Using Case-Method Pedagogy to Facilitate Audience Awareness

Introduction:
Technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors value audience awareness, using peer- and client-based projects to facilitate it. We explore how students’ audience awareness is facilitated by the case method, which presents students with a professional communication task within a workplace scenario.
Situating the case:
Case-method research suggests including a detailed audience and situation, multiple genres, and multimedia. Few studies have explored how case materials facilitate students’ audience awareness.
About the case:
A 12-week case that was consistent with case-method research asked students to respond to an engineering firm's internal problem with a proposal and report.
How the case was studied:
Students from two sections of a genre-based course completed reflections about their audience awareness after the proposal and report. We qualitatively analyzed 51 reflections.
Results/discussion:
Students stated they could understand the facts about their primary audience but couldn't identify secondary and tertiary audiences. Students stated they could identify audience needs, but they disagreed about the amount of detail to understand those needs. Also, students stated they could respond to the audience using appropriate evidence and writing style.
Conclusions:
When using the case method, instructors should know that students may need varying levels of detail to interpret their audience's needs. Also, including data and conflicting needs gives students opportunities to make strategic decisions about content.