Finding their place in TC: using a community of practice model to research emerging TC professionals

Technical communication is evolving rapidly. As a result, new practitioners often have a difficult time placing themselves in their own field. New practitioners, even seasoned professionals, may feel mastery over what they consider to be only small slices of the whole TC spectrum and little confidence in the diversity of settings in which technical communicators may find themselves working. However, confidence in applying TC skills and knowledge in a wide variety of work settings is necessary to thrive in a professional environment where new technologies and organizational cultures develop quickly. Innovative training is required to prepare new practitioners with a complete foundation they can comfortably use in the unpredictable contexts of TC practice. At the University of Washington, we created a capstone course to collectively address these varied, critical TC training needs. Our program, the Technical Communicator Professional Portfolio Program (TC3P), combined the enabling power of peer-led learning with the integrative properties of professional portfolio creation. This paper discusses how we used communities of practice (CoPs) literature as both an analysis framework to make sense of TC students´ processes and to inform TC3P program design iteration. Specifically, we will examine how our findings can be illustrated as communities of practice principles and how an analysis of the students´ work behavior revealed participants generating a community of practice. Finally, examples will be given of how these findings were used to inform an iterative design of the TC3P to further improve the program´s capacity for preparing professional technical communicators.