Eric Detweiler's blog

Technological Nostalgia and the Academic Year to Come

Eric Detweiler — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 18:13:30 +0000

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I feel so out of touch when it comes to video games.

During my time in the Digital Writing and Research Lab, I've worked to incorporate new technologies and media into my scholarship and pedagogy: I've published webtexts, rhetoric podcasts, and--as you might have guessed--blog posts about pedagogy. I've had students in my classes record podcasts of their own, collaborate on wikis, and use digital platforms to create visuals. But despite their vast array of pedagogical possibilities, I've yet to bring video games into the classroom. After all, the most recent gaming console I own is the eight-year-old (eight years old?!) Nintendo Wii, which--let's be honest--I mostly use to watch Netflix.

Except, that is, for a few months last fall when I got my hands on a Wii Classic Controller.

wii classic.jpg

image via Amazon.com

This controller is not exactly a groundbreaking piece of technology. In fact, it's decidedly backwards, a way of retrofitting the Wii's more innovative controller so you can use the console to play games from past platforms. In my case, the game in question was Mario Kart 64, an eighteen-year-old game (EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD?!) and the only multiplayer game at which I've ever been any good. As I lack both the hand-eye coordination required by many newer games and the funds required to purchase newer consoles, Mario Kart 64 still represents--alongside the halcyon days I invested in the Final Fantasy games released for the first-generation PlayStation--the pinnacle of my gamerly achievements. So, following my accomplishment of a key graduate-school achievement, I used the classic controller to descend into a few days of '90s nostalgia. With my good friend Toad, I sped across 64-bit beaches, turnpikes, and boardwalks. I won gold cups and blasted my competitors with heat-seeking turtle shells. I drove, I raced, I karted. And then, eventually, I felt the pull of responsibility, put down the controller, and picked up my copy of Maurice Blanchot's The ~~Racing~~ Writing of the Disaster. Done with krashing karts, I returned to the various spin-outs of scholarly writing.

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image via Fanpop

Which is to say that it's all too tempting for me to shake my head at undergraduates these days, what with their fourth-generation PlayStations, eighth-generation Mario Kart games, Steam accounts, and Flappy Bird victories. Soon, Beloit College will release their "mindset list" for the class of 2018 and surely give those of us who teach them--whether we're 27 or 72--plenty more excuses to panic about students' cultural touchstones.

My hope for myself, though, as I begin academic year 2014-15, is that I can resist such allergic reactions to students' cultural and technological habits. Following the suggestions of John Warner, I'd hope to avoid projecting my own anxieties about and lack of discipline with digital technologies onto my students--at least not without first asking after my students' relationships with technologies new and old. This strikes me as one of the many tensions teachers--perhaps especially teachers of rhetoric, writing, and composition--must constantly balance: Resisting the urge to fume at and dismiss technologies with which we're unfamiliar while also resisting the urge to celebrate technologies about which we know very little for the sake of novelty alone or as part of some dream about the inevitable march of progress.

What excites me about the digital rhetoric classroom--the reason that maybe I should work harder to plug post-millennial video games into my classroom, and that I'm excited about the work the DWRL's new Video/Games group will undertake in the coming year--is how fruitful a place it can be for negotiating and questioning this tension. With any new technology--even the most seemingly ubiquitous--at least a few students in any given class are going to be disoriented by it. And at the very least, perhaps we as teachers will be disoriented by it (or, in the spirit of dissoi logoi, we can pretend to be). The digital rhetoric course, in short, can be a place not for socializing students back into old forms of composition, nor for naturalizing new technologies into institutional structures, but for denaturalizing both our own and our students' expectations about and approaches to various technologies, forms of communication, and ways of being--from the ancient art of Mario Kart 64, to the crystallized realms of academic English, to the technological relations that may only come into existence in the courses we teach this fall and in the future.

Over the Hedge with Nate Silver and Jacques Derrida

Eric Detweiler — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:00:51 +0000

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Eric Detweiler

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Wikimedia Commons

In October 2012, statistician and New York Times blogger Nate Silver was predicting up a storm. He was aggregating, calculating, and tabulating poll results in order to determine the probable outcomes of the upcoming presidential election. By the end of the month, he had President Obama’s reelection chances at 79%. MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough was not amused:

“[A]nybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes.”

In his own blog for the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates aggregated some of the Silver backlash that occurred in the final days before the election. From Politico’s Dylan Byers:

“For all the confidence Silver puts in his predictions, he often gives the impression of hedging. Which, given all the variables involved in a presidential election, isn't surprising. For this reason and others—and this may shock the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis.—more than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated.”

And from Dean Chambers: “Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice.”

Coates sums up:

“I don't really know. Anyway, Byers goes on to quote David Brooks and Joe Scarborough, manly-men who can't find San Francisco on a map and are so macho that they chew coffee beans whole, leaving the French press for you ... Terry Gross-listening, Steve Urkel-looking m—”

Actually, I’d recommend reading his post for yourself.

I found Coates’ gloss of the Silver’s critics compelling and astute: The critique often boiled down to the fact that the critic didn’t think Silver was “manly” enough. But there’s also a flip side to this critique: He was also too bold, too bombastic, too reckless in his prognostications. So to the (I would argue significant) extent that such adjectives are linked with masculinity in American culture—political culture included—Nate Silver was branded as both too macho and not macho enough. He’s too confident; he “gives the impression”—but only the impression—of “hedging.” In a way, his hedges were taken as a superficial way for this “man of very small stature” to make incredibly arrogant (at least for Scarborough et al.) claims without proving it on the gridiron like a real man.

At the same time I was following the 2012 election and Silver’s blog, I was also reading a lot of Jacques Derrida’s work, as well as criticism of that work. I found myself struck by similarities between Silver critics and Derrida critics. Slavoj Zizek (whose name, I suppose, arouses as much ire in some academic corners as Derrida’s does in others), for example, states “that in his writing he's seeking ‘simply to make completely sure that the idea comes through,’ in contrast to the exasperating rhetorical adornments he finds—or rather skips over—in a thinker like Derrida” (Nealon). Urban Dictionary’s entry on “postmodernism” is less nuanced and scholarly, but raises a point that’s hard to miss: “pseudo-intellectual Trojan Horse of tyrants everywhere in the western world. Began in Arts faculties in various universities under ‘thinkers’