Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic created major disruptions in technical communication classrooms everywhere. Although technical communication instructors are used to teaching in a variety of contexts and settings, adopting a flexible approach in the first place will allow them to be better prepared for the changing dynamics of an unpredictable world. The authors present an approach that constructs pedagogical scaffolding to emphasize outcomes, interactions, relationships, and projects. These interrelated aspects form a coherent vision that can support both pedagogical planning and real-time decision making in specific instructional situations.
On very short notice, the COVID-19 pandemic required technical communication teachers to move residential courses online. This situation was difficult for numerous social and technical reasons, but it also underscored the need for flexible instructional design. For many teachers, rising to the challenge of the moment involved a wholesale reconsideration of what they and their students were doing in the classroom—from workflows to usability tests and everything in between. Such a stark turn of events was stressful, to say the least, and certainly not conducive to educational success.
In this article, we discuss an approach to designing courses that is adaptable to varying pedagogical contexts. Rather than specifying that courses will be residential, online, or hybrid, we first consider outcomes, interactions, relationships, and projects. Then we can adjust our teaching to accommodate the specificities of media and modes. Such an approach allows teachers to respond productively in rapidly changing circumstances.
Rescaffolding Instruction
As we teach semester after semester, year after year, we grow comfortable in our pedagogical spaces. This comfort allows the scaffolding we carefully constructed at the start to fall away, leaving our classes freestanding buildings. As we gather with our students in those spaces, we sometimes mistake the building for the learning that happens within the spaces.
For many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic washed the schoolhouse away. Adrift, we panic: How can I teach? How will my students learn? We open portals among ourselves and our students—Zoom, Meet, Skype—and find that our students are distracted or completely missing. Work comes in later than normal; revision comments are left unaddressed. Without the classroom, we tell ourselves, learning is not happening, or at least not very well.
But we seem to have lost sight of the point of teaching: We are not tasked with building schoolhouses; we are tasked with educating students. Today, we are tasked with putting together new scaffolding. We argue, however, that our scaffolding must be of a different type: Not rigid but flexible. Not fixed but dynamic. We draw on four concepts as we describe our scaffolding: outcomes, interactions, relationships, and projects.
Outcomes
One method for developing this new type of scaffolding requires us to take frequent readings of our shifting educational contexts, to question and requestion our comfortable assumptions about what we are doing. For example, our default assumption about a lesson on formatting headings in a report is that such a lesson involves projecting an example document in Microsoft Word onto a computer screen in front of a classroom and then showing students how to use styles to format the headings while we talk about hierarchy and visual processing theory. Next, we ask students to open an unformatted document on the computer in front of them and format the headings appropriately. Following these activities, we often start a class discussion by asking what else they might do to give textual elements more visual prominence, hoping someone will suggest altering the typeface or coloring it something besides black. Or perhaps someone will suggest using emojis or animation.
But what if there is no classroom? What if some students do not have Microsoft Word on their home computers? What if they cannot even meet for videoconferences? That is where backward design comes in. The concept, developed by Wiggins and McTighe (2005), underscores that most instructors’ impulse is to begin with learning activities (holding a lecture, writing a draft), create assessment tools to evaluate the content developed during the learning activities, and then try to cobble together a link between the assessment and the learning goals. In contrast, backward design begins with identifying the desired outcome and then figuring out what evidence might be used to demonstrate that the outcome has been reached. Only after those two aspects have been determined does a teacher begin to think about the learning activities.
Returning to our example of a lesson on headings, we ask the following question: What is the outcome we want? At a broad level, we are trying to help students learn how to visually structure a document to aid in reader comprehension. Specifically, we want them to create headings that stand out from the body text using the conventions of a standard technical document. What evidence will we accept as showing that this outcome has been achieved? Students use visually prominent headings in a technical document they are drafting. Does this outcome require a lecture and interactive discussion? Of course not. We are just used to doing it that way.
Interactions
Even in our straightforward example of having students format headings, we can see many different types of pedagogical interactions. The teacher interacts with the whole class, presenting an important design concept (visual hierarchy) and guiding a tutorial to demonstrate practice. Students interact with the content of the tutorial (a report) and also the platform (Microsoft Word) that supports production. The content and its platform also interact in meaningful ways, for the platform helps to determine the structure and shape of the content. In addition, students interact with field knowledge (another type of content) to identify conventions for report genres. In the activity that follows the tutorial, students interact with each other in a large group, discussing other ways to give textual elements more visual prominence. The teacher intervenes occasionally with prompts and questions.
