Cooking Up Rhetoric: Exploring Rhetoric, Culture, and Identity Through Food-Based Texts

The special topics course for the Bachelor of Arts in Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication degree at Boise State University allows instructors to cover a range of topics related to writing studies, as long as the course addresses the program learning outcomes that focus on genres, audiences, craft of writing, and inquiry. As an avid home cook and consumer of food media, as well as a feminist and scholar who studies gender in technical communication, I determined that food could provide a lens to address these outcomes. Food texts enable an exploration of rhetoric through lived experiences, particularly through Indigenous, immigrant, and non-European/ non-white perspectives. Thus, the course’s readings and content provided avenues for all students to explore the rhetoric of food but sought to disrupt whiteness and patriarchy through the texts and rhetorical approaches we examined

Engineer as Writer and Woman: Gender, Identity, and Professional Discourse

As students, academics, and professionals, women entering engineering disciplines still encounter barriers that may impede their success. In this environment, what is the role of writing in the development of a professional identity, and how does it function as an avenue or a barrier to professional success? Using an ethnographically-informed case study approach, this dissertation focuses on the experiences of three women--a biological engineering student, an industrial engineering academic researcher, and a civil engineering professional--to examine how these women use writing to construct an engineering identity, take action within their discourse communities, and to demonstrate their technical expertise and ability. Yet even for these highly skilled women, writing does not always lead to professional recognition and advancement. While writing might serve as a potential tool to recruit and retain women in engineering fields, the drawbacks to being a good writer in engineering must be understood in the continued pursuit of equity. Finally, this dissertation examines the traits these women possess that enable them to be skilled writers, and how those features could be incorporated into writing pedagogy. Writing is an essential component of what it means to be a skilled engineer in a variety of settings, and women\u27s personal and educational backgrounds are a component of that ability. By understanding the three women\u27s experiences as engineers and writers, future research can build on these findings to learn how use writing as a way to achieve equity in the field, how writing aids in the development of a professional identity, and how to continue to enhance writing education

Writing and Women\u27s Retention in Engineering

Engineering disciplines have focused on recruiting and retaining women, assessing factors that contribute to decisions to enter or exit the field at every level. While many studies have examined writing in engineering disciplines, few have looked at writing’s role in women’s decisions to remain in or leave engineering. Using a case study of a professional civil engineer, Katy, this study examines the role that writing played in her dissatisfaction with engineering and her ultimate decision to leave the field. The author analyzes two genres of writing, meeting minutes and a preliminary engineering report, to explore how Katy’s writing practices often ran counter to her coworkers’ or supervisors’ approaches. While a single case study makes generalization impossible, this work opens the door to future research that accounts for writing in recruiting and retaining women

Preparing Future Technical Editors for an Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Workplace

How should instructors adapt technical editing courses to account for generative artificial intelligence (AI)? This article addresses what generative AI means for technical editing pedagogy. While AI tools may be able to address rote editing tasks, expert editors are still needed to provide accessible, ethical, and justice-oriented edits. After reviewing impacts of generative AI on editing praxis, the author focuses on the microcredentials that she built into an editing course in order to address these impacts pedagogically. The goal was to enable students to understand AI, argue for their expertise, and edit from ethical and social justice perspectives

Centering Equity and Inclusion in Engineering Collaboration and Writing

This paper focuses on preliminary findings from a study that asked students and alumni to share their stories around teamwork and communication in engineering settings. In addition to student and alumni stories of teamwork, engineering faculty were interviewed to learn more about how they approach collaborative and communication-based projects and how consider diversity, equity, and inclusion in their teaching. The goal was to connect the ways that instructors frame these collaborative projects and to surface how implicit biases may emerge and impact students. The findings reported here focus on what students and alumni participants shared about their positive and negative collaborative experiences, with an emphasis on the intersections between those experiences and their background/identities that may elicit bias from their peers. This paper concludes with recommendations for educators to work toward reconceiving their collaborative and communication-based assignments and to begin uncovering their own implicit biases

