First, I like your style. It is readable and inviting ... personable. I found this to be so true that I was actually enticed to go and find the article, just so I could read it more closely myself. Thanks for that.
Implicit in Bushnell’s argument is the position that successful Technical Communicators in the corporate world will operate as professionals who communicate; their writing/communication is a supporting mechanism that facilitates their primary business purpose. This stands in opposition to the concept in which there are others who may work primarily as professional communicators, where the writing/communication (artifact) is their product.
Based on our class discussion last week, I believe this distinction is an important one. Certainly I agree that the university has an obligation to develop critical thinking, reasoning, and ethical decision-making in the students with whom the public has entrusted it. Even so, I have yet to understand how a professional communicator can be practically successful if she/he is regularly editorializing a communication work using a personal value system that may stray from the values of the corporate institution. In the case of these individuals, I lean toward a position that supports their professional success by training them to produce the most excellent and effective corporate 'hegemony.'In contrast, the communicating professional seems much more prone to benefit from the type of “subversive” teaching described by Bushnell. In one’s role as a professional who actively leads, directs, and personifies the corporate values, the subsversively trained professional will be equipped with communication processes and practices that will cleverly and strategically shape the corporation to achieve its own best health and longevity. Indeed, this is precisely what professionals are ideally hired to do: to even suppress their own personal best interest (or personal values) for the longer-term good of the corporate entity.
Our classroom discussion touched momentarily on the differences between TC as a certificate, as an associates’ degree, bachelors’ program, or as a research-oriented doctorate. Such a discussion seems particularly germane to an understanding of the larger discipline; it may be useful and appropriate to expect (or even engineer) a university’s TC programs to produce graduates whose competencies (and their resulting professional trajectories) move up the spectrum from ‘professional communicator’ toward ‘communicating professional’ as their academic achievement moves from certificate toward PhD.