In reading for this week, I began thinking about rhetoric and argumentation not only as important skills for our students but as a particular skill for us as teachers. As composition instructors we are teaching our students how to persuade through writing. We are reading their papers for logical fallacies, for insufficient presentation of evidence, and for a correct understanding of writing within an academic context. It is a large part of our job to make sure that they have the skills to communicate effectively as college writers. But if all language is rhetoric, then how do these concepts apply to the language that we use to teach our classes?
We don’t think of teaching as “argument” in the traditional sense, but I think a large point both of the readings made is that all communication is a kind of argument and involves a certain amount of convincing. We work at convincing our students that the assignments we are asking them to do have merit, that they are capable of doing the assignments that we ask them to do, and that our basic expectation is that they will attend class and do their assignments. We put these ideas forth through writing, like our syllabus, blogs, or the e-mails that we send our students. We put these ideas forth through the words we say out loud in class, which are often crafted spontaneously and require us to adapt to many different situations, balancing between communicating effectively, capturing student attention, respecting the student, respecting the integrity of the course, and a million other things. We also create messages through nonverbal communication—I know that I worry about what I am wearing, how I am fidgeting, and how organized I look to my students. These things add to our ethos, or credibility as a speaker who is presenting the rhetoric of the course of Writ 101.
Keith and Lundberg talk a great deal about audience. On page 19, they talk about different strategies—each with pros and cons—for adapting to an audience with “significantly mixed viewpoints.” As teachers, we know that our students have wildly diverse backgrounds, not just in traditional ways but as students and writers. We know that our words may be less convincing to some students. The “common element” all our students share is their desire/need to pass the course. Additionally, audience is an important concept for us as students. We talk about many similar topics in Writ 101 and Writ 540—but we speak about them in vastly different ways and at vastly different levels of complexity. This is due to our understanding of what is expected of us by our audience. Our audience when we are teachers expects us to explain information in the simplest terms possible, and then to build on that information. In our graduate-level classes, we are expected to demonstrate our knowledge and preparedness to our instructors. The rhetorical situation is different.
Keith and Lundberg talk about a “second persona”—asking the audience to see themselves a certain way through the rhetoric that we use, and I think that this is an important concept in our rhetorical model as teachers (Keith and Lundberg 14). As some of the first teachers that our students will ever encounter, we are, in some ways, teaching them appropriate ways to be college students. Making expectations clear through a written document like a syllabus presupposes students as capable of completing assignments, as responsible enough to get themselves to class, and as mature enough to behave appropriately in a college course. The way that we shape rhetoric toward our students allows us to shape a way that we would like them to behave.
Additionally, our job involves teaching our students how to effectively use rhetoric. How important is it that our students understand logical fallacies? I took a writing-intensive course on Argumentation as an undergraduate, and I think that these models have always helped influence my thinking and my writing. I think that students often inherently recognize when logic is fallacious but lack the vocabulary to articulate why. I think a basic understanding of logic and argumentation is essential to understanding how to craft an argument. Logical fallacies are often taught without context, outside of the sphere of writing. I found the Jones article student-friendly and possibly will use it to help students understand how the appeals they are making are working.
I have learned to scrutinize my rhetoric as a teacher. My little students eagerly pounce on lecture points that are not as well developed as they should be. While they may not be able to verbalize why something doesn’t seem quite right, they sure become attentive when I falter. You mean I’m supposed to give them the tools to communicate exactly why my discussion falls apart?!
ReplyDeleteOkay, so I’m exaggerating. I had one horrible paraphrasing day. I wasn’t able to provide my eager young minds with a foolproof rule o’ thumb, or even any kind of direction as I frantically and blushingly flipped through the Everyday Writer, unable to find the key to unlocking the paraphrase mystery. Instead, I said, “you just say the same thing in different words without deviating from the author’s intent,” “try to re-state what the author says in your own words,” “Good gravy, I’m paraphrasing myself.”
I made it through that day, that horrible paraphrasing day, and boy was that next class period mapped out! My rhetoric was thorough and precise. I knew exactly where my questions were to lead my students and the responses that I was going to give them. I have since mellowed on this suffocating bottle-neck strategy, but it was a relief after September 17, 2010 (I must note here that it was possibly not as bad as it lives in my imagination and in this description).
The concise and clinical nature of Keith and Lundberg’s dissection of rhetoric was useful, if a bit dry. As I begin to consider grading my students’ papers, this reading may help me in remaining as objective as possible. I know, for me, it would be easy to say, “I know what you are trying to say,” or “you’ve come so far, and I am very impressed.” I think it’s still okay to say these things, but follow up with, “that being said, we need to discuss the ways in which your argument falls apart.”
