Abstract
Being assigned to teach unfamiliar content is an experience that many technical communication (TC) instructors can relate to. In this experience report, four TC instructors describe their experiences teaching unfamiliar and emerging technology, providing takeaways for readers about how they might approach similar tasks, particularly when constrained by a lack of time and resources when teaching a class for the first time. The instructors had to adapt their pedagogical approaches to teach a range of technology and software. These approaches include building students' visual and rhetorical literacy, diving deep into ethics, explicitly teaching students how to learn, and humbly showing vulnerabilities and gaps in knowledge to students. Readers can draw from the instructors' experiences and lessons learned when faced with teaching unfamiliar and emerging technology.
Recommended Citation
Bryson, Rachel, Ryan Cheek, Sam Clem, and Hannah Stevens. ""You Want Me to Teach What?!": Emerging Technologies, Required Knowledge, and Pedagogical Practice." Proceedings of the 42nd ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, SIGDOC 2024, Association for Computing Machinery, 2024, pp.173-177.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1145/3641237.3691665
Department(s)
English and Technical Communication
Publication Status
Open Access
Keywords and Phrases
Emerging technology; Pedagogy; Teaching technology; Technical literacy
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2025 Association for Computing Machinery, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
28 Oct 2024
Included in
Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Technical and Professional Writing Commons