Writing Assignments for the Prefigurative Classroom: Framing the Rhetoric of Workplace Writing

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Present Tense

Volume

10

Issue

1

Publisher

Whitworth English Department

Publication Date

1-13-2025

Abstract

As social justice educators who work in vocational-centered fields—English education and technical communication—we want to do more than prepare students to become successful creators of workplace writing within current professional structures. Whether writing curriculum maps or project reports, we want our students to identify and resist oppressive practices, place their work in broader contexts, and recognize their writing as political. These aims align with calls from our fields that challenge instrumental conceptions of professional preparation. In English education, for example, teacher educators have called for more robust understandings of teacher-learning to push against the notion that teachers are technicians who apply already determined conceptions of teaching and learning (Baker-Bell; Fleischer; Sieben and Johnson; Simon; Skerrett et al.; Staunton). The history of technical communication pedagogy is also fraught with battle lines between socially-conscious and instrumentalist approaches. Building off the foundation of Herndl, Savage, Thralls, and Blyler, and others, in the last decade, a new movement of scholars seeks to integrate a social justice framework into technical communication pedagogy, research, and practice (Agboka; Haas; Jones; Jones, Moore, and Walton; Moore). While both fields have called for professional preparation that resists an instrumental approach, we continue to need frameworks that help educators create experiences with—not just discussion about—more robust visions of professional participation.

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