ENGL 5000 MATC Capstone

The workshop-based, capstone course is designed to support you to create a portable digital portfolio. However, the overarching goal is to produce and articulate a professional identity based in reflective, collaborative practices bolstered by rigorous theoretical framing. Consequently, you are invited to develop a portfolio that contains a set of artifacts (things you have produced) for specific audiences and purposes in alignment with your professional identity and the MATC program outcomes as described in the Graduate Student Handbook.

Your sense of professional identity as a technical communicator will vary depending on your goals and career trajectory. The capstone experience can support you to synthesize content from your work throughout the program as you recognize habits of mind, skills, and key theoretical or methodological approaches that emerged across your programmatic experiences.

Rather than simply making an attractive document, your goal is to produce a portfolio of revised artifacts grounded in core curricular concepts and skills. Ultimately, a well-composed portfolio demonstrates a clear sense of professional identity, ability to reflect upon and illustrate skills, and preparedness to transition to another setting.

Questions you're invited to explore include:

• • How do I develop a portfolio that showcases my rhetorical finesse, design savvy, and academic acumen?
  • What is a ‘bridge' portfolio, and how do I adapt it for different audiences and purposes?
  • Why is theoretical framing important for portfolio development and artifact revision?
  • How do I showcase ethical communication competencies and why does it matter in a portfolio?
  • What are distinctions between an industry-, teaching-, or research-focused portfolio, and what role does academic framing play across these genre variations?

ENGL 5365 Studies in Composition: Rhetoric and Globalization

How do people, things, and ideas move across cultural, national, and regional borders? What kinds of relationships do these movements reveal? What is unique about transnational movement and connectivity in our current historical moment?

In this course, we will explore how globalization impacts rhetorical processes and how people use rhetoric to respond to globalization. For our purposes, globalization refers to the specific forms of economic, social, political, and cultural connectivity and mobility that have developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We will focus especially on transnational feminist approaches to globalization, which highlight to the gendered dimension of these processes. Course readings and discussion will engage themes such as migration, citizenship, education, and resistance movements in relation to contemporary globalization.

ENGL 5366 Teaching Technical Communication

English 5366 is a course that will prepare you to teach technical and professional writing as an introductory (survey) course for students across the disciplines. It will introduce you to the theoretical and pedagogical knowledge you will need to teach technical and professional writing successfully. English 5366 will also ask you to consider critical issues related to teaching technical communication. From this foundation, it will progress to more practical concerns ranging from what to teach in a technical writing introductory class, how to teach this information in both face-to-face and online settings, and why to teach it.

In addition to technical writing pedagogy, you'll write a variety of technical documents as you prepare a lesson, review textbook components, develop assignments, observe master teachers at work, and report your findings and experiences. You'll conclude the semester by producing a teaching portfolio that showcases your preparation for teaching technical communication. The portfolio will include a syllabus and weekly schedule for an introductory course, a lesson plan with instructional materials, a teaching philosophy, and an instructional video appropriate for online teaching.

ENGL 5372 Reports

This course focuses on the report—the primary workplace document that creates knowledge and supports decision-making. Our class will examine reports of various types: information reports, analytical reports, feasibility studies, recommendation reports, empirical research reports. We will consider proposals as part of the document cycle that leads to reports. In the workplace, proposals seek approval or funding for a plan or activity. Reports provide information on the progress of such activities, or on the status of research.

All writing in some way tells a story, and so it is with reports and proposals. A proposal from a social service agency seeking money to expand a program for the poor must tell the story of the people it hopes to serve. A report on a study of sub-atomic particles conducted by physicists using a particle accelerator tells the story of those particles, even though they exist only for nano seconds. Narrative is intrinsic to reports and proposals.

As is typical in any graduate technical writing class, we will approach this topic from a theoretical and applied perspective. We will analyze reports provided by students and the professor using rhetorical theory and we will produce reports and proposals based on primary and secondary research. The class will involve reading and response in Blackboard and a report project in which students address a decision they are facing in their lives. In previous classes, students have used the report project to help with decisions involving career choices, medical issues faced by family members, technology options for their workplace, and similar challenges.

Our text will be Houp, Pearsall, Tebeaux, Dragga. Reporting Technical Information. Oxford University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0195178791.

ENGL 5373 Instructional Design for Technical Communicators

Technical communicators don't just write or communicate information; they use multiple tools to instruct people how to perform certain tasks safely and effectively. In many professional settings, technical communication and instructional design are interchangeable responsibilities, and so this course brings the two together so you can study and examine their relationships.

This course introduces students to the principles and processes involved in developing instructional content for professional settings, including design thinking philosophy, user and task analysis, learning theories, and methods of usability evaluation. The course also covers several theoretical approaches to technical instructions, including instructional architecture strategies, human-centered design principles, practical learning objects, and other rhetorical methods. Major assignments include reviewing instructional materials, analyzing instructional situations, prototyping an instruction set, testing the prototype, and creating recommendations for future development.

