David Franke | SUNY Cortland (original) (raw)

Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing, 2010

This book grew out of the challenges of starting and sustaining a Professional and Technical Writ... more This book grew out of the challenges of starting and sustaining a Professional and Technical Writing program at the state college where Alex Reid and I were hired (nearby, co-editor Anthony Di Renzo began his program at Ithaca College in New York a few years before us). We found ourselves building our program at the intersection of several academic and semi-academic discoursesrhetoric, English, new media, business, publishing, composition and others. We had plenty of theory from these fields and personal experience as students, teachers, writers, and freelancers. Yet as we established our identity as a major, we found that our interactions with other departments (especially English), our entanglement with the long-standing academic tensions between "liberal" and "vocational" education, the demands of staying abreast of new technology, the way our resources and students were distributed across many disciplines-all these pressures and others combined in unexpected ways, presenting us with a bit of a paradox in that we were compelled to make sense of the whole while we struggled with the day-today work of running a new program; simultaneously, most day-today decisions depended on a sense of our whole-our mission, rhythms, audiences, and strengths. Seen from a purely analytical perspective, what we were trying to do seemed impossible. But of course it wasn't impossible. Our experience beginning a PTW program at the State University of New York at Cortland was typical in many ways. The undergraduate program we were hired to bring to fruition, like many others, was simply hard to define, lacking a deep sense of tradition that English and even rhetoric programs often enjoy. Our program was defined more by what it was not than what it was: not literature, not journalism, not composition. Despite this, the program grew, in part because we were able to invent an attractive curriculum, and our success introduced a new problem in that we were quickly understaffed: we had only three Professional and Technical Writing faculty in an English department of 50-odd full-time and part-time faculty. The demands on the three of us, all in new jobs, were sometimes intimidating. Actually, they were often overwhelming, as several authors in this volume have also experienced in their own schools. In front, we met the challenge of teaching new classes. At our back was an avalanche of paperwork. Struggling to keep moving forward, we found ourselves grasping for information and models. Like any academic in a new situation, we depended on our research skills first, and started reading. 1 The WPA (Writing Program Administrator) listerv (http://lists.asu.edu/archives/ Design Discourse x wpa-l.html) gave us valuable clues to how writing programs run on a day-today basis, though its focus is of course more on Freshman English. National conferences, especially ATTW (Association of Teachers of Technical Writing) and CPTSC (Council on Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication), provided invaluable information about internships, key courses, recent theory-and at these conferences we found something the readings did not provide: warm, anecdotal, human stories. I sought first-person narrative accounts that presented the PTW administrator's logic and commitments, a constructive, sustained, intelligent set of discussions in relation to which we could shape our own history. To complete and understand our own program, we needed reflective stories that demonstrated and reflected on the process of making key, high-stakes decisions in the unfamiliar situation of running a professional writing program. This narrative gap is what prompted my colleague Alex Reid and me to put out a call for papers that would, we hoped, assemble a community of narratives. Alex and I asked that PTW curriculum designers discuss how they composed and revised their PTW sites. We emphasized that we were looking for case studies in first person that revealed how designers made sense of and organized their particular location-in other words, how they historicized their work. Their stories would reveal the praxis of those in PTW programs working simultaneously as both teachers and administrators, often from the margins of English, Engineering, Composition/Rhetoric, and on the line between the liberal arts and professional schools. The focus was not to be pedagogical, but architectural, with an emphasis on design problems. In its final form, each of the essays was to examine the complexities of developing, sustaining, or simply proposing non-literature curricula, from entire programs to individual classes. The authors were generally new assistant professors when these essays were written, and their contributions reflect an acute sensitivity to the practical contexts within which they worked-the political, historical, and financial realities-as well as a sense of vitality, a sense that something untested and unique could emerge and succeed at their respective locations. In the best pragmatic tradition, these essays explain how to both picture and perform a task, in this case the task of developing communities and curricula in PTW, with the belief that other designers might benefit from their narratives. We experimented in this volume. Our always-supportive publisher Mike Palmquist encouraged us to go ahead with a form of peer review that helped us make the entire process as useful as possible to the authors and you, the book's audience. After outside readers gave the thumbs up to the book proposal, we solicited the essays. Alex Reid and I wrote responses to each essay we accepted and mailed our comments back to the author. Simultaneously, each essay was mailed to another contributor in the book for further response and comxi