Introduction
In the Professional Writing Program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, I teach online courses in technical and professional writing. My classes are required for English students with concentrations in Professional Writing and students in STEM fields like kinesiology, industrial technology, and informatics. I first adopted an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook in my technical writing classes in the Fall of 2020, when South Louisiana was grappling with compound disasters of Covid-19, protests surrounding the police shooting of Trayford Pellerin on August 21, Hurricane Laura on August 27, and Hurricane Delta on October 9. My students stumbled through the semester, trauma- and grief-stricken, some weeks quarantining in their homes, and other weeks traveling miles to find electricity or internet access.1
In the summer of 2020, during a pandemic that disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) students, and after the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, the Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) published a demand for Black Linguistic Justice. These scholars called for teachers of English composition and writing to educate themselves and teach students about Black Linguistic Justice (Baker-Bell et. al. 2020). The writers asked composition instructors to “stop using standard English as a communicative norm,” and instead, the committee demanded that instructors teach about white linguistic supremacy and anti-Black linguistic racism. In 2021, the CCCC published a new statement on White Language Supremacy (WLS), which is “an implement to white supremacy, particularly within educational institutions” (Richardson et al. 2021). The community affirmed their commitment to anti-racist teaching and dismantling oppressive systems through writing and communication.
In 2020, scholars like April Baker-Bell, Bonnie J. Williams-Farrier, Davena Jackson, Lamar Johnson, Carmen Kynard, and Teaira McMurtry demanded that we think about our own pedagogy as a place where we can have discussions about social justice and language. As a white European-Acadian person who has had, as Hansen (2018) says, “the privilege of being born into [standard] English,” I felt compelled to look critically at my own pedagogies to make my composition classroom a more equitable place for multiple identities and expressions. Therefore, I sought to enact a holistic model of teaching that bell hooks theorized in Teaching to Transgress. This pedagogical model would not only empower my students but would also establish “a place where teachers grow … and are empowered by the process” (hooks 1994, 21). Through my assignments and lectures in class, I sought to use OER not only to reduce textbook costs for students, but also to foster cross-cultural equity in the classroom.
OER are tools we can use to make our classrooms more equitable and inclusive, especially in terms of the financial burdens of education.2 However, without careful selection and planning on the instructor’s part, some OER can reinforce structural inequities and bias, as some textbooks promote equity and diversity more than others. George Veletsianos writes that we must carefully choose course materials to “dismantle some of the structural inequities that OER may reproduce” (2021, 409). Veletsianos asks us to consider the people and “forms of knowledge” that authors represent in open access resources. One resource alone typically cannot represent or reflect the diverse viewpoints of all our students. We must think critically about how existing OER intersect with our own positions and contexts and we must develop a community of voices or a repository of various perspectives in our classrooms (Veletsianos 2021, 409). When we work with our students to analyze, study, or create OER for class assignments, we should seek to amplify an abundance of ideas and engage in equitable and inclusive compilation and research practices.
Reliance on a single composition book, when not supplemented with additional resources, might further exclude students’ viewpoints from the conversation. This essay discusses my journey to select OER texts for my upper-level online professional writing course and how I learned to curate readings and media that foster a growth mindset (Dweck 2006; Cote 2022), include diverse voices and cultures, and ask students to participate in their ownership of knowledge and writing. First, I will explain the challenges I encountered by initially putting too much emphasis on a single commercial textbook—particularly when the source seemed to downplay “real-world” language encounters I had experienced myself as a professional writer in my community. Second, I argue that choosing multiple OERs, rather than using one, can help achieve the goals of equity and equality in the classroom. Finally, I posit that if we are interested in inclusive, equitable education, then we should bring our students into the discussion about the topics of OER and inclusion. Their experiences—whether as speakers who were “born into English” (Hansen 2018) or speakers from other countries—heavily influence their expectations and goals in a composition class.
Choosing a Textbook
In Fall of 2020, I struggled to find an appropriate OER textbook for my upper-level professional writing class, so I assigned a new commercial textbook, Paul MacRae’s Business and Professional Writing: A Basic Guide (2019). The text had useful chapters on plain language, genres of professional writing, and clear communication, but the book attempted to persuade my students that their success in the workplace depended on their use of Standard American English. The text did not fully explore the complexities of the English language and lacked nuance about audience analysis, dialects, and language that would empower students in their own communities. MacRae’s introduction advocates for students to learn and use American Standard English for all business contexts. He begins with “The Importance of Good Communication,” lamenting that with the shift in media technologies from television to internet, progressive educators stopped forcing students to learn the rules of spelling, writing, and grammar. This, MacRae argues, has led to students who “cannot express themselves in print, much less create great written work” (2019, 15–16). MacRae and other scholars like Rob Jenkins (2018) assert that Standard English pays off in the corporate world. They argue that without standard English literacy, students are unlikely to succeed or get jobs in the workplace.
