Initiating and continuing rhetorical invention is an important practice for teams seeking to innovate. Workplace professionals demonstrate one potential model of rhetorical innovation by instantiating four rhetorical moves that make up a broader practice of difference-driven inquiry (DDI). But it remains unknown how DDI, as a model of innovative rhetoric, can be taught in the technical and professional communication classroom. Over the course of two studies, the author investigated a pedagogy attempting to teach practices for innovation rhetoric. The results show that the pedagogy can be effective but that more scaffolding is needed.

How might explicitly prompting graduate students to self-regulate intervene in their development of writing knowledge and practices across multiple semesters? This study takes a close look at how prompted self-reflection on writing intervenes in a graduate student’s development of self-regulation and genre knowledge as he transitions from MA to PhD program in rhetoric. We present the case of one graduate student, ‘Eric,’ who was explicitly taught conventions and strategies for writing and prompted to reflect on writing projects over several semesters using an in-process protocol. Aligning data from in-process protocols, interviews, and drafts of Eric’s writing, we construct a fine-grained narrative that shows a complex and recursive relationship among Eric’s development of knowledge about academic genres, self regulation practices, and sense of scholarly identity. This narrative raises questions about how genre knowledge and self-regulation inform each other in graduate-level writing, and it offers an example of a self-regulation intervention that may help graduate students develop specialized ways of writing.

Leveraging a team’s diverse perspectives can be a powerful way to foster team innovation. A common approach to leverage team differences involves tool-based approaches, including brainstorming, mind-mapping, and whiteboarding. However, the effective use of ideational tools as a means to innovation often assumes high levels of team cohesion and productivity—dynamics that may not be safe to assume, especially in teams with high levels of diversity. This study investigates how workplace teams at a Biotech company use discourse to innovate, and in doing so, instantiate a larger rhetorical practice known as difference-driven inquiry.