When I talked about the need to expand what TPC means practitioner I briefly mentioned in that post about the inductively derived theory of TPC Domains of Knowledges and Skills.
Since the late 1970’s academics have been checking in with practitioners to determine what TPC programs should include, and since the 1970’s not much as really changed. While the book will walk readers all the way through this historical data and current approach, here I just want to highlight the TPC Domains.
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Trying to illuminate distinctions in the type of skills taught in TPC programs also intersects with discussions outside of higher education. For example, the federal government job site, USA Jobs, includes descriptive information on what knowledges, skills, and abilities are and why they are important. “Knowledge is a body of information applied directly to the performance of a function. Skill is an observable competence to perform a learned psychomotor act. Ability is competence to perform an observable behavior a learned psychomotor act”( https://www.usajobs.gov/Help/faq/job-announcement/KSAs/). Approaching program design through the relational model of knowledge, skills, and abilities gives terminology to academic programs that aligns with expectations and experiences outside of higher education. It offers students a vocabulary that keeps the focus on the what, how, and why that not only will get them a job, but help them understand ways to effect change of unjust practices and processes within their organizations.
Keeping terminology consistent to knowledges and skills, I want to add domain, which is a specified sphere of activity or “A sphere of thought or action; field, province, scope of a department of knowledge” (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.) of scholarship in education and related fields about teaching and learning. The most notable of those conversations start with Benjamin Bloom (1956), whose work on domains of learning has been a hallmark of educational theory. Keeping similar terminology and being clear about the definitions and use affords TPC a connection to related theoretical and practical conversations about learning, while also maintaining a connection to organizations outside of higher education.
Domains of knowledges and skills are predictors of future success that have been identified by a wide swath of experts (as discussed in detail below). These domains illustrate what a degree can do for student’s future paths and how students (and TPC PAs and faculty) can explain what the degree program can do in the world. Models are a way to organize and identified information into a theoretically and empirically sound system. The models highlighted here are innovative in writing because they bring together theoretical concepts and empirically based information. The theory building I’ll do in this chapter is drawn inductively from the considering the programmatic data and existing scholarship and research. One of the advantages of developing a theoretical model is that it requires deep thinking into what the domains of knowledge should be. For TPC, using knowledges and skills drawn from multiple standpoints affords TPC PAs and faculty the opportunity to consider program (and course) building and program sustainability in different ways. As scholars and teachers know, a good theory is meant to provide alternative perspectives and thinking.
When I went to update the skills work that I did previously, the terminology I used with Sally Heschel did not work as well. The addition of data sources outside of published TPC literature made clear that the original two-part alignment of skills was too limiting to fully encompass the knowledges and skills students need to be exposed to in TPC programs.
When I returned to what TPC PAs and faculty may need to know about knowledges and skills in program and course design, I found that the two groupings of conceptual and practical did not fully encapsulate what programs needed to do for students. Rather, more flexibility was needed while simultaneously offering a theoretical model that could help guide program development. Using terminology found outside of higher education also aligned with my own thinking in how to conceptualize knowledge and skills programmatically. Thus, I considered how to group the skills from the data sources in a way that could guide program development. Figure 10-5 shows that shift from conceptual and practical to foundational and essential and a new domain of specialty.
Ethics and justice domain is necessary to guide programmatic work (as outlined in chapter 9). I follow and invoke Sam Dragga’s (2010) ethical stance when he wrote:
In a world always-growing and changing information, technical communications must be filters—ethical filters—instead of containers, picking their way through the available information to find genuine knowledge. Effective communication—ethical communication—allows us to make knowledge from information and (sooner or later) to derive wisdom from this knowledge. (p. 225)
In addition to this view on ethical communication from Dragga, the Ethics and Justice Domain acknowledges the differences between ethics and justice made by Josephine Walwema and her collaborators (2022). They write “:social justice and ethics are not the same thing but are nevertheless interconnected—both in the specific set of advocacy concerns for social justice work and in the broader everyday set of ethical concerns of any TPC teacher, researcher, student, or practitioner” (Walwema, Colton, & Holmes, 2022, p. 262). While social justice is important in program and course design, it is not interchangeable with ethics. While making the distinction to separate social justice and ethics, Walwema et al., (2022) posited, “ethical frameworks help us understand how to enact justice and identify the behaviors, actions, and policies that should be considered just or unjust” (p. 262). Ethics and justice start all conversations, and they are imbued and integrated throughout all the others [1] In its most basic form, justice and inclusion must be guided by the following questions:
- Who is included?
- Who is excluded?
- What are the stakes of that?
No program or course design decision can begin without first starting with and returning to issues of ethics and justice.
Foundational knowledges are those that are at the core do the field and more enduring. This idea of necessary for all other skills is seen in the icon—the trowel and bricks that would be used to make a foundation. Essential skillsencompass those skills and abilities that are essential for success and satisfaction in the workplace and in society. This domain includes many skills that are often referred to as “soft skills,” but they are actually essential to success. Specialty skills would then be those that are constantly changing or needed for specialized jobs. The icon of the toolbox emphasizes that specialty skills can be taken out and used when needed.
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What this chapter describes is each knowledge and skill and how it is supported by the literature in the field. If one is wondering where something like Ai would be included, that would be in technological literacy.
In addition, I took the TPC Domains and compared them to other similar work in related fields. For example, in UX, Emma Rose and her collaborators asked about UX skills and dispositions.
| TPC Knowledge and skills | Rose et al., 2020 |
| Foundational: | |
| critical thinking | Process thinking; deal with complexity; critical thinking |
| problem solving | Approaching problems |
| rhetorical analysis | persuading |
| collaboration | Collaborating; working with clients |
| written communication | Story telling |
| technological literacy | Software/tools |
| research | Research/research methods |
| information design | Design/visual design; data analysis |
| Essential | |
| content management | |
| project management | Leading |
| inter-, multi-cultural | |
| interpersonal | Listening |
| intrapersonal | Creativity; all the dispositions |
| oral communication | communicating |
| Specialty | |
| basic business | Business strategy |
| subject matter expertise | UX fundamentals |
| emerging skills |
And then one can see the TPC Domains aligned with information of what makes a good medical writer from AMWA:
| Skill from AMWA | TPC Domain | TPC Knowledge or Skill |
| Basic grammar and usage | Foundational | Written Communication |
| Sentence structure | Foundational | Written Communication |
| Punctuation | Foundational | Written Communication |
| Medical terminology | Specialty | Subject matter expertise |
| Professional ethics | Ethics and Justice | Ethics and Justice |
| Statistics | ** | |
| Tables and graphs | Foundational | Information design |
Showing these comparisons highlights that TPC programs can indeed prepare students for a wide array of jobs in a wide array of industries. The domains also afford faculty a key touchstone to help design programs that prepare students to be adaptable and flexible practitioners.
[1] Refer to Chapter 9 for a more extended discussion on programmatic inclusion.