The introduction in McRae’s Business and Professional Writing did not encourage my students to embrace their own language skills and proficiencies. Instead, the book aimed to standardize my students’ linguistic identities to prepare them for a seemingly homogenous workforce. In “Contesting Standardized English,” Missy Watson (2018) writes, “we don’t actually need a single homogeneous variety of language in order to communicate effectively.” Moreover, my own personal experiences led me to agree with Watson.
In the years before I began teaching at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, I worked as a Guardian ad Litem alongside social workers in the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services. Black professionals in this field often used Black English in correspondence, reports, and other documents. I learned that workplace discourse communities were highly context-specific and used different registers, tones, dialects, and specialized vocabularies to meet their needs (Swales 1990; Bremner 2018). Contrary to MacRae’s emphasis, workplace writing, in my experience, was not monolithic. The textbook, for which my students had paid around forty dollars, did not present a multi-faceted view. As a result, I decided to address ideas about Standard English and workplace writing with the students.
After Fall 2020, I sought to find an OER textbook for the professional writing course, and I redesigned the class to also include lessons that borrow from and cite multiple sources. I aimed to add to my repository of voices and perspectives in the online composition classroom. One of the sources I chose is an OER by Melissa Ashman, Introduction to Professional Communications (2018), because it includes citations of diverse sources and examples with names that reflect different kinds of identities. Ashman’s text emphasizes a growth mindset and affirms student’s languages, cultures, and dialects. Ashman writes that students who have proficiencies in multiple languages or dialects have an advantage in workplace environments, adding, “Our goal is not to erase what’s unique about your writing voice to make it “appropriate” for the workplace, but to build on your existing skills so that you can be successful in whatever workplace you enter” (13). Instead of attempting to replace or supplant students’ “inadequate” writing with newer, standardized ways of writing, Ashman’s approach is an additive model, adding new information to the kinds of skills and experiences students bring with them to class.
Ashman’s text aligns with Guide to Inclusive Teaching at Columbia (Kachani et al. 2018). The teaching strategies instruct teachers to “use examples that speak across gender, work across cultures, and are relatable to people from various socioeconomic statuses, ages, and religions” (Kachani et al. 2018, 20). Ashman’s book uses examples of students who have complex, intersectional identities. One example is Jian Yi who began his education in China and learned English as a second language when he moved to Canada at age twelve. Although Jian Yi can write in multiple languages, he lacks confidence in his writing skills. In addition to this, he is taking a full course load and feels burdened by the communication class. Ashman encourages students like Jian Yi to consider their language proficiencies as an advantage in business and professional writing. Ashman asserts that Jian Yi is a good writer because he can shift between two languages, and he can build on this skill as he adapts to the conventions of business writing in the workplace. Introduction to Professional Communication takes a broad view of the social skills that students need to succeed in business writing. This approach fosters positive views about writing skills and encourages students to find their own socio-cultural strengths and motivations.
Ashman also gives examples of various gender identities. In one example, the textbook uses they/them pronouns for a student named Kai: “Kai prided themself on being able to write their essays the night before. They would drink some energy drinks and buy their favourite snacks and write for hours” (2018, 56). Kai’s story of procrastination may resonate with my students who struggle with time management, drafting, and revision. The example provides a model for adapting the writing process. In the example, Kai tries writing a draft for peer review and learns to write and revise their essay in multiple stages. This example is not only useful to students who want to learn more about drafting and revision, but also provides representation for nonbinary students and introduces they/them pronouns to students who know little about nonbinary or trans* identities. This kind of representation fosters social-emotional learning principles like self-awareness and social awareness.
Ashman’s Introduction to Professional Communications acknowledges the diverse experiences of our students, recognizing that some students might have job responsibilities or family caretaking obligations in addition to their research and schoolwork. The textbook also includes reflections for students to consider, such as,“What do people in your culture and/or your family believe about reading, writing, and telling stories?” (Ashman 2018, 17). This asks students to reflect on their own identities and the value of communication in their own families or cultures. Ashman not only respects the cultural identities of her readers, but also encourages developing writers to respect their audiences when composing documents. She instructs students not to make assumptions about their audiences in their own writing, and to avoid reinforcing stereotypes about groups of people.3
Ashman’s text is a good start to finding representation of various identities in textbook, but the Canadian cultural context of this OER meant that I needed to include other voices and positionalities that would reflect the situations and perspectives that my students might encounter in the workplaces of the United States or in the Gulf South. To help with this, I used the Sutori platform to create a learning library, including resources from CCCC Black Technical and Professional Communication Resource Guide, and added other resources, ranging from an episode of The Bitter Southerner’s podcast, “What We Talk About When We Talk About How We Talk,” to the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. I ask students to explore the library and choose topics and media that interest them, speak to their own experience, or give them new insights about power, communication, and language.
