La Comprensión General

Much like fantastical cases, case scenarios are very short problem-based situations that ask the student to assume the protagonist role and intervene in some manner. Case scenarios can be found, nearly ubiquitously, as “end-of- chapter” assignments in business communication textbooks since the 1970s (Rozumalski & Graves, 1995).7 _{These case scenarios are between one to four}

paragraphs, at the most, with a task directive for the student at the end. For that

7 _{See, for instance, the following textbooks: Locker & Kienzler, 2014; Munger, 2005; Poe and}

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reason, Lynn Rozumalski and Michael Graves (1995) have referred to these case types as scenarios to signify their brevity and the absence of anything more than a facile rhetorical situation that sketches some context for the student.

The earliest record of case scenarios in the field of writing that I have found dates back to the 1940s. In 1945, Frederick Abbuhl was among the early cadre of faculty members to advocate for including case scenarios in technical writing, “so that technical writing students could learn to work in the context of the workplace” (Kynell, 2000, p. 95). As the acting head of the English

department at Rensselaer, Abbuhl presented two sample teaching cases in his 1945 piece, “A Writing Laboratory Course,” which are among the first examples of this new pedagogy for engineering English education in a journal publication, as shown in Appendix A.8 While entire books organized around case studies

were not very popular in the 1940s, as Kynell (2000) has told us, cases like these were regular end-of-chapter components of other textbooks, as they still continue to be today. A gap in our institutional knowledge does exist here, however, since we do not know how Abbuhl and others used these case scenarios in their

classroom. This is still an area of research that demands more attention in our scholarship, even though it is not the explicit focus of this project.

8 The examples are duplicated as close as possible to their original document formatting to give

readers a sense of how writing students in the 1940s may have encountered these cases on the page.

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For many instructors who use teaching cases in the classroom, several commonly recognizable features are present in Abbuhl’s teaching case scenarios that form business communication’s most common approach to composing a teaching case. Most noticeably, the student is assigned the central protagonist’s role in the case, and to aid the student, background information is provided, such as key facts of the story. The role that the writer is to assume (e.g., secretary of a local society, special interest article writer for a publication) is specified, and the student is also given the exact assignment they are to complete along with any special instructions for completing it.

Abbuhl’s case scenarios exemplify a lineage of case study pedagogy that is much more reminescent of short narrative problems in mathematics (e.g., A train leaves the station at 10:30am traveling from Chicago to New York…)than it is of longer narrative case formats like the HBS case method approach. These cases have an abridged form and lack a significant rhetorical situation because they are tied to a much older lineage of problem-based learning (PBL) in higher education that utilizes brief scenarios as a way of contextualing abstract problems. As James Bossard and Frederic Dewhurst (1931) explained in their history of American business school education, problem-based learning has been a

prominent mode of teaching since the 1800s, spanning the sciences, mathamatics, medicine, and the humanities. However, the use of short narrative problems as a

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contextually-situated approach to problem solving was not theorized and articulated as PBL until the 1960s when it was popularized in McMaster University’s medical school pedagogy (Norman & Schmidt, 1992).

The pedagogical tenet of PBL is to reinforce learned conceptual thinking through the application of a concept to a concrete, solvable problem; in other words, PBL scenarios act as a sort of deductive empirical teaching tool. Much as the progression of a logical syllogism, where general rules move to more specific applications, PBL asks the student to take a general concept and map it onto a discrete situation. Over two decades, PBL pedagogy morphed into case-based learning (CBL) theory during the 1980s in business communication, which was often used explicitly as a way to apply textbook readings to workplace scenarios and to reinforce learning through application of key concepts covered in lectures (Miller D. , 1982).

Whereas most of these case scenarios are purely fictional (or hypothetical), newer texts, such as John Thill and Courtland Bovée’s 2015 Excellence in Business Communication, have begun including case scenarios based on real companies. In a end-of-chapter section simply labelled “Cases,” Thill and Bovée have included one- to two-paragraph case scenarios structured with a brief overview of the company (or problem) and a task section that explains what students are expected to produce:

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Tumblr has become a popular ‘short-form’ blogging platform by

combining the simplicity of Twitter with the ability to share photos and other media easily. Tumblr is free to join, and you can learn more about using it at www.tumblr.com/help.

Your task: Write a 300- to 400-word post for your class blog that explains how to set up an account on Tumblr and get involved in the Tumblr community. (Thill & Bovee, 2015, p. 217)

In most of these case scenarios, to substitute for the lack of a robust rhetorical situation, students are told to invent any necessary details, just as they are in other textbooks.

Unfortunately, we do not know how instructors use case scenarios in the classroom, and there is no scholarly literature discussing their utility to business communication curriculum. It is arguable that these types of case scenarios are more popular as a fixture of textbook publishing because, as in the instance of Thill and Bovée’s text, the authors can fit between 15 and 20 of them onto three pages, but there is no supporting evidence for this claim.

At their best, because of the brevity and the lack of situated context for the students, case scenarios seem to aim at showing students that communication can be complex. In other words, they appear to show students that the task of

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responding to a local engineering society comes with a different exigency than composing an article for a magazine, as in Abbuhl’s examples. But at their worst, case scenarios simply replicate the very problem that most instructors have with textbooks: the false categorization of informative versus bad news or persuasive

communication sends students into the real world with broken recipes for all occasions (Eubanks, 1994). Whereas real-world communication is rhetorically complex, case scenarios contradict the very use of teaching cases as a way to simulate the real-life exigency and complexity that is inherent in any

communicative encounter (Eubanks, 1994).