| The proliferation of epistemic practices in educational inquiry requires that we find improved ways of thinking about and choosing among them. Rhetorical approaches offer an important complement to traditional ways of framing epistemic practices by recognizing the practical reality that, as researchers, we are called to produce certain kinds of texts to accomplish our goals.;In this dissertation, I examine the epistemic practices of a training department in a major North American transit authority---which I call the MTC---to show that the choice of epistemic practice is integrally linked to the kind of textual artifact required for some purpose. When the routine face-to-face interactions of the early years of the MTC no longer sufficed under the pressure of increasingly public scrutiny owing to a 1995 fatal subway crash, the MTC appealed to the epistemic ideal of mechanical objectivity and adopted a system of activity that enabled them to produce objective, textual evidence of trainee competence that was reliably communicable over long distances, which they then used to make objective decisions about who passed and who failed various training programs. The production of this evidence and the enactment of accompanying decisions, in turn, required a set of quantitative epistemic practices and the coordination of dozens of people across the department, all of which was accomplished through the composition and enactment of several genres. These genres operationalized competence in a way that made it amenable to further inquiry and public scrutiny, codified and equitably disseminated the knowledge required to be deemed competent, standardized the context of instruction and of test administration to ensure confounding influences did not interfere with trainee performance, suppressed the influence of instructor judgment on the assessment of trainees, and provided an algorithmic process for determining who passed and who failed. This genre-based system of activity offered the MTC precisely the kind of textual artifacts they needed to defend their decisions to distant, distrustful audiences of auditors, legal authorities, and other examiners, some of whom had little or no expertise in the transit industry or in educational testing. |
