Book Commentary 22 Bernhardt and Garay's Expanding Literacies Robert R. Johnson JCD Book Commentaries Editor et me begin with a few questions to those readers who are technical/professional communicators (as I imagine the majority of you are!): Did you ever have the opportunity to take a class in technical writing before you went to college? Second, did you ever take an English or language arts class that was not more or less solely dedicated to the reading of literary texts? Third, do you wish that you had been given the opportunity in high school to have some instruction in the writing of nonacademic texts? Although I cannot count your raisedhands, my assumption is that most of you answered "No" to the first two questions. As far as the third question is concerned, I will not presume to know the answer you might give, but I imagine that you would at the very least be curious as to what such instruction might be like in a high school classroom. That is, imagining the possibilities for a broader array of texts in the secondary school curriculum is interesting, if not downright fascinating, to consider. Expanding Literacies:English Teachingand the New Workplaceis a book dedicated to investigating the promise of technical and professional communication in the secondary classroom. As many of the chapters make evident, and as the three commentators explain, this is indeed an exciting new arena for technical communication. At the same time, it is also an arena fraught with difficulties: practical, economic, and ideological. The three reviewers in this volume offer up some hard questions concerning the how and why of teaching technical communication in the secondary schools. Dale Sullivan and Ann Brady, both university teachers with a wealth of experience in technical communication, point to the benefits of pursuing these possible changes to secondary classrooms. They also, however, remind us that these changes have social and technological consequences at almost every turn. Certainly go forward, they say, but continually reflect on these consequences as you proceed. In a similar vein, Evelyn Johnson-a secondary and middle school teacher-suggests that expanding the spectrum of literacy in the secondary schools is a "must do" activity, but one that should be monitored and revised on a continual basis. As you will soon see, these three commentaries offer strong support, with a healthy skepticism, for the issues raised in Expanding Literacies. I hope you enjoy reading about this new and exciting educational opportunity for technical communicators, an opportunity especially exciting for those young students who will become the technical communicators of the future. L *Journal of Computer Documentation November 1999/Voi 23, No. 4
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Bernhardt and Garay's expanding literacies
Johnson, Robert R.
Follow ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
, Volume 23 (4)
Association for Computing Machinery – Nov 1, 1999
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