Upon completion of the course, students should feel confident about:

• • Describing planning processes and methods in instructional development
  • Applying principles of user-centered design in developing instructional materials
  • Explaining how methods of assessment and evaluation contribute to instructional quality and usability

ENGL 5374 Technical Editing

This course focuses on the professional practices of technical editors, including developmental or comprehensive editing (providing editorial feedback for global issues, like audience, purpose, organization, and appropriate content), design and layout editing, copyediting, proofreading, and production editing. While we will spend time on mechanical issues related to grammar and punctuation, we will focus more on how technical editing is “a complex communication problem that requires strategic assessment” (Flanagan, 2019, p. 40). That is, we will focus on exploring and practicing the habits of mind and practices that make technical editors effective: attention to detail; developing relationships with authors/writers; being flexible and adaptive; advocating for audiences and users; and mediating the relationships between authors/writers and their audiences.

As such, this course is a practice-based course, and students will gain practice with the following: analyzing and assessing documents for their rhetorical purposes and audiences; providing developmental editorial feedback to authors; copyediting and proofreading documents; providing editorial feedback for a variety of modes and media; using and creating style guides; considering ethical issues related to technical editing; editing for language diversity and global and diverse audiences; developing and implementing workflows for technical editing; designing and editing layouts for production; and describing and explaining the values that inform their editorial practices.

ENGL 5379 Empirical Research Methods

The course explores empirical research methods in communication research, emphasizing research design, methods, and quantitative analysis. The course will emphasize: 1) the philosophy of empirical inquiry; 2) methodological concepts including design and data gathering; 3) the assumptions underlying and uses for various statistical analyses (descriptive and inferential), and 4) interpreting and arguing from empirical data analysis results. The course project will focus on designing an empirical research study with the goal of publication.

ENGL 5385 Ethics in Technical Communication

ENGL 5385 is a theoretical course on the topic of ethics and technology. Students will become familiar with a wide range of traditional (Western) ethical frameworks, including utilitarianism, virtue ethics, care, deontology, and postmodernism & poststructuralism, and non-Western (ubuntu, indigenous virtue ethics, cultural rhetorics) approaches. Students will endeavor to understand how each respective frameworks can and cannot be applied to TC through workplace case studies and contexts. This course offers students the opportunity to apply ethics to a wide range of ethical approaches to both academic and/or workplace applications.

ENGL 5387 Publications Management

This course covers strategies of content management, project management, asset management, and content strategy development, especially as they are used to support the publication of technical communication in professional contexts.

Students will explore the complexities of content management through reading case studies and advice on best practices and approaches; practicing content management strategies through a documentation project; practicing structured authoring, single sourcing, markup languages, and content reuse; and conducting a case study (including interviews and quasi-ethnographic observations).

ENGL 5389 Field Methods

What do we do when we want to study something that can't be re-enacted in a laboratory, dissected analytically from detailed, constrained experimental conditions? This question is incredibly important for researchers who study everyday language and language-in-use. Historically scholars of technical communication and rhetoric have called upon the methods of anthropology, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and interviews. These methods remain crucial to the discipline's ability to study our technical writing, design, and rhetoric as it's practiced in uncontrolled conditions. The technical communication and rhetoric's long-standing relationship with usability testing and now user experience architecture have moved to fuse the traditional ethnographic methods with the experimental insights of user-centered and participatory design research.

Our class will survey and practice those methods most common to field research, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and participatory design research. We will also contextualize those methods relative to the debates and concerns the field has had about replicability, generalizability, and the relationship of qualitative research methods to quantitative methods as equally “empirical.” We will also pay close attention to the ethical implications of this mode of research, attending to the potential risks and rewards of conducting research of language-use outside a lab, in public spaces, even in digital, online, and new media contexts.

ENGL 5393 Grants and Proposals for Academia and Business

Technical communicators and educators see problems in their communities that require sophisticated plans to solve. Such problems often require additional funding and resources or a plan of action which involve formative and summative assessment measurements, including in our work in the academy and industry. In this course you will learn rhetorical processes of grant seeking from identifying a problem, to coming up with an idea to solve the problem, to making sure the idea furthers the mission of the organization, to finding potential sponsors, to planning and developing a proposal. The goal of the course, in other words, is to define objectives and then to turn those objectives into outcomes.

ENGL 5394 User Experience Design

Our experiences with technology go beyond simple appraisals of utility. User experience (UX) refers to the range of meaningful experiences—physical, ludic, affective, aesthetic, and ethical—people have when interacting with technologies for work or play. UX design, in turn, refers to a process and range of practices that researchers and designers use to create technologies that provide people with experiences they value.

In this class, students will undertake a UX design project that involves user research, requirements definition, and the design and evaluation of a digital artifact. Students will individually develop their projects by identifying and researching a use context targeted for design, engage potential users in activities that define design requirements, and create low-fidelity prototypes for experience-centered evaluation. Throughout the UX design process, students will iteratively develop their design concept and reflect on its development by reading and discussing assigned texts, writing use case scenarios, and participating in class activities.