The social perspective and pedagogy in technical communication

Jeremy Huston

Thralls, C. & Blyler, N. (Summer 1993). The social perspective and pedagogy in technical communication. Technical Communication Quarterly 2 (3): 249-269.

Sorry for the lack of quality on this one. Other things have my attention.
In their article, Thralls and Bleyer set out to explore the social aspect of composition and try to understand how this alters TC pedagogy and what the social implications of the paradigms created by these approaches. They identify four different pedagogical approaches to TC (social constructionist, ideologic, social cognitive, paralogic hermeneutic) and outline what they mean for the field. Social constructionist pedagogy views writing as an acculturation process, where the ideas of the writing reflect the values of the community; in TC, this is seen in the ways that students are groomed to digest and create documents that are accepted within the field as well as instructional examples that try to emulate the real world. Ideologic pedagogy varies from that course and argues that just because norms for discourse are socially determined is not reason enough to validate those norms and are more concerned with questioning power structures and resistance in general; in TC, this is demonstrated by problematizing established discourse and using social interaction (they mention computer labs but virtual spaces would probably be a recent/relevant analogue) to question beliefs and norms and generate new ideas. Social cognitive pedagogy is somewhere in between the first two, trying to use communication not as an artifact of social discourse, but as a way to negotiate that space and adapt it across/depending on the communities in which the communicative act is performed; this is applied in TC through reflection on the writing process and by mimicking the actions of acknowledged expert writers (a sort of TC belletristic pedagogy). Paralogic hermeneutic pedagogy holds that writing is an uncodifiable activity that defies the social controls that other pedagogies attempt to impose upon it and therefore fluid, indeterminate, and immediate; in TC this approach is exemplified in a dialogic approach wherein students interact with real scenarios and individuals in the professional world in order to understand the give and take of actual rhetorical situations while eschewing model- and genre-based approaches to instruction.
Whew.
Thralls and Bleyer then emphasize that these methods of teaching can be intermixed, but ultimately leave to the reader to determine what is best for their own classroom.
I thought this was relevant next to Miller. How do we understand our pedagogy, and how do we justify the means of our instruction? What is our rationale for student preparation, and how do we sell it to others who may have already othered us?
It works for me, anyway.