Chapter 6 Empirical Experiences of academic literacy
6.6 Perceptions of the Technical Communication course
6.6.2 Tutors‘ perceptions of the adequacy of the course
the course it suggests that this knowledge takes priority in the mind of the tutor.
Tutor 7 looked at the adequacy of the course from the point of view of the design of the curriculum and materials for the 2011 course, which she felt was well designed because it provided students with just enough reading material to allow them to do further research on their own. Only five readings were provided in 2011 as compared to 21 in 2009. However, students‘ technical reports (from 2011) that were analysed indicated that students did not use any other material besides what was provided in the course pack. This turns the comment by Tutor 7 on its head in showing that perceptions of curriculum developers or practitioners about the behaviours that students should exhibit are not necessarily reducible to events (i.e., what students actually do). This is a critical realist ontology that supposes that the three domains of reality, through interrelated, are not necessarily reducible to the other (Sayer, 2000).
For Tutor 5, the adequacy of the Technical Communication course was best described in terms of the ‗improvement‘ that students demonstrated as a result of the correction or input from the tutor. Hence, for this tutor, students are successful at the end of the course because they have been filled with academic literacy knowledge by the language tutors. The last comment by Tutor 10 is related to writing skills. She suggests that students come out with better writing skills, have an idea about referencing and self-editing, and can write good sentences ‗which forms the basis of any academic essay or report‟. It is interesting to note how none of the tutors relate the adequacy of the course to the process of design which, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, represents benchmark knowledge in the engineering discourse.
Negative comments:
Tutor 10.The course is short – and they would benefit from a longer course.
Tutor 7: ... in terms of implementation however I think there was a bit of a communication breakdown at times because there were so many tutors so they, between the tutors themselves or between the tutors and the lecturer.
Tutor 10 perceived the length of the course (which is offered over a 13-week period) as a negative factor which impacted on the outcomes. She suggested that students would benefit from a longer course. This comment has an affinity with some of the comments made by students, who felt that the timing of the course was not appropriate because it was too far removed from the stage when they needed to
apply the knowledge gained. Tutor 7, on the other hand, chose to focus on issues of administration and felt that there was poor communication between the engineering academic coordinating the course and the language tutors. This was supported by Tutor 8 who also commented on the content of the course. For this tutor, the notion of Discourse (in the sense used by Gee and adopted in this study) was the metric for determining the adequacy of the course. Engineering students, he argued, are the kind of people who like challenges, and if given less challenging work, the chances are they get bored. This comment was directed at the solar cooker project which Tutor 4 did not see as challenging as it had to be done over a full semester, and especially as it consisted of using materials that absorb and retain heat, such as foil paper. This is what he had to say:
Tutor 8: I have noticed...you a dealing with a group who want to be engineers, they want to be engineers right umm, and remember people only go into disciplines that work with the way they work, right,...So who are Engineers right. This is the question I‟ll start from. Well, first of all they are people that like having challenges that are nominally difficult, if not possible to solve right. Engineers in particular are tinkerers; you don‟t go into engineering
… unless you like the idea of poking at stuff.... Look at it this way right, with building a solar plate and a coffee pot you could have had the students to do that in four days, easy, you could have got them …I would have given them 3 days yah…
There was also an indication that the course was ‗too big‘ in that there were many students taking the course.
Lecturer 1: My impression is the course is too big. It is, there are too many students to get the kind of one on one contact that you really need to educate, although there are lots of tutors. It‟s problematic to get uniformity for every...
when you have a huge number of people doing... So it seems to me that the course is too big and as a result of that it may not achieve the purpose that it could achieve. Not that it‘s not achieving, it could be a lot better if it was taught in smaller classes.
It was difficult to ascertain whether learning opportunities were equitably distributed in such large classes. Research on large classes and how to deal with them has been gaining in popularity over the years. While innovative ways have been suggested on how to deal with large classes, there remains the need to deal with the physical distancing that large classes bring about. Perhaps a causal mechanism, as
one student puts it, could be that students thought the lectures and the tutorials were not as exciting as the project itself (student 6). The large class numbers also meant that more tutors were required making it ―problematic to get uniformity from every tutor‖ (Lecturer 1).
In this section, I have presented evidence that highlights the representation of academic literacy and students in an engineering context. The evidence suggests that the different agents (tutors, engineering academics and students) have different understandings of what constitutes technical report writing as a form of academic literacy. Tutors draw on the discourses of English language proficiency and underscore the importance of surface skills such as grammar, presentation, referencing and structure. Moore (1998) refers to this as the instrumental approach where writing is seen as a technical process of transmitting finished thought to paper. In this case writing is seen as a simple conduit by which students simply prove that they have learnt what is required of them, and failure to do this immediately places them in deficit. Engineering academics, on the other hand, draw on the discourse of ‗professionalism‘ in their understanding of technical report writing, highlighting the importance of discourse acquisition for participation.
Students‘ understanding of technical report writing is derived from their experiences in the course, the forms of participation that they have been exposed to. From these broad findings, I identified the following issues of discourse:
The deficit discourse
Assigning agency in learning to students
Technical communication as entrée into the engineering profession.
These discourses factors fall in line with the critical realist methodology adopted in this study and bring us a step closer to uncovering the mechanisms which configure social exclusion in an Engineering Faculty.