“You want me to teach what?!”: Emerging Technologies, Required Knowledge, and Pedagogical Practice

Being assigned to teach unfamiliar content is an experience that many technical communication (TC) instructors can relate to. In this experience report, four TC instructors describe their experiences teaching unfamiliar and emerging technology, providing takeaways for readers about how they might approach similar tasks, particularly when constrained by a lack of time and resources when teaching a class for the first time. The instructors had to adapt their pedagogical approaches to teach a range of technology and software. These approaches include building students’ visual and rhetorical literacy, diving deep into ethics, explicitly teaching students how to learn, and humbly showing vulnerabilities and gaps in knowledge to students. Readers can draw from the instructors’ experiences and lessons learned when faced with teaching unfamiliar and emerging technology.