How do students really use writing in the real world?
One answer has emerged from a novel partnership between Mason’s English Department and the Center for Public Safety Excellence (CPSE), a public safety accrediting and credentialling organization for fire and emergency services. Coursework for the new Advanced Technical Writing Certificate/Badge has helped firefighters across the country and around the world improve the writing and communication skills they rely on for their jobs.
“Being a better technical writer will not put a fire out more quickly,” explains Associate Professor Heidi Y. Lawrence, one of the lead developers of this collaboration. “But it might win a grant that funds more training or equipment. It might streamline community collaboration on safety measures. It might reduce disagreements via email. It might improve relationships.”
Lawrence and Assistant Professor Lourdes Fernandez first met with representatives of the CPSE in February 2020; the organization had recently revised their mission to take on education as a core component of the services they would provide to members and were seeking to work with a university toward that end.
“Technical writing and general communication were not within our wheelhouse,” said Preet Bassi, CPSE Chief Executive Officer, “and we determined we needed a partner in the space that could be a subject matter expert. We liked the idea of partnering with a university, a four-year institution that was going to be a center of excellence for this kind of work.”
In their pre-Mason careers, both Fernandez and Lawrence had worked in public safety training and communications. The overlap between their backgrounds and the CPSE’s goals made them perfect for addressing the very specific needs of the firefighters.
The Advanced Technical Writing Certificate/Badge includes six courses, ranging from fundamentals of technical writing, through editing and grammar, plain language, proposal writing, and communication in organizations. The program—taught online and asynchronously—runs for six weeks, once per semester; the third iteration of the course was in Fall 2021, with another planned in Spring 2022. The courses are primarily developed and taught by Fernandez, with assistance from program assistant Kate Gandy, an MA student in the Professional and Technical Writing concentration; Lawrence teaches the course on proposal writing.
The students—on average twelve per course—range from fire service professionals in local firehouses in our area to public safety experts stationed at military or other government facilities abroad.
“There are these very motivated professionals out there, and when you’re also out there putting out fires, who has time to get an advanced degree?” says Gandy. “My goal is to synthesize and summarize everything when I can and help them learn everything quickly.”
Fernandez agrees, emphasizing “those tiny, tiny little things that they can probably take out and immediately apply. This is not their primary task at work, but these are the things that impact how successfully they can do other things in their job.”
The success of this program relies not only on its pedagogy but on several additional layers of administrative and budgetary planning—an “administrative village,” as Lawrence termed it.
“Although from the outset we knew what we would teach, how to run a program like this was a mystery,” she continues. “G-numbers. Tuition. Email addresses. Blackboard spaces. We use these things as faculty and know that they facilitate students’ journeys to our classrooms, but we don’t create or process them.”
The teaching team earned support in this regard from several groups at Mason: the Dean’s office and Kim Dight in particular, who developed the program budget; the office of Continuing and Professional Education (CPE), specifically Marc Austin and Sarah Harper; and the Chair of the English Department, Debra Lattanzi Shutika, with continuing support from new chair Tamara Harvey.
“Starting, piloting, and running a program like this simply isn’t in the professional preparation and training that most English faculty get in graduate school. But maybe it should be,” Lawrence says. “In this project, we have all gained insights that we didn’t have before, have seen parts of the University we didn’t know existed, developed a new appreciation for how a key part of our communities work. Why are we so attached to the idea that our traditional classrooms are the only spaces where our knowledge is valuable and valued?”
“The fact that you were willing to work with CPSE to create this program…to create this program and tailor it for fire service needs, I mean it's a win-win for everybody,” says Debbie Sobotka, CPSE Chief Operating Officer.
A win-win for everybody—plus new insights for Lawrence, Fernandez, Gandy, and others into their discipline and fresh understandings of the stakes of their pedagogy as they worked in partnership with specific stakeholders to learn more about writing in specific settings.
“The potential and richness of this program,” says Lawrence, “really became apparent to me once I realized that it offered a new way of answering an old question, ‘How do students really use writing in the real world?’—a question I’ve asked myself time and again in the fifteen years since I taught my first writing class. What small role can I play in one organization’s mission to improve communication? What are the stakes of my discipline when they really play out in real-world, daily practices? This course has taught me that.”