Transformations Abound: Johnson-Eilola & Siebler, Spilka

I want to draw more heavily from Mirel's "Writing and Database Technology: Extending the Definition of Writing in the Workplace" than Spilka, although there are numerous connections between the two. The reason I am compelled to hang with Mirel is because her discussion of technology as a value-less medium for reporting data is an issue I most recently confronted in my WRT 105 course. I had assigned a CDC fact sheet on HIV in the US as of 2007, and students were to apply a heuristic they created based on Bartholomae & Petrosky's "Introduction: Ways of Reading" to the fact sheet. While I should not have been surprised realistically, I was alarmed when the discussion of the method of writing quickly dissolved into a debate about whether or not the CDC facts were argumentative. Further, many students felt that my comment that we could not trace the methods for which the CDC gathered their facts, thus making our discussion really about the presentation of their data rather than a comprehensive look at their methodology was grossly unfair. It further went without note that the CDC's references included its own results from previous studies. Finally, that the data was arranged on the fact sheet in order to persuade an audience and even influence how they felt or behaved in regards to HIV was a subject we could not resolve, but instead had to table in order to continue with the heuristic.

I can't help but write the summary with a leery tone, despite my best efforts. How can students not see that reporting the CDC's own data in the form of pie charts in which male-to-male transmission, African Americans, and intravenous drug users are high risk groups propagates a notion of HIV as not white, heterosexual or seemingly normal people's problem as well as connects to a long tradition of those particular groups having moral deficiencies? Further, after a student discusses at length how down low men's increasingly vital role in heterosexual transmission in minority populations was even a subject of an hour long Opera show, how can students not see that merely reporting HIV as a problem for African Americans and gays does not cover the complex intricacies of sexuality that are continually complicating every day people's mis-education about HIV? And better yet, how many of you even know what the hell I'm talking about, making not only the information I'm trying to grapple with, but the way I'm reporting that information a rhetorically complicated task, and thus in line with Mirel's discussion of reporting on information?

What was at the forefront of our class debate then was whether or not technical communicators invoke rhetoric when reporting data from the field (which field?). Many of my students believe, as Mirel points out, that the pie charts and CDC study's represent a mere objective reporting of the real situation of HIV. It is illogical, they would argue, that those statistics or even the way those statistics are gathered engages in rhetorical concerns, or went through a delivery process to imagined audience at a point in time under certain conditions (or assumptions). While I obviously find this position itself illogical, I can understand on many levels why it is preferred.

If the CDC has its own ends, means, method, methodology and even epistemology about HIV, then how will they, the students, ever know or know to trust info about HIV? In other words, if something as serious and scary as HIV is implicated in something like rhetoric, then what hope is there to ever DO something about it? Further, if we must be critical and examine how it is that the CDC, a government sponsored agency created to service the people and their health concerns, then what information about HIV is ever indisputable? Isn't HIV an issue in which we should have access (or even demand access) to indisputable facts? These aren't quite the naive questions I immediately assigned to my students, but instead are fair and logical questions in regards to cause and effect nature of information.

I agree completely with Mirel's suggestion that a pedagogy which plays with scales, or scaffolds the size of audience and task so that students move from more micro conceptions of data-to-audience reporting to macro conceptions is an important technique for teachers to utilize. However, I have a hard time seeing how scale will so neatly mitigate data reporting concerns that intersect so intimately with other personal factors, like sexuality, gender, race and economic class. If the CDC had reduced its study to only Syracuse, and the numbers they had reported still came up with high risk groups as being homosexuals, injecting drug users and African Americans, would that have made a difference in the way students conceive of risk and sexuality, habit, economics and race? Even if the numbers they had reported were not nationally comparable (that the high risk group was Caucasian, wealthy, heterosexual women), have my students understood the appeal that such data makes on behavior, as well as the connection between the arrangement of that data to important rhetorical decisions?

While this connection is not only my job, but also my raison de etre, this is a difficult connection to demonstrate. I wonder what the feasibility is of training tech communicators in the connection between rhetoric and data reporting without a four year study program in rhetoric? I mean, how besides the classroom, can this connection be implemented? Because while I struggle to help my student make the connection, in reality there are a large number of people who will not go through my (many would call torturous) 105 in which we use HIV as a course inquiry, nor will they go through a tech comm class in which the instructor is trained or wants to explore the connection. So I guess what I'm asking is whether this is a bit of a preaching to the choir kind of thing. While I found her contribution to the anthology incredibly insightful and helpful, how do other folks with a stronger sense of tech comm training or even tech comm workers and workplace conditions see her work as having any real contribution to the enterprise?