Project #6 “Final Project Proposal”

I originally wrote the project proposal below for WRA 841: Professional Writing Theory and Research. As it turned out, I wrote a proposal for the Computers and Composition special issue on wearable technology (which was also about listening) instead. I decided to include this project, however, because it points to a gap in the Professional Writing and Technical Communication and offers a(rough) proposal for responding to it. This gap is the lack of discussion about the embodied dimensions (emotional, psychological, and neurological) of communication. My proposal also explains the need to integrate such explorations in Professional Writing and Technical Communication curricula. This is an area of research that I’d still like to pursue, as my concentration essay will suggest.

Erin Schaefer
Prof. Ben Lauren
WRA 841
Spring 2017

Project Proposal

For my final project, I would like to research how scholars in Professional Communication talk about What Linn K. Bekins and Sean D. Williams call “high skills” which include “creativity, ability to navigate ambiguity, comfort with multiplicity and complexity, interpersonal understanding and empathy, synthesis, pattern recognition, and the ability to tell good stories” (289). I have already gotten a brief glimpse of how these skills are articulated as important in this field; these skills are seen as important in the work place and pedagogically (especially in preparation for the workplace). They are also seen as integral parts of a professional communicator’s identity given the need to communicate across many different contexts.
In addition to further understanding how these skills are currently treated in Professional Communication, I want to look at how discourses about the brain can inform these conversations. Professional communication often asks us to look at the complexity of organizational systems as well as communicate across several different contexts. How does one’s neurological state – something that is tied to habits around emotional response and particular kinds of attention – either foster or inhibit these kinds of skills?
I wish present this interdisciplinary conversation in a way that is mindful of David Gruber’s concerns about neurodisciplinary writers that to strongly twist knowledge from the brain sciences as this knowledge is translated into a new context. To ensure that the information from discourses on the brain remains faithful to the original discipline, I will offer an annotated bibliography from primary sources (e.g., from neuroscience or cognitive psychological journals).
In addition to showing how knowledge from the brain sciences could benefit Professional Communication, I also want discuss how this knowledge could be implemented pedagogically. Amy L. Housley Gaffney as well as Bekins and Williams, among other scholars, discusses the importance of shaping curriculums that adequately prepare professional communicators. They have focused on the importance of providing students with real-life opportunities that give them a chance to practice communication skills.
In this project, I would like to argue that if we are to teach these kinds of communication skills in professional communication curriculums, these curriculums should take advantage of the scholarship from other disciplines that teach about things like empathy and leadership. I hope to articulate what such a curriculum would look like. I will discuss specific scholars that could inform this curriculum, while also offering a few examples of pedagogical exercises or assignments.
Elizabeth Tuleja and Jim Suchan revealed a theme similar to professional communication curriculum about communication skills: training programs on communication in industries geared toward service. Therefore, I will also briefly discuss what the curriculums described in my project have to offer these kinds of communication skills trainings. Specifically, I will offer suggestions for professional communicators who wish to develop their own training programs: what are the major concepts and/or disciplines that they should draw from? What sort of exercises might be beneficial in the constraints of an industry context?