Stepping back from the details, we can identify the following pedagogical interactions: teacher–student, student–student, student–content, and content–platform. Sometimes these interactions are dialogic; sometimes they are monologic. Some of the interactions are between humans, others are between humans and nonhumans, and still others are between nonhumans and nonhumans. Interaction patterns can be conceptualized and categorized for planning and other purposes.
Flexible pedagogies associate interaction patterns with outcomes. If outcomes define desired results and how teachers can verify them, interaction patterns organize learning experiences, at least in part. If we are trying to help students learn how to visually structure a document to aid in reader comprehension, we could require a lecture and interactive discussion (teacher–student interaction), but we could also provide a screencast (student–content interaction) and ask students to work in small groups (student–student interaction) to revise the text design of a sample report. Different interaction patterns can serve the same outcome.
Relationships
The relationships part of our scaffolding expands the concept of interaction to highlight an ethical issue. Although the nonhuman dimensions of instructional situations can have agency in that they affect teaching and learning, we are thinking of intentional responsibilities in teacher–student and student–student interactions.
Interactions become relationships when the people involved have responsibilities to each other. Several of these responsibilities are discernible in our ongoing example. In creating the tutorial on formatting headings, the teacher should select a platform that is accessible to all students, use content that is relevant and current, and discuss both the why and the how of the task so that students can solve short-term problems (controlling a specific production platform) and learn the idea that should be remembered forever (creating visual hierarchy aids reader comprehension). For their part, students are obligated to pay attention to the tutorial and ask questions. Students have more responsibilities in the large-group interaction that follows the tutorial. The point of that discussion is for students to engage in a coconstructed knowledge-making activity, and they are obligated to help make it a productive one. The teacher might need to intervene occasionally with prompts and questions, but if students are passive or the teacher talks too much, the discussion will turn into a lecture.
Flexible pedagogies are alert to relationships and what they accomplish in instructional settings. It is not important for teachers to implement the same relationship structures in all contexts, but they should enact ratios of responsibility that help students and teachers achieve stated outcomes. In other words, implementing a specific type and number of teacher–student and student–student relationships in any particular situation is less important than helping everyone participate ethically in educational processes.
Projects
Jensen et al. (2016) argued that traditional organizations homogenized and quantified time in order to squeeze ever greater efficiencies out of workers. The disruption we are experiencing with the COVID-19 pandemic was prefigured, in a sense, by shifts in the structure of work over the last several decades. Professional disciplines fostered organizations as monolithic and work as routine and repeatable. Managers and consultants examined work at both macroscopic and microscopic levels, reducing costly uncertainties by homogenizing and quantifying time.
Today’s world, according to Jensen et al. (2016), is increasingly organized around contingent and dynamic projects rather than disciplines. Such project-based approaches value the ability to reorganize quickly, welcome accidents, and respond to feedback. Activities and networks play central organizing roles: temporary connections, contingent interactions, and relationships allow people to work based on the demands of a project. As people move between projects, they adapt to contexts. For instance, if some students do not have the particular application that you want to use to teach them how to create visual hierarchy in a report, make the lesson platform agnostic. If some do not have broadband access, email annotated documents back and forth. We are teams of guerrilla learners, working together.
Conclusion
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered our normal approaches to teaching and learning, planning and responsive design can enable us to adapt successfully. Our extended example of a basic technical communication lesson on applying headings illustrates a framework for creating flexible pedagogies. From this framework, we can derive key questions that can help teachers rescaffold their instruction: What are the outcomes we are trying to achieve? What types of interactions—teacher–student, student–student, student–content, and content–platform—can aid our task of achieving those objectives? In the interactions between human agents, who has responsibility for what, and what are the ethical responsibilities for making learning a productive enterprise? What are the social and technical dynamics in a pedagogical project? How can these dynamics be managed differently to adapt to changing environments? Such questions promise to be fruitful ones in a complex, uncertain, and unpredictable world.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.