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Abstract
This article brings together the communication needs and positioning of women in technical areas, and asks “how can technical communication classes contribute to the mentoring of young women engineers at a time when many of those women want to be identified as engineers instead of being spotlighted as women in engineering?” Incorporating research into mentoring for women in engineering, and feminist approaches to mentoring in general, we adopt Heath and Heath's strategy in Switch, instituting small changes in technical communication classes (and sometimes their infrastructures) that target a mentoring problem—i.e., talk about time—with the hope of flipping a switch toward larger changes. Thus, the article demonstrates two tactics that we can use to deliver improvement in managing the discourse surrounding time and its deadlines. Our approach both mentors undergraduate women in more actively and effectively discussing and scheduling their work without singling them out as women and also integrates good mentoring practice into the infrastructure of technical communication service classes.
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Other Articles on Communication by these Authors
Section:
| Moore, K. , Exposing the Hidden Relations: Storytelling, Pedagogy, and the Study of Policy, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 31: 1, 2013. Google Scholar | |
| Moore, K. and Pflugfelder, E. , On Being Bored and Lost (in Virtuality), Learning, Media, and Technology, 35: 2, 2010. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
| Sullivan, P. , After the Great War: Utility, Humanities, and Tracings from a Technical Writing Course in the 1920s, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26: 2, 2012. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
| Sullivan, P. , Inspecting Shadows of Past Classroom Practices: A Search for Students' Voices, College Composition and Communication, 63: 3, 2012. Google Scholar | ISI |