Valuing Women’s Contributions: Team Projects and Collaborative Writing

Team projects offer opportunities for student engineers to learn how to work on a team and produce collaborative written reports. However, research has shown that women often do more writing during these projects, and that their writing labor is unrecognized or undervalued, particularly when the technical work is viewed as more essential. In this paper, we examine the results of a study focused on the writing component in a year-long senior capstone materials science and engineering (MSE) course sequence. This course requires students to complete projects for clients and produce a written report, among other deliverables. To focus more on writing education, the engineering professors brought in an English professor, who researches engineering communication and is coordinating this project, to consult on assignments, comment on student work, and present on writing topics, including managing the writing aspect of collaborative work. Here, we assess the impacts of interventions on student writing and collaboration, focusing on women’s experiences through a series of interviews. These interviews focused on learning more about women’s past experiences working on teams and the effects of the course interventions. Particular to women’s experiences, we argue that by making the writing labor more visible in the project and insisting that each student contribute to the writing, women’s contributions will not only be clearer but also more explicitly valued and their experiences will be more positive overall. After describing the findings, we offer recommendations to continue improving women’s experiences in project-based classroom settings. These recommendations focus on ways engineering instructors who assign writing can ensure women’s contributions are both visible and valued in evaluation

The Writing Observation Framework: A Guide for Refining and Validating Writing Instruction

The Writing Observation Framework (WOF) is a new tool for enhancing writing instruction in schools. The WOF organizes principles of writing instruction In a way that improves the evaluation of teachers\u27 writing practices, encourages a shared philosophy of the writing process and its instruction, and assists schools in demonstrating the integrity of their writing programs

Using Reflection to Facilitate Writing Knowledge Transfer in Upper-Level Materials Science Courses

When students enter upper-level engineering courses, they may bring with them unclear or inconsistent approaches to writing in engineering. Influenced by their past experiences with writing, students encountering engineering genres such as reports and proposals may struggle to write successfully. They may struggle in part because of the messiness inherent in writing knowledge transfer: a student who successfully completed freshman composition may still be unable to transfer skills, habits of mind, and approaches to writing from that setting to engineering because the rhetorical situations look drastically different. Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak define transfer as a “dynamic rather than a static process, a process of using, adapting, repurposing the old for success in the new,” and they argue that reflection—reflection that allows students to develop metacognition and a robust theory of writing—is integral to transfer. In addition, for learning to take place and successful transfer to occur, students need to recognize what they don’t yet know

Building a Communication-Integrated Curriculum in Materials Science

With the need to meet ABET outcomes around professional skills, such as communication and teamwork, engineering programs have long explored approaches to ensure their graduates are able to participate in the workplace in ways that employers demand. While approaches vary and success depends on a number of factors, research demonstrates that an integrated approach to professional skill development is the most impactful for student learning. How can an engineering program build an integrated approach that provides meaningful communication education? This paper shares the experiences from faculty in a material science and engineering program that has created an integrated approach to communication and is working toward creating a cohesive culture around communication and professional skill development. This program started small: one faculty member from technical communication was recruited to work with a faculty teaching junior- and senior-level project courses. The focus of the program was primarily on bolstering written skills, but in recent years has expanded to consider professional skills more broadly, including working on diverse teams and supporting equity and inclusion through writing and collaboration. The goal of this paper is to share where the program is currently and the next steps to expand efforts to continue to support student learning. Starting in 2022, the integrated communication education has been expanded to the sophomore lab to create a three-course sequence focused on communication and professional skill development. This scaffolding and multi-year focus allows faculty to build student confidence in their ability to work as technical professionals after they graduate. By the time undergraduates reach their senior capstone, they are more fully prepared to take on complex communication situations within challenging team projects. Future efforts focus on more consistently scaffolding writing throughout the full materials science program and engaging a larger set of faculty around these areas. The paper will share findings of how efforts have supported student learning and explore how faculty can address areas that still need support. Overall, this collaboration has not only allowed the materials science program to fully meet ABET outcomes but also understand the ways communication support enables graduates to develop engineering identities and move into the next phase with the skills they need to be successful

Theory to Practice: Negotiating Expertise for New Technical Communicators

In technical communication, discussions on how to best prepare graduates to meet workplace challenges range from responding to changing technology and occupational needs to focusing on creating flexible workers. Part of this conversation centers on expertise: what kinds of expertise are most valued and how can graduates be trained to be experts? In this article, we explore our field’s understandings of expertise by focusing on a recent master’s graduate and practitioner, Megan. As first an intern then a full-time employee at HP Inc, Megan experienced clashes between the classroom and workplace, which she sought to reconcile. In addition, she also had to learn to assert herself as a subject matter expert (SME) while working alongside SMEs. This navigation was not something her education necessarily prepared her for, and when compared to surveyed graduates’ experiences, may be something programs could emphasize. We conclude with recommendations for how academic programs can incorporate conversations about expertise and equip students to assert themselves as communication SMEs and build on that expertise after graduation