Where Keith and Lundberg got my gullet going was in their description of the more recent thinking on rhetoric. Burke's thinking on how languages privilege views or ways of thinking and how that thereby limits broad spectrum or public sphere rhetorical moves seems important to me.
ReplyDeleteAs Emily and Savannah point out, as teachers we need to be spot on in our rhetoric to motivate our students to engage. But there's also been some work done before us that automatically defines our roles as Authorities (or Teachers, or whichever you prefer so long as you keep the capital letter). I'd hoped early on to move away from this notion of myself as the bastion of all knowingness in the class but I'm finding some of the rhetorical, institutional, and cultural moves made in the past have been harmful to my students becoming engaged learners and writers.
For example, as Emily discussed, we assume our students are mature enough to follow the guidelines of our syllabi and schedules. But, as I quickly found out, many students coming from outside of an academic sphere lacked the context for knowing how to guide themselves to the homework for the course on any given day. In fact, in our own graduate course we've had difficulties with that. I like to imagine myself as pretty self sufficient when it comes to knowing where to turn when I don't know but I managed to post on the wrong readings for the second week of class.
More importantly, many students have given me pictures of how they were encouraged to write in high school (the 5 paragraph essay looms large) with the implication they've learned all there is to know, or they'll never be able to write because they were no good at it before. Another rhetorical hold over that often gets in the way is importance of grades.
In any case, I'm bringing this up to say that rhetoric goes both ways. My students have effectively turned me from the stance of "we're all adults here" to "clearly you all need more guidance to achieve my primary goal of having you improve your writing." So I discuss home work everyday, I say again what I've said before, I reiterate the syllabus, I mark down their homework (accountability winning out over a respect for them as responsible adults), I play the Authority more than I like, and so on. Hopefully, they also engage in writing as a process.
I find myself most frustrated by my own inability to hit on the right mode of identification (53) to move my class further away from what has been done and more toward working together to move forward as Learners, Readers, and Writers.
Last week’s reading addressed the point that all writing is persuasive, even if it is no overtly so. Even something that simple conveys information, like an instruction manual is persuading us of its authority, and I see this as one of the many roles of teaching.
ReplyDeleteThis reading did a lot for me in terms of defining what is rhetoric. Speeches, messages, subtle and glaringly obvious, across all media, we are constantly negotiating rhetoric. I think this might be a new concept for some of our students. That they are receiving messages even when they see the American Flag outside their window.
From the focus on audience in Keith and Lundberg, I realize that I have not done a good enough job at impressing upon my students that navigating genres also means adjusting for differences in audience.
It's like Savannah's student who declared global warming is fake. The rhetoric of Sustainability can be off-putting for some of our students who have grown up with the rhetoric of dismissing these "liberal ideas." In my pair conferences this week, I tried to define sustainability in terms of the three central modes: economic, social, and environmental. I tried to impress the idea that something is not truly sustainable unless it achieves harmony of all three elements. In doing so, the concept of sustainability became more approachable to the students who grew up uncomfortable with this idea. Some of them had been writing the paper as if humoring me with the sustainability part, not investing any real thought into the topic. By changing the rhetoric with which we approach the varying backgrounds of our students we can better negotiate our authority as a teacher.
It's interesting that Emily brought up teaching as argumentation, because I was thinking about the same thing, though in a slightly different sense. I agree with her that we are, in essence, attempting to persuade our students, but the teacher-as-arguer is pertinent also in terms of essays/papers.
ReplyDeleteI almost just wrote teacher-as-opponent, and I realize that that is how I think of it sometimes -- Jones is right that argumentation is often thought of as a fight or a war, and I am guilty of the same thinking even though I know it's detrimental to the possibilities of good, productive argumentation. I think "argument" can sometimes be a dangerous word to give to students because implicit in it is the idea that there will be a WINNER. But sometimes argument is more about exploration and less about proving something, or defeating someone else's ideas.
So anyway, in terms of teachers being arguers, I wonder, when writing the personal academic argument, who our students thought they were arguing AGAINST. Because "argument" as it is generally understood involves more than one person. Much of the problems I saw in my students' drafts involved a lack of precision and a lack of a good research question, which I think is due in part to the fact that they were approaching the paper as an argument with themselves, rather than as an engagement in some greater argument. Technically, as I'm the only one who will read their final papers (for now), I am their "opponent" -- I'm the one who will be circling their words and posing new questions, when in fact they should be doing this to themselves and to their peers. This is why I think workshop can be so effective: because it pushes the students into an argument with someone outside their own head.