This article demonstrates how an analysis of the net work of medical social work students in an interprofessional Standardized Patient Program (i.e., healthcare simulation) reveals the productive potential of a Critical Disability Studies orientation to writing studies and workplace research. Standardized Patient Programs were created as a method for uniformly assessing healthcare students’ interpersonal interactions with patients. In practice, they evolved to additionally standardize the professional attitudes and behaviors of students. Structured around three emergent claims, this article uses novel and established technical-rhetorical concepts to unpack how social work students comprehend and navigate issues of power, collaboration, and knowledge exchange within a Standardized Patient Program. And when these claims are further analyzed through a Critical Disability Studies lens, they reveal how disability-related disruptions can constructively challenge medicalized stances toward disability as well as understandings of collaborative labor, workplace/simulation-based writing, and professional discourse.

In this essay, we offer the “investigative pivot” as a framework for teaching rhetoric researchers how to orient and withstand being re-/dis-/oriented by the research process. Investigative pivoting indexes how a researcher responds to material conditions under which they collect and analyze data. To illustrate investigative pivots, we present and analyze pivot narratives from four graduate student researchers. Drawing on the analytic power of E. Cram’s rhetoric of orientation, these pivot narratives detail how we negotiate infrastructural, ideological, and institutional influences on our research process. When adopted, the investigative pivot prompts researchers to anticipate, recognize, and respond to the material-discursive hurdles of life and learning that follow us into our research sites. Such a framework, we argue, facilitates simultaneous methodological and pedagogical opportunities for students, teachers, and researchers of rhetoric.