Using Imagination & Creation to Facilitate Immersion & Transferability in Technical Writing Assignments

Abstract

“Imagination and Creation in the Technical Writing Classroom: Innovative Methods for Encouraging Rhetorical Decision-Making and Transfer” Rhetorical decision-making, with the explicit goals of increasing critical thinking skills and preparing students for transferring their classroom experiences to real-world situations, has become a primary concern of college writing courses across the country (CWPA 2014 Outcomes Statement). In technical and professional writing classrooms, where emphases on genre knowledge and meeting audience expectations are the norm, creativity and imagination may seem like an unlikely fit for fostering such skills. This panel’s members believe such a use of creativity and imagination is beneficial to developing critical and rhetorical awareness in technical environments. We will present three different strategies for teaching students to be rhetorically decisive and able to transfer those skills by focusing on creativity in professional and technical writing classrooms. Presentation 1: Analysis as a mode of exploration and discovery in technical writing classrooms. When teaching writing, it is important encourage students to be creators, rather than hasty replicators. Taking things apart and putting them back together is an essential way of understanding causes and effects. To help students become informed decision-makers, writing teachers have the opportunity engage them with this deconstruction and reconstruction. Drawing on the concepts of mentor texts and tactile learning, this presentation will share a set of strategies for helping students engage with form and content by discovering the ways written documents, physical objects, and processes function. Presentation 2: Using imagination and creation to facilitate immersion and transferability in technical writing assignments. To help students better understand the contexts for their assignments, teachers must craft assignments that allow for a level of immersion. There are three approaches to creating immersion through imagination and creation that seem particularly useful in technical writing classrooms: client-based projects, problem-based learning, and innovative real-world writing situations. Moving from more traditional to more progressive assignments, this presenter will show how innovative methods will encourage students to use their imaginations while creating tangible, useful texts and provide them the opportunities to practice rhetorical decision-making that will be beneficial in future writing contexts. Presentation 3: Rhetorical analysis as a means of engaging students’ imaginations and creativity. A quick review of technical and professional writing programs reveals that the majority of technical and professional writing courses focus on production, with courses ranging from report and grant proposal writing to designing online content. The underlying emphases are sound: audiences, purposes, genres and forms, with a detailed focus on conventions. What is often lacking is a perspective about the impact of that writing: What are these documents designed to do? How are they received? What are their short- and long-term impacts? Such a perspective requires creativity and imagination. Emphasizing the value of self-reflection, critical reading and analysis, and a multicultural context, while not being limited by perceived boundaries between literature, composition, and professional writing, this presentation describes a capstone course emphasizing rhetorical decision-making helps students gain qualities Cicero believed were essential to making human social life possible: practical experience, expert knowledge, and a sense of responsibility for private and public life.