Navigating the “eddies”: Cross-cultural teaching and learning experiences in a technical and professional writing class

Teaching Technical and Professional Writing can be complicated by the dynamics in the classroom. When it comes to imagining an audience, establishing an ethos, adopting a particular tone, analyzing a specific rhetorical situation, and writing on a cross-disciplinary topic, students find themselves struggling to cope with some “eddies”-linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary differences. Teachers working in cross-cultural classrooms also confront challenges from unfamiliar teaching contexts. Drawing on existing technical communication pedagogy theories and recent proposals for preparing effective technical communicators in today´s diverse and fluid global contexts, this paper reports a Chinese Ph.D. student´s first-time cross-cultural teaching experiences in a Technical and Professional Writing class and reflections on students´ learning experiences. Aiming at adding real-life scenarios for teachers in similar teaching situations to discuss, this paper provides narrative descriptions of how the teacher and the students navigated multimodal artifacts, cultural expectations, and collegial relations and disciplinary expectations. This paper suggests a user-centered approach for teaching in cross-cultural contexts and the importance of developing empathy with students.