First-Hand:History of an ASEE Fellow – John Brocato

Name: John Brocato

Birthplace: Ft. Belvoir, Virginia

Birth date: August 19, 1969

Family:

My paternal great-grandparents came to the US from the town of Cefalù on the Italian isle of Sicily, settling in Morgan City and Raceland, Louisiana. They established and ran a general store in Raceland that, while no longer in operation, still stands and is occasionally used as a setting in movies, most notably A Gathering of Old Men and the Ray Charles biopic Ray. My other paternal great-grandparents were French-Cajun Louisiana natives. On my mother’s side, her family was an Anglo-Dutch mix, though I’m unclear on the timeline for their initial arrival in the US.

My father was born in New Orleans, and my mother was born in the farmlands outside Huntsville, Alabama a dozen or so years before Wernher von Braun relocated to Huntsville and helped transform it into a space-program hub. My father joined the US Army in 1950, and I believe he met my mother at Ft. McClellan in north Alabama after he returned from his service in Korea. They married in 1953 and traveled the world during his 32-year Army career. He was stationed at Ft. Belvoir outside of Alexandria, Virginia and Washington, D.C. when I was born, and we later relocated to Huntsville (where I grew up) when he was transferred to Redstone Arsenal. He retired as a full Colonel and the Assistant Commandant of the base in 1982.

Education:

My background is in the humanities, specifically a B.A. and an M.A. in English. During my master’s program, I worked as a TA for an English professor who taught a course called Writing for Engineers, and this is when I truly became interested in technical communication. Not long after this, my university’s college of engineering announced it was establishing an endowed program within the college to work with engineering students on technical communication; I was hired to create this program, which is how I came to work in engineering and to join ASEE. I’m currently working on a Ph.D. in the history of science and technology as a way to bridge my humanities and engineering experiences.

Employment:

When people find out you’re an English major/writer, they ask you to write and edit even when such tasks are not in your job description. Thus, at various jobs before I entered academe, I was often the unofficial in-house writer and editor, which pleased me immensely because (a) I love writing and editing, and (b) even off-the-books work like this provided me with valuable experience, especially once my professional attention turned to engineering communication.

Prior to joining the college of engineering, I taught English Composition courses in the English department. One of my main frustrations with teaching these courses involved my lack of success at getting students to apply writing and rhetorical techniques to their majors and interests. After all, most of these students were freshman who either knew little about their majors or had no major at all yet. Thus, when the job in engineering opened up, I jumped at the chance to work with a very specific type of applied writing.

Since 1999, I’ve worked with engineering students of all majors and academic levels helping develop their professional personae through engineering-communication experiences. While our bailiwick is mostly writing – correspondence, reports, descriptions, instructions, proposals, et al. – we also work extensively on presentations, documenting research, and ethics, especially the reality that engineering communication has an innate ethical component. (to be continued)

Research and Scholarship (under construction)

Philosophy of Engineering Education:

Teaching writing is a difficult process. By the time most students get to college, they have been writing in some form for around 15 years, and in a society where encountering effective written text via reading has been in decline, these 15 years of writing often mean 15 years of poor habits, from procrastination and lax standards for grammar and spelling to sheer ineptitude. Thus, teaching collegiate writing of any type is largely a process of guiding students away from whatever poor habits they have acquired while also nurturing their good habits and talents. These ideas help form the basis of my teaching philosophy: provide experiences wherein students can work on their weaknesses and sharpen their strengths.

The word experiences is key to teaching writing because writing should not be a true lecture course (though, in truth, most subjects should not be true lecture courses). Writing teachers must, of course, talk to their classes and lay the conceptual groundwork for the assignments to come, but soon the course must become interactive, with less teacher talking and more students writing and analyzing. The only way people improve at writing is to read, write, receive feedback on their writing, and write again. Over the years, my classes have become more and more interactive, informed partially by the workshops of Rich Felder and Rebecca Brent. In particular, I have made effective use of their brief group exercises designed to illustrate the topic in question. For example, one strategy I regularly employ involves introducing the idea of writers having to make choices about their writing situations by having students work on an open-ended case study that requires them to (a) make decisions about the type and quantity of deliverable needed, and (b) explain their decisions during class discussion. Instead of me lecturing them abstractly about the need to consider decisions carefully, students get thrust into a realistic scenario (almost like a short story) where they themselves are the writer, and they themselves get to decide what they need to write. Knowing that they will also have to defend their decisions before the group adds a level of accountability; rather than simply having free reign over the assignment, students go into the writing understanding that they will be asked (by instructor and peer), “Why did you decide to do that? Will that course of action solve the problem? Did you consider this other option?” The quantity and variety of student commentary on writing exercises like this never cease to amaze me.

Beyond these brief in-class exercises, I believe writing teachers – and, more specifically, technical-writing and engineering-communication teachers – have a professional responsibility to craft their assignments so that they are as realistic and as career-relevant as possible. In engineering, this applicability is easier than generic writing courses because the students are often older and more experienced, but it is also more important because the work of engineers and the process of documenting their work are such important tasks. I have, therefore, spent a major portion of my time in engineering creating and reworking writing assignments so that they are realistic and useful. Also, I often implement student feedback as part of this process. If a student tells me I might improve an assignment in some specific way, I try to incorporate her/his suggestion into the next semester’s assignments (provided the idea is pedagogically sound). This idea is one of the ways I strive to create a culture of professionalism in my classroom – not a stiff, intimidating environment but a place where students are treated like professionals with serious ideas who are capable of undertaking serious work. I see this culture reflected in their writing and an appreciation of it espoused in my evaluations, where comments like “I enjoyed the environment of this class” are common.

One last element of my teaching philosophy is perhaps also the most important: enthusiasm. I openly tell my students that I wanted to be anything but a teacher when I was a college student, largely because I was terrified of speaking in front of a group. Once I got to graduate school, though, and accepted a teaching assistantship, I started to realize that I could be an effective teacher, that I liked it very much as a profession, and that one of my main strengths as a teacher was my “stage presence” and enthusiasm for the subject matter. Indeed, one of my main teaching points during our discussions of oral presentations is my own hierarchy of needs as an audience member: most important to me is content accuracy, and directly under that comes enthusiasm. Simply put, if a presenter cannot convey some enthusiasm for his/her subject (no matter what it is), I have little interest in hearing them talk. And when some student inevitably complains “But thermodynamics is so boring” or “No one is interested in Pascal,” I tell them three things: “(1) If you yourself are not excited by this subject, why are you talking about it? More to the point, why are you even in your major?” (2) Even if you are not genuinely enthused by your chosen subject, you still have an audience to care for – get excited for them. (3) I teach English; I can talk with unabashed excitement about semicolon misuse for an entire class meeting, and I guarantee that your subject is far more interesting than mine, so show us an enthusiastic presentation.” In short, I believe students need to see their teachers convey genuine passion and enthusiasm for the subject at hand, and I work hard to do this every day.

Effectively modifying 15 years of poor writing habits in one 16-week semester is probably impossible, and it can certainly be defeating to read end-of-semester papers and realize that some students have not grasped vital concepts. My goal as a teacher, though, is broader than a good grade on a paper. If I can get students to think differently in some way about the writing they will do as professionals – even if this thinking comes later on, after college – I will have affected learning and their careers, and I will have done what I see as my job.

ASEE Activities (under construction)

Other Professional Activities (under construction)