TY - GEN
T1 - Navigating the 'eddies'
T2 - 2014 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference, IPCC 2014
AU - Li, Shuwen
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 IEEE.
PY - 2015/1/23
Y1 - 2015/1/23
N2 - Teaching Technical and Professional Writing can be complicated by the dynamics in the classroom. When it comes to imagining an audience, establishing an ethos, adopting a particular tone, analyzing a specific rhetorical situation, and writing on a cross-disciplinary topic, students find themselves struggling to cope with some 'eddies'-linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary differences. Teachers working in cross-cultural classrooms also confront challenges from unfamiliar teaching contexts. Drawing on existing technical communication pedagogy theories and recent proposals for preparing effective technical communicators in today's diverse and fluid global contexts, this paper reports a Chinese Ph.D. student's first-time cross-cultural teaching experiences in a Technical and Professional Writing class and reflections on students' learning experiences. Aiming at adding real-life scenarios for teachers in similar teaching situations to discuss, this paper provides narrative descriptions of how the teacher and the students navigated multimodal artifacts, cultural expectations, and collegial relations and disciplinary expectations. This paper suggests a user-centered approach for teaching in cross-cultural contexts and the importance of developing empathy with students.
AB - Teaching Technical and Professional Writing can be complicated by the dynamics in the classroom. When it comes to imagining an audience, establishing an ethos, adopting a particular tone, analyzing a specific rhetorical situation, and writing on a cross-disciplinary topic, students find themselves struggling to cope with some 'eddies'-linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary differences. Teachers working in cross-cultural classrooms also confront challenges from unfamiliar teaching contexts. Drawing on existing technical communication pedagogy theories and recent proposals for preparing effective technical communicators in today's diverse and fluid global contexts, this paper reports a Chinese Ph.D. student's first-time cross-cultural teaching experiences in a Technical and Professional Writing class and reflections on students' learning experiences. Aiming at adding real-life scenarios for teachers in similar teaching situations to discuss, this paper provides narrative descriptions of how the teacher and the students navigated multimodal artifacts, cultural expectations, and collegial relations and disciplinary expectations. This paper suggests a user-centered approach for teaching in cross-cultural contexts and the importance of developing empathy with students.
KW - cross-cultural
KW - Eddies
KW - navigate
KW - pedagogy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84940571038&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84940571038&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/IPCC.2014.7020387
DO - 10.1109/IPCC.2014.7020387
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84940571038
T3 - IEEE International Professional Communication Conference
BT - 2014 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference, IPCC 2014
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 13 October 2014 through 15 October 2014
ER -