Megan Von Bergen
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
Designed as a major assignment in a general education professional writing course, the Instructions & Accessibility/User Analysis (IAUA) assignment asks students to create a multimodal set of instructions for a simple task, while making design choices that improve accessibility. Students also conduct a user analysis of a classmate’s instructions. The assignment hones students’ experience 1) with a common technical communication genre, writing instructions; 2) with making ethical rhetorical choices, and 3) with accommodating audience(s) with diverse access needs.
As postsecondary students identify as neurodivergent (ND) and/or disabled in increasingly large numbers (GAO), writing educators face a corresponding obligation to center the needs of these students in course policies and assignments (Birdwell & Bayley, 2022). The IAUA, drawing on technical communication’s commitment to social justice (Hull et al, 2019; Walton et al, 2019), invites students into ongoing conversations about who is invited into –– or excluded from –– the professional spaces they themselves inhabit, including both campus and future professional spaces. The project also introduces students to concepts of universal design, asking them to acknowledge that audiences’ access needs are diverse and often undisclosed to the writer and to make proactive design choices that accommodate a wide range of readers.
Key to the IAUA is an early mini accessibility evaluation of a professional space (such as the university campus) or document (such as a memo distributed in a different class). Conducted after students have read about the history of disability access (“Curb Cuts”) and/or its importance in public communication (“Tools of Oppression,” Sims), the evaluation invites students to identify (in)accessible elements in the document or on campus, guiding them to make the connections between ongoing class activities and the professional, public spaces they already inhabit. The evaluation also primes students to be intentional about how their own instructional document may be designed in such a way as to include as many people within their target audience as possible. This evaluation may be taught independently, as its own assignment.
I designed and taught this assignment in Writing in the Workplace (ENG 295) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a predominantly white university (PWI). There, I linked the assignment with ongoing conversations about the importance of vernacular/diverse language and professional choices to building inclusive environments (Hull et al). These connections allowed me to validate the needs and communication practices of students from minoritized communities, while also urging students from majoritized communities to take steps to make the professional spaces they belong to more equitable.