Sunday, October 18, 2015

Ryan Moeller and Ken McAllister--"Playing with Techne: A Propaedeutic for Technical Communication


Playing with Techne: A Propaedeutic for Technical Communication: [1]
Moeller, Ryan;McAllister, Ken
Technical Communication Quarterly; Spring 2002; 11, 2; ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection pg. 185 

Propaedeutic: (of an area of study) serving as a preliminary instruction or as an introduction to further study.

"We offer historically grounded, creative meditations on techne that emphasize its manifold nature: it is conversational, ingenious, cunning, full of trickery, and unpredictably artistic. Such mediatations can replace overly complex workplace scenarios in technical communication classrooms, particularly when an instructor wishes to emphasize knowledge making rather than the mechanics and politics of document production" (185).

"Techne is not the act of hammering, not is it the hammer itself. Rather, it is the 'way' of the hammer...Too often, teachers of technical communication press their students prematurely into the role of professional technical communicator" (185).

 
"The authors of these and similar texts seem to assume--not without justification--that students enter the classroom with an eye toward a professional life in a disciplined corporate environment...Only later, when students and teachers have already assumed the prescribed 'real world' roles offered them by their textbooks, does the discussion turn toward what many call the technical, stylistic, or grammatical aspects of technical communication" (186).
 
"Prematurely urging students to assume roles in workplace in  workplace contexts and...produce technical documents...skips over the fundamental elements inherent to the learning of any new art: learning and playing with basic concepts, experimenting with them, and using one's imagination to form increasingly complex understandings of what is being practiced" (186).

"Although positioning technical communication as straightforward and pragmatic may meet the practical expectations of career-minded students and help to alleviate some of the pedagogical burdens on overworked teachers, it ultimately displaces the agency of writing in the classroom. It creates the illusion that students' only agency lies within the context and confines of a workplace or in the role of a professional" (187).

"we propose that a better way to introduce technical communication is to allow students to be students, letting them learn and play with the rudiments of technical communication before requiring them to act like experts and professionals...We have found that focusing on readings and discussion of techne is an excellent way to begin this process" (187-88).
 
"ethics and ideologies are also components of the art they are learning to practice. And rather than forcing them to adopt an employee mentality, students work as students and scholars" (188).
 
"Our objectives in this article are:
  • To inspire technical communicators to think in creative ways that do not rely on corporate terminology or workplace analogies
  • To provide teachers of technical communication with a new focus that can be used playfully in the classroom
  • To inspire teachers to think of themselves as teachers, not as bosses or representatives of the real world
Opposing Theories of Techne

"Those who limit techne's depth and breadth often do so on the way to either emphasizing efficient workplace behavior...or an overarching sociopolitical agenda that can be facilitated by studying technical communication as a form of praxis. Such reductions do not consider the true range of techne's connotations that have been spun by generations of rhetorician-philosophers" (189).

"most audiences have been trained to expect 'just the facts.' If today's audiences for technical communication holds the objective, neutral transmission and reception of information as its highest good, then technical communicators have little opportunity to envision and enact their own sense of a different social good; the rhetor must, to a significant degree, conform to the audience's ethics...it may only educate them in the mechanisms of corporate capitalism's ethics" (190).

"The term that once denoted the constant process of theorizing, acting, and reevaluating one's work in the world in order to transform oppressive and exploitative societies into just and egalitarian ones, comes to signify something like 'appropriate behavior,' and techne is reduced to an inoffensive set of techniques that facilitate one's appropriateness" (190).

"it seems to us particularly difficult to teach people to resist an ingrained ideology--expediency is best, for instance--while also teaching them how to occupy that position more fully" (191).

"What Plato was trying to discover...was nontechnical expertise on morality, which is to say philosophy. In order to lay claim to the supremacy of philosophy, however, he had to constrain, dismiss, and exclude other ways of knowing, including rhetoric, techne, and poetry...Unfortunately, Plato's dismissal of both techne and rhetoric has been reinforced through many generations of scholars who have felt little need to search for more expansive understandings of techne that stretch beyond Plato's narrow characterization" (192).

"Dunne admits that Aristotle not only significantly blurs his own carefully constructed delineation of types of knowledge (productive, practical, and theoretical), but also never gives any example of a techne that is not governed by phronesis" (193).

Techne as a Conversation about an Art
 
"If such indirect factors are to be reclaimed for techne, then research and reflection upon what has come before must be integrated with the learning of technique. The pragmatist may ask: why make field reports or technical memos 'ingenious'? Our answer: because the artisans who create them can't help but make them so" (199).
"How do you teach students of technical communication to be magicians, to draw power from the ancient wellspring of techne? First teach them how to think about how people think (or at least how they might think), which is to say, teach them to be cunning. Only once they've begun to grasp these precepts, do you begin to teach them about the contrivances that will enable them to make the impossible possible" (200).

"But techne is always embodied. It is a way of being, particularly a way of being in relationship to other things. And to people. It is built on failure--hundreds of failures, in fact--and emerges slowly in the form of occasional, but deeply memorable successes. In this sense, techne's 'trick' is that it seems to the uninitiated to be more natural than it is. The only people who know how much work art is are artists and, perhaps to an even greater extent, artists-in-training. Techne is a trick, then, not for beginners, but on beginners" (201).

Implications of Techne as Artisanship
 
"There is no question that the most common Western classical usage of techne was to indicate artisanship, meaning 'skillful production of an object.'...Artisanship, craft, skill, and other such terms have considerably more depth to them than many of us acknowledge, not only from a historical or etymological perspective, but also from the perspective that they are terms describing human beings' mediated relationships with one another" (203).
"We need to move beyond the descriptions of technical communication as the practice of clearly presenting technical information, and reclaim techne--creative, ingenious, tricky, unpredictable, and utterly human--for our work as teachers and technical communicators" (204).

technical communicators "are artisans. They work under a variety of constraints but are not determined by them because they are liberated through their creativity. They work to teach others in surprising ways, always inclined to try the untried, to privilege change, and to accept chance and organization as co-conspirators in the process of invention" (204).










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