Introduction

Researchers and practitioners in the field of Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) are no strangers to the interview. Whether as a tool for field research or an approach to gathering information from subject-matter experts (SMEs), conducting interviews is an oft-utilized and necessary skill in TPC work. For example, the past twenty-five years of TPC scholarship in prominent journals like Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, and the Journal of Business and Technical Communication have featured many scholars who used the interview as a core method to identify and examine themes for more functional TPC practices. By probing individuals’ unique experiences and perspectives, researchers have extracted valuable information on the formation of ethics in the workplace (Dragga), scholarly trajectories and criteria used for TPC scholarship (Palmer and Killingsworth), and continuing professional development for early-career writers (Berger and Pigg), to name a few. In addition to the interview’s use as a research method, TPC scholars also emphasize its importance in fashioning disciplinary and workplace identity writ large. In her 1984 article “Interviewing for Information,” Leslie Levine avers, “If technical writers want to be considered professionals in their field, they must become expert interviewers as well as good technical translators” (qtd. in McDowell 296). Put differently, hard skills alone do not make a robust TPC ethos; the soft skills required to conduct an interview are also crucial to effective workplace proficiencies and TPC identity.

In this article, we—an assistant professor of Professional and Technical Writing (PTW) and three undergraduate PTW students at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech)—underscore and update Levine’s claim by arguing that a more explicit curricular focus on the skills and mechanics of interviewing can help smooth transitions between the classroom and the TPC workplace. By explicating an interview-themed podcasting assignment in an upper-level college English course, we illustrate how the classroom can operate as a staging ground for workplace dynamics and as a site for critically assessing the technical and professional writer’s role, affordances, and limitations. After first situating this trajectory in the broader themes of TPC scholarship and client-based learning, we conclude with three student-created deliverables that offer reflections of the proposed assignment and feature three unique interviews providing perspectives of PTW student needs.

Situating the Interview in TPC Scholarship

To better understand the exigency of teaching interviewing, we must first understand its broader significance for TPC work and pedagogy. Scholars have long-identified the value of nurturing face-to-face communication skills, both as a classroom exercise and an essential skill for TPC work (Mancuso). In her 1993 article, Madelyn Flammia likens professional technical writers to journalists, arguing that both jobs hinge on an “ability to garner information from sources—often uncooperative, and sometimes extremely reluctant sources” (125). Leslie Levine corroborates this assertion, noting that up to 75% of the writer’s efforts in the workplace go to information-gathering and interviewing SMEs (qtd. in Lee and Mehlenbacher 549). It is with this hard-earned information that professional and technical writers create public-facing documentation and artifacts representative of particular stakeholders and organizations. Speaking to the larger impacts of such work, Jeremy Rosselot-Merrit stresses that the TPC practitioner uniquely “contributes a set of skills and sensitivities that optimally lead to clearer, more audience-centered communications yielding benefits for users, organizations, and stakeholders, including employees” (Rosselot-Merrit). Considering both the scope of the writer’s influence and the primary charge of their work, the writer’s role is not an ancillary or simple one, and the skill of interviewing is essential to their performance as a member of a more successful work team.

Despite acknowledging the importance of interviews in TPC work, little attention seems to be given to their instruction or impact. Flammia also observes that though the skill of interviewing gets baked into journalism curriculum, “technical writing students usually have no conception of the need for becoming skilled interviewers until they are well into their first job” (125). In other words, learning how to conduct a good interview is more a rough-and-ready competency gained on the job than an intentional practice scaffolded throughout TPC curriculum. The unfortunate consequence of this oversight is that the writer often suffers from being misperceived as incompetent at worst or as a “translator” or editor for the SME—the “real” professional—at best. In their interview-based study of technical writers’ attitudes toward SMEs, Martha F. Lee and Brad Mehlenbacher identify SMEs’ specialized communication and their lack of understanding of the writer’s role as the primary barriers writers face in the TPC workplace. One of Lee and Mehlenbacher’s respondents urge SMEs to “understand that the writer is just as much a professional as the SME, that asking questions is part of their job, and that the writer is the interface and filter for the engineer to the audience” (548). From these accounts, the interview functions inextricably as a technical and social tool—a means to solicit necessary information and build rapport with colleagues and affiliates prone to misunderstanding the writer’s role and intent. Another respondent underscores this complex dynamic by describing their relationship to SMEs as “interviewer/ego booster/listener/negotiator/journalist/friend” (547). Such a multifaceted and shifting role on the part of the writer demonstrates how tricky and pivotal the task of interviewing truly is. What TPC practitioners exercise through the art and skill of interviewing is not just functional but hugely interpersonal, which impacts both their ability to accomplish work and broadcast professionalism.

