not me. They will need to question their
identities and consider the needs of other
identities when writing, something that I
myself will need to practice with my students
as well. I hope to continue to have these
difficult discussions with my future students
and my own self to create more critical awareness of what it means to be a
technical communicator in today’s society. In doing so, I hope to encourage
students to think outside of the technical communication classroom because their
words do matter and do hold weight.