The Pedagogy Balancing Act
Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) has a vibrant history of scholarship dedicated to instructional research. The importance of people–instructors, students, partners, clients, and stakeholders–lies at the head of the audience-driven communication methods we teach. Given TPC’s attention to purpose and context, the examination of relationships and environments that we promulgate to students, creates in many of us an exigence to study the pedagogy we use with the people involved for our various classroom situations. This research helps the field maintain and improve the passing of knowledge and skills to future professionals. The fastest growing environments for TPC instruction are online synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid classrooms facilitated by Learning Management Systems or LMSs (like Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, D2L, etc.). For this reason, TPC scholar-educators, like myself, who are doing pedagogical research have pivoted their studies away from face-to-face classrooms to digital spaces and the diverse impacts of their varied forms on the people and relationships within those spaces.
As a powerful catalyst for moving TPC courses online, the on-going global health crisis has made distance learning in our field ubiquitous. Classes in these disciplines—which were already numerous pre-pandemic—are now even more likely to be remote. For many TPC educators, the coronavirus necessitated digital migration and created praxis pain points that have and continue to test our mettle. We have been asked to: have face-to-face “classes moved online” (Frith, 2021, p. 1), create synchronous hybrid learning environments that mesh the physical with the virtual (Cochrane et al., 2020), and to teach the way we used to in physical classrooms with things like masks, distancing, disinfectants, and even the virus we’re trying to control (Hamilton & Bowman, 2022; Paige & Jungels, 2021; Leathers, 2020). And, though the media has joked at times about the pandemic world, for us the trials of the classroom continue and the jokes are not so funny. Instead of laughing off our situation, I asked, how has our teaching changed in response to the pandemic and how can we balance privacy with presence in a decidedly more digital pandemic classroom space? These tough questions gave me purposeful research in a rather bleak time.
For numerous TPC educators there are days so stressful that many are struggling to think about teaching their classes, much less about how to innovate a solution to teaching decision tree design to students in online teams, for example. There are closed door conversations among colleagues who are overwhelmed and are choosing to disengage just so they can hang-on a little bit longer (McClure & Fryer, 2022). But, despite the challenges, many of us in TPC are coming together in meetings and scholarship to help each other develop a “flexible pedagogy” (Johnson-Elola & Selber, 2021, p. 154). Personally, I have gathered electronically with many colleagues around the country to try and figure out how to keep the human element of communication in TPC courses “reinvented...to continue with online teaching” (Nuere & de Miguel, 2021) and upended by technological integration, mediation, and surveillance.
The growing number of online TPC classrooms has asserted the need to redress questions of privacy. The perennial issues of digital surveillance and privacy have become an ever-present topic of discussion and research for our scholars, educators, and organizations concerned with pedagogy and best practices for virtual spaces (STC, 1998; Gurak & Duin, 2004; ATTW, 2011). Some researchers are anxious about the use of their students' data (Flaherty, 2020) and their own information (Cook & Grant-Davie, 2017); I am one of these researchers. The surveillant changes wrought by technology following the pandemic have exacerbated the need for a return to research into privacy in our classroom spaces. The prolific uptake of technology and data capture in online learning is astounding for many of us, it is being driven by many of our institutions, and it is here to stay (Curtin, 2021).
The pandemic era TPC classroom is being reshaped by a groundswell of colleges and universities calling for more human presence in online classrooms loaded with new capture technologies. Their push for presence, for some, stems from institutional plans to retain students by providing some of what has been lost during the digital migration, losses to in-person learning created by the pandemic exodus from the traditional classroom (Wan, 2020). At the same time, the means for human, machine, and algorithmic capture of online participant information (personal, behavioral, statistical, and psychological) has also grown in number and capacity. Improved LMS analytics, web conferencing, automated transcription, and diverse audio, video, screen capture, and dissemination technologies have changed the information landscape of participant data in higher education (Baldwin, 2019). Many institutions are mandating more instructor and student presence via new technologies to create a facsimile of the human element, of the presence we have in physical spaces. For all of these reasons–the importance of pedagogy to TPC, the digital migration of our courses, the increased infringement potential of stakeholder privacy, and the call for more presence–I offer a study seeking insight and providing our experiences with the troublesome balance of privacy and presence while teaching in the covid era.
Using personal interviews, I discussed the new spaces of online, hybrid, and distanced physical classrooms with ten experienced TPC stakeholders. I chose to study TPC experience specifically, instead of composition more generally, because of the pronounced relationship between TPC and technology and my ties with these educators. Together, we explored how to maintain the human experience in digital TPC, the current pedagogical imperative, and the difficult technological path we tread together. This article aims to address the consequences of the shift to more online learning and digital workspaces (e.g., Iwai, 2020, Li & Lalani, 2020; Merrill, 2020; Miller, 2020) and explores the balancing act faculty are performing between robust online presence and stressors of working in captured environments. We feel some of our trials with this balancing act may illustrate common experiences relevant to all communication educators of this era.
Based on the heartfelt, empathetic experiences of TPC faculty, I argue for increased attention to the kinds of presence we are creating and how our experiences teaching online impact our sense of privacy and ability to work effectively in the classroom. I offer insights from TPC educators around the country and from various types of technologically modified classrooms. It is my hope that a pedagogical response based on these shared insights may lead to TPC course design ideas that include presence but also mitigate the potential of increasing privacy infringement in classrooms, on LMSs, and beyond.
Responding to Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s (2021) call for “flexible pedagogy,” I offer recommendations based on my Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved study which may help us teach and learn in the post-pandemic classroom. First, the article explores the literature on privacy and presence relevant to current classrooms. Then, the research questions and methods supporting my qualitative case study are provided. Based on those methods, results grounded in stakeholder experiences are discussed. Thematic offerings are based on the first-hand accounts of TPC teachers across several courses, programs, and institutions. It is from their experiences and shared-need for a meaningful, peopled learning space that I conclude by offering an informed pedagogical approach that supports a secure learning environment while nurturing human presence in our teaching. By pairing technology responding to the virtual shift with a concept of TPC education as human-centered, we may come to know both the importance of the human element in the experience of online classes and how to improve data privacy for surveilled shared spaces.