I began collecting free resources, articles, podcasts, and videos for students to explore. Starting with the CCCC’s “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” in 1974 that “affirms the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language,” our class explored language and power as they read and listened to a debate about workplace communication. Students read excerpts of Stanley Fish’s “What Colleges Should Teach, Part III” (2009) and Vershawn Young’s response in “Should Writers Use They Own English?” (2010). I wanted to align my teaching practices with Brittany Hull who writes that in her classroom, students “write usin the language or variety they were comfortable with, depending on their intended audience and the rhetorical situation” (Hull, Sheldon, and McKoy 2019).
We listened to NPR’s Rough Translation episode “How to Speak Bad English,” and Hansen’s TED Talk “2 Billion Voices,” which de-centers speakers who were “born into English” and focuses on the English language skills of the two billion people who learn English as a second language. Hansen encouraged my professional writers to use plain language and avoid idioms when writing for international audiences. We learned more about cross-cultural communication, emphasizing that English speakers should train themselves to listen to different accents and different ways of communicating in global business environments. These conversations pushed students to challenge their own assumptions and consider audience expectations in a world where colonialism, classism, racism, and white supremacy have devalued many cultures, accents, and dialects.
Students had thought-provoking and lively discussions about these readings in an online forum. Some were energized to see representations of their own Black English in Young’s work, others discussed suppressing their own Southern or Cajun accents and dialects as they grew up in public schools. Meanwhile, others wrote about their experiences as international students and expressed the difficulties they found while reading Young’s article. The discussion forum became a way for my students to share the ways that they felt about their own languages, how they learned English, and how they learned to code-switch or code-mesh at a very young age or later in life.4 Students generated their own discussion topics and by far, the most popular discussion thread was “would you date someone on a dating app who used a different grammar than you?” The students took their knowledge of language and power and turned the discussion to ways that they encountered interpersonal relationships and possible romantic interests online. Some students responded that they would refuse to go out with a person who wrote in a different style or dialect, while others challenged these notions and said they would likely be willing to get to know a person before deciding.
Finally, to add more voices to the array, I have been working to include writers or speakers with disabilities and LGBTQIA+ authors who can teach us about different embodied and lived experiences. When I teach students about user experience design and accessibility, I often include YouTube videos from screen-reader users who teach us how to design texts for accessibility and keyboard navigation. If students who are unfamiliar with screen-reader technologies understand how screen readers operate, they begin to reconsider their document design and the importance of accessibility in professional and technical writing. In the class, my students read Emily Ladau’s Demystifying Disability (2021). Although Ladau’s book is not an OER, she offers a free, accessible, plain language translation—translated by Becca Monteleone and herself—on her website for readers to use. We also listened to Emily Ladau discuss language on NPR and watched a video of her interview with Judy Heumann. Sasha Costanza-Chock’s open access book called Design Justice (2020), which explores how marginalized communities might take part in designing structures and information for a better world. I am currently working to add new voices to my accessibility collection, including intersectional identities.
Writing for the Community: A Sample Assignment
To help students explore professional writing in their communities, I ask students to compose a health promotion document for their community. Many of my students are Health Promotion and Wellness majors and enjoy this assignment. I teach writing as a process, and pre-writing activities are crucial to the development of this community-based project. Before students begin writing, they learn about language and culture choices from professionals in the field. We discuss Miriam Williams’s research on race in professional communication and the value of using plain language when writing for the public (Weber 2015; Williams 2017). We also listen to an interview with Emily Haozous, in which she talks about the need for technical writers to immerse themselves in the culture of the community to determine what the audience needs from the document (Weber 2022). Haozous demonstrates the need for Indigenous writers to work within the community to create culturally appropriate healthcare documents.
We also examine communications and public service announcements in community health organizations during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Professional writers in New Orleans LCMC Health published a public health article titled “5 Ways to Stay Safe while Makin’ Groceries during Coronavirus.” The phrase “makin’ groceries” is an expression that means to go shopping. It comes from a literal English translation of the French verb “faire,” meaning either “to do” or “to make.” This public health campaign used the community’s familiar phrasing to target an audience to encourage mask wearing in public places like grocery stores. We examined the value of such community-minded discourse to connect with audiences who could understand the cultural context and nuance of the message. We also considered the drawbacks of such context-specific language for national or international audiences, demonstrating the inherent tensions in language and the value of carefully considering audience and rhetorical situation when writing for the community.
