Textual Ecology, Collaborative Tasks, and Genre Systems: Using PDE to Teach STEM Career Awareness/Intent

The paper discusses the use of "Productive Disciplinary Engagement" (PDE) for a curricular project that features a technology-based alternate reality game (ARG) with the objective of teaching undergraduate students about the collaborative nature of STEM careers. Much of the PDE research uses PDE as either a design-principle or as an analytics lens. This project does both. Most of this extant research focuses on spoken discourse to teach disciplinary knowledge. This project uses workplace documentary texts that are embedded within a semester-long undergraduate course designed to teach students collaboration skills using the context of natural disasters. A range of texts are used in this design from didactic to disciplinary. Students learn about professional work through educational renditions of professional cultural historical activity systems. This paper focuses on design decisions and illustrates some ways that workplace documents can be used in education.