With stakes this high, it is no wonder that Levine and Flammia call the TPC practitioner to become a skilled interviewer. Speaking to the persistence of this need in the 2020s, Lindsay Moore and Yvonne Earnshaw find that TPC practitioners and recent graduates of TPC programs report a similar lack of identity and preparation around technical communication in the workplace. They point to skills like interviewing SMEs as “really useful” and “valuable” in navigating their jobs, but they also stress a lack of “professionalization and workplace preparedness” once hired (Moore and Earnshaw). Again, the risks of an underprepared TPC practitioner are misunderstandings and/or variations in definitions regarding TPC work, which lead to the devaluing of their positions and, in turn, limits on professional advancement. Rosselot-Merritt notes similar outcomes in his 2020 study of the working professional’s perceptions of the TPC field. Through analyses of his interviews with non-TPC and TPC professionals, he argues that “TPC as a field continues to face challenges to its professionalization and legitimacy,” despite its growth as an academic discipline (Rosselot-Merritt). He explains that the source of these challenges often stems from those with decision-making power—e.g., managers, SMEs—who do not understand the TPC professional’s role and, as a result, exclude them from the overall process of producing and distributing published information (Rosselot-Merritt).

Considering these tenuous and persistent workplace conditions, scholars like Emily January Petersen call TPC professionals, especially those early in their career and/or occupying historically minoritized identities, to claim their “interactional power,” or a sense of agency cultivated through “language and social interaction” (36). Studying the ways women access such agency in the Technical Communication workplace, Petersen explains that the key to harnessing interactional power is by “becoming aware of the context in which power struggles take place and then using that knowledge to design new participation” (36). In this way, the interviewer gathers contextual information and adds to their soft skills, both of which enhance social relationships and increase interactional power. Chalice Randazzo makes a similar, parallel argument in a study of how her TPC students acquired information and advice for professional writing. By employing interviews as a tool to investigate best practices and field knowledge for résumé-writing, Randazzo found students connecting and accessing information through classmates, school personnel, and professional contacts—individuals they may not have had previous access to or recognized as an information source. She describes this process as a way to “facilitate student empowerment” by engaging them in the reflexive, mindfulness-building exercises that conducting interviews inherently affords (291). Coupled with the fraught interpersonal dynamics of TPC work, these accounts illustrate the potential of the TPC interview to operate as both the site of fomenting tension and of immense professional opportunity.

Reframing the TPC Classroom’s Role toward Client-Based Learning

TPC workplace realities place a heavy burden on not only the art of interviewing but also the classroom’s role in cultivating these proficiencies. Whether the TPC interview skews toward workplace dysfunction or social/professional empowerment is a consideration instructors should take up in earnest. This begs the question, how might TPC curriculum better prepare students to navigate the tricky, ever-evolving dynamics of the workplace, especially those wrought by face-to-face interactions? Answers to this question necessitate more than adding “learn interviewing mechanics” to TPC course objectives. Numerous textbooks and articles already highlight the importance or process of conducting TPC interviews (see Flammia; McDowell; Rice-Bailey). Thus, instead of isolating instruction of a particular skill as the antidote, the TPC instructor might deploy the interview as a structural tool that rewrites the roles of empowerment and interaction.