Students complete a few pre-writing exercises in which they reflect on their ideas about language choices, their communities, and their audiences:
- How might you describe your own culture in terms of your heritage, religion, identity, nationality, race, ethnicity, etc.? How have your experiences informed your worldview? How do you think that your culture informs your communication style?
- Our textbook talks about how our culture helps to shape our predominant modes of communication. Narrative storytelling, group discussion, and listening to elders are ways that people communicate or make decisions. Which one of these options do you rely on most? What does this say about your culture?
They conduct research about their own communities, and they use John Swales’s discourse community theory to analyze the modes of communication and the languages that people use in their neighborhoods, peer groups, workplaces, or their families. Students select a community that is important to their personal or professional life, and they introduce their discourse community to the class. They also conduct primary research: observing conversations, conducting interviews, and collecting documents or artifacts from their community. In their written reflections, students discuss their findings and analysis:
- What did you learn about how your discourse community communicates?
- What did you learn about the genres your discourse community uses for communication?
- How does this knowledge help you better understand what it’s like to be a member of this discourse community?
Students also create empathy maps for their audiences to think about audience expectations for health promotion documents. Empathy maps, developed by the Nielsen Norman group, help each person to consider what a target audience thinks, feels, says, and does (Gibbons 2018). After completing their analysis of the community and target audience, students compose a document for their chosen community. Students have written exercise plans for improving mental health outcomes for students on campus, low-cost recipes for the free food pantry in their neighborhood, and informational guides for the Louisiana Lupus Foundation. Students choose their writing style, tone, and language based on the research they conducted in the community and the empathy map of their audience.
Assessing Student Writing
I assess students’ writing in their own language by including students in the grading process. In their 1982 article, “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response,” Lil Brannon and C. H. Knoblauch argue that composition teachers should not assess student writing based on a vision of an “Ideal Text,” but instead in conversation with the student. This method of assessment de-centers the teacher’s power in the classroom and treats students as authorities over their own texts. I use a process that Christian Aguiar, Andrew M. Howard, and Ahmad Wright (2020) call collaborative grading. Collaborative grading creates resilient learners as it asks students to metacognitively reflect about their learning process. Many scholars have written about how we can move away from the traditional models of grading and have students take more power into their learning (Blum 2020, Stommel 2021).
Students grade their own health promotion documents by developing their own rubrics and scoring themselves. They also write a 300-word reflection for the assignment to report their purpose, audience, strengths, and weaknesses. Students submit multiple drafts of their work, using their own assessment and my feedback to revise the work before they submit a final portfolio at the end of the semester. I determine grades either through a labor-based model or by averaging the student’s self-assigned grade with the grade that I assign using the rubric. This approach to grading emphasizes the writer’s ideas and communicative goals. Although students are still developing their writing skills, they have an extensive knowledge about their own culture and community. I have found that students take this assessment seriously and reflect upon their communication choices, goals, and audience considerations. Often, they accurately identify areas that they can revise in future drafts. We can begin to see the potential and power of Open Pedagogy when we combine OER with class activities that foster connection, inclusion, and the amplification of all voices in the classroom space (Jhangiani and DeRosa 2017). Collaborative grading invites students to participate in that knowledge-making through discussion and reflection.
Conclusion
I have more work to do to craft a diverse, equitable, and inclusive classroom. I will continue to learn and build my community of voices in technical and professional writing classes. This essay represents a discussion of texts that have been useful to give students a framework to consider their own positions in their discourse communities. In the professional writing classroom, OER can remove financial barriers to learning, allowing us to share multiple texts with students at no cost. Due to the increase in open access composition textbooks, I no longer rely solely on the perspective of a single book or author. I have found it useful to ask students to choose their interests, discuss their differences, and contribute to their own learning. My professional writing students research their own discourse communities and the language and rhetorical approaches that they will use in their future workplaces.
Instead of prescribing Standard American English as the model for all workplace writing, I ask students to think critically about the potential audiences that they will encounter after graduation. Together, we’ve learned that their understanding of the rhetorical situation and audience expectations can guide their linguistic choices. Moreover, students have become empowered to choose tones, registers, designs, and dialects that will reach their audiences and result in effective communication.
OER can make learning more accessible for our students, but sources can sometimes perpetuate biases and world views that exclude or marginalize students in the classroom. As educators, we must carefully select supplementary materials to build a community of voices that will support our students’ learning. Voices from diverse perspectives can encourage students to grow and better understand their own identities as well as the consideration of others when writing in discourse communities.
