Andrea M. Reese and Dr. Beverly B. Zimmerman, English

The curriculum for the Insight student journal workshop class consisted of an eclectic mix of handouts distributed at the editor’s whim. Some were created by previous editors, some photocopied without attribution to the teachers who wrote them, and others adapted from undocumented print sources. Not only did this raise ethical problems, but the number and variety of handouts made overlap of content inevitable. I realized the head editors could use class time more effectively if lessons were distinct and parallel.

A handbook would also eliminate the problems inherent in a handout-based system—future editors need not keep track of the day’s handouts for absent students. Furthermore, the handbook would provide order and structure to the course, enabling the editors who teach the class to devote more attention to the forthcoming issue of Insight.

I created the handbook in QuarkXPress on 8.5 x 11″ facing pages. It is 47 pages long, with five sections titled “Introduction,” “Acquisitions,” “Editing,” “Proofing,” and “Appendix.” The finished handbook was formatted for three-hole drilling, and section dividers were printed on card stock to differentiate them from the body text. The three middle sections cover the main parts of the publishing process as it applies to the Insight staff. To give staff members an overview of the process, I interspersed these with the parts of the process that applied to editors, illustrators, and designers. The content was based strictly on what users could apply immediately, hence making this a handbook instead of a textbook.

I set out to use research findings to create a highly usable, readable handbook for Brigham Young University’s Insight publication lab, and to subsequently produce a set of guidelines specific to editors and writers of handbooks. As I pursued these goals, I discovered a major conflict: often, the most relevant books and articles I found were neither empirical research nor qualitative research—they were based on “practitioner knowledge,” as my advisor called it. Furthermore, sometimes important aspects of creating the handbook were not the kind of information scholars conduct research on.

I began to observe my own practice in creating the handbook and realized that I had to rely on my own practitioner knowledge, however meager, in certain areas of instructional and document design. Schön’s “reflective practitioner” model provides a useful framework for understanding and working with these difficulties. Schön articulates the problem I faced: he speaks of professionals who face the dilemma of “rigor or relevance” in their professions (240). The cause of this dilemma, he claims, is a Positivist model of thought he labels Technical Rationality that became prominent following the scientific triumphs of World War II. In this model, professionals function by applying empirically proven theory to real-life problems.

Schön argues that Technical Rationality, the philosophy that the scientific method improves and invigorates all aspects of any discipline, is “radically incomplete” since it deals only with the technical aspect of problem solving—a small part of actual problem-solving—and ignores “the irreducible element of art” all professionals employ to deal with complex “messes”(18, 47). He claims that practice is itself a kind of research, and proposes a basic model for this research:

1. The practitioner encounters a problem. She views it as unique, but “reframes” it using a model from past experience—in effect, invests it with an interim identity.

2. The practitioner conducts an experiment by treating the problem according to her model.

3. She evaluates the results. If her model produced an overall improvement, it is “affirmed” and she continues her present course. If it produces a “surprise,” or is not affirmed, she revises the model according to feedback and applies the new model.

The theory describes the handbook creation process far more accurately than the Technical Rationality model describes it. For example, the handbook editing process was a recursive process, not a linear application of theory. Though I had done extensive research, it did not cover some of the crucial, practical issues of handbook creation, such as creating documents in QuarkXPress.(publishing software), making the handbook adaptable for new generations of Insight classes, and finding the best binding method for the type of handbook I created.

In the field of text design, where the product’s actual effect on users is difficult to determine, practice that relies too much on empirical research becomes stilted and inaccurate, while practice relying only on personal experience can be misleading. Charles Kostelnick says,

Because desktop publishing allows the immediate visual feedback of the printed page, this form of document design is well-suited to intuitive methods. Intuition cannot, however, act as the sole guide: Because professional communicators create documents for specific audiences and situations, they need to evaluate rationally the visual-processing tasks of users. (22)

My experience creating the Insight handbook has shown that Schön’s reflection-in-practice, supplemented by generalized empirical research (such as that found in review articles), the practitioner research that Schön advocates, and semi-empirical tools like usability testing, can make instructional designers’ practice more accurate, efficient, and intellectually rewarding.

References

• Kostelnick, Charles. “Typographical Design, Modernist Aesthetics, and Professional Communication.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 4 (1990): 5–24.
• Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books, 1983.