A step in this more expansive direction is to first challenge the “classroom-workplace gap” paradigm. Arthur Berger and Stacey Pigg note that common characterizations of TPC training invoke a deficit model wherein the classroom inadequately equips students with essential competencies—like conducting interviews—and, as a result, churns out underprepared new workers. They alternatively argue that the necessary skills for workplace success are not only difficult to predict but also impossible to represent in the classroom due to their contextual specificity. This is to say, these “necessary” skills deal less with academic deficits and more with the ad hoc ability “to adapt to the continually evolving structure and technology development” at play in their job sites (369). Liberty Kohn makes a similar argument but identifies reasons why classroom approximations of workplace dynamics often fail. Unpacking the core differences between university and workplace writing, he explains:

Workplace writing, which uses information toward goals other than employee learning, which communicates social action, outlines policy, builds partnerships, and solves problems as exigencies arise, changes the matrix of literacy’s informational relationships taught to students throughout their secondary and postsecondary education, in which context is often limited, textual borrowing practices are different, and students often understand the purpose of writing to be that of assessing learning, not using or creating knowledge. (170)

From Kohn’s description here, we see workplace writing objectives, unlike classroom goals, being externally oriented, focused not on individual efforts or writing for writing’s sake but on collective activities that work toward more instrumental ends.

Taken together, these perspectives show that addressing any classroom-workplace gap does not necessarily mean reinventing the curricular wheel but, instead, steering existing wheels in a different direction, particularly one oriented beyond the classroom. Thus, rather than bearing the pressure to be all things to all students, the TPC classroom might see its role as cultivating opportunities for students to practice adapting and becoming dexterous information-seekers, emphasizing the meta-proficiencies involved in adjusting to new contexts rather than just mastery of specific hard skills for particular tasks. For the TPC interview, this frame means teaching students both the procedures for conducting interviews, especially with SMEs, and underscoring the transferable proficiencies they glean from applying these skills to externally oriented situations in context-specific ways.

One path to a TPC pedagogy that emphasizes adaptation and context is client-based learning, which Gregory Wickliff defines as “a group writing project that originates and culminates outside the classroom” (171). Like the workplace writing Kohn envisions, client-based learning de-centers the writer and their individual efforts and focuses instead on an external entity—not just a teacher—who establishes complex tasks for collaborative problem-solving. Within this frame, discursive acts become a purposeful way to collectively probe and adjust to unknowns. Wickliff explains that most traditional communication classes presume stability in relation to the unknown, where issues of definition and problem-solving involve relatively straightforward processes and answers (172). Client-based learning alternatively poses “ill-defined problems for students that force them toward self-definition” (173), which necessarily calls for more dynamic growth and continuous adaptation to unpredictable contexts. Describing the measures of success for client-based learning, Summer Smith Taylor explains, “In the workplace, expectations of clients, supervisors, and employees tend to evolve as the participants share ideas. Successful projects end with agreement on standards” (134). Thus, even assessment measures for client-based learning involve an emergent, collaborative focus rather than a solitary one where students create content to be assessed by one instructor according to a preset rubric.

We propose that a client-based classroom is an especially effective environment to teach TPC interviews and help students anticipate their transition to the workplace. In the next section, we present an example of a semester-long, client-based project at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech) and how an interview-based podcasting assignment helped students develop the technical and metacognitive skills for more adaptive and empowered TPC work.

Unpacking Client-Based Learning at City Tech

In an upper-level, special topics class for the Professional and Technical Writing (PTW) program at City Tech, I (Shauna) created a course that took on the PTW program itself as a client. In conversation with my colleague Jason Ellis, I learned that students in the program, since its inception in 2015, have tried to form a student club; however, due to unknown factors, these efforts never materialized. What is known, however, is that as a commuter school focused mainly on STEM disciplines, City Tech struggles to cultivate community amongst students, especially those pursuing degrees in the humanities. Situated in the School of Arts & Science (SAS), the PTW program exemplifies this conundrum; the PTW degree is the English Department’s sole four-year, BS degree, home to nearly 60 students. Considering City Tech’s enrollment of 13,784 students in Fall 2023, with only 12% of these students enrolled in the SAS, the PTW program has an extremely small campus footprint (“Fact Sheet”). To nurture community and visibility for the program, Ellis suggested I frame the special topic for my course around starting and creating technical assets for a PTW Student Club.

With this premise in mind, I built the course structure under the following assumption, which Andrew Rohm et al. assert in their 2021 piece on “future proofing” students’ skill development through real-world learning: “designing and incorporating live projects with real clients and real project activations enables students to develop both the technical as well as meta skills that can better prepare them for future jobs and careers” (8-9). Thus, in order to cultivate technical and meta skills in tandem, I believed that the key to the course’s success was to find a real client and to design a workflow that bore strong resemblance to actual TPC projects. We quickly found a student, external to the class, who volunteered to be future president of the club. In conversation with technical writing contacts, I also synthesized real TPC project activations around four phases: 1) Discovery, 2) Needs Analysis, 3) Defining Deliverables, 4) Producing Deliverables.

Each phase built into the next and became essential to the progression of student knowledge. In Phase One: Discovery, students independently gathered contextual information by analyzing existing student clubs on and off campus, beginning their journey toward interactional power. They presented their insights as multimodal lightning talks in class, which uncovered precedents for student organizations’ successes and failures. With a continued focus on oral presentation skills and context-building, Phase Two: Needs Analysis asked students to find peers or affiliates of the PTW program and create a “Profile Feature,” which involved a semi-structured, recorded interview, edited down to approximately eight minutes, and conveyed as a podcast story. The goal was to extract specific insights about student and professional needs from a diverse group of interviewees that the class would collectively code, analyze, and present to our clients. (Please see the appendix for a link to the assignment prompt.) What students uncovered in this phase would inform what they defined (phase three) and produced (phase four) as deliverables for the club in the form of a mission statement, constitution, event proposals, and member-facing multimodal assets.

Students followed a suite of readings about TPC interview methods with Phase Two: contact interviewees via professional correspondence and create interview guides that sketched common themes related to Phase One and our clients’ goals. Core topics included student support, leadership training, and club presence/community. In class, students workshopped these guides to build a common queue of interview questions, which they tailored to each interviewee after conducting additional research on their respective backgrounds and professional histories. In-class time also involved practicing these questions in mock interviews and discussing the importance of asking for consent, building rapport, and staying open to unpredictable answers and variations in the interview guide flow. These efforts culminated in students conducting and recording the actual interview, assessing the interview for relevant insights, and producing a podcast as the technical deliverable to share with our clients.

Below, three students present their final deliverables, along with reflections on the skills developed and the challenges they worked through. Each features a unique perspective in their interviews: student, faculty, and alumna.

Student Reflections and Deliverables

Naila Butt

In this class project, I was tasked with developing a podcast that focused on assessing the potential needs for a PTW club at City Tech. This project was new territory for me as it involved a formal interviewing process, an area I had never touched on before.

Focused on capturing students' diverse experiences within the program, the project involved in-depth interviews with PTW students at different stages of their academic journey, namely Parmbir Singh, Khemraj Persaud, and myself.

My primary aim was not just to document student experiences but to dive into what is essential for the success of the PTW club. The initial interviewee, Parmbir, offered valuable insights into the PTW experience as an upper freshman, but as the narrative unfolded, it became clear to me that a more holistic view was necessary. To achieve this, I decided to also interview Khemraj, a senior in the program, adding another perspective to the overall podcast. 

Initially prepared with a detailed interview guide, I soon discovered a broader narrative, shifting the project's trajectory. One of the main challenges I encountered was the overall preparation for the interviews. The interview guide I had created seemed like a concrete guideline, but I soon learned the importance of flexibility. This guide became a tool to keep the conversation focused yet open enough to let the interviewees steer the flow—an approach that allows for unexpected insights.

For instance, instead of asking hanging questions from my prepared guide, I often prompted questions that helped bring out more of the conversation and stories waiting to be told by the interviewees. When I shifted from structured questions to more fluid storytelling techniques, the discussion became more genuine and organic. This allowed the individual narratives to intertwine to paint a collective picture of the PTW program.

In the editing process, integrating these interviews into a cohesive podcast presented its own set of challenges and learnings. I started my process by isolating snippets of the key points and recurring themes. This project required a blend of experimentation and creativity to stitch these narratives into a structured yet fluid piece. Thus, I found myself trying to balance the various voices as if they were puzzle pieces I fit together to create a comprehensive picture for my audience. Many times, I had to arrange and rearrange the pieces until I found an audio sequence that was most engaging and digestible for the audience.

Overall, this project offered a unique perspective on the commonalities and divergences in student experiences within the PTW program. This exploration provided a nuanced understanding of student challenges and aspirations, offering valuable insights for framing the goals of the upcoming PTW club. It encapsulates the essence of the project—a blend of personal growth, academic exploration, and the art of storytelling in a technical context.

Nano-Transcript_Naila:

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:f089ce6e-dad3-4111-ab4d-08c1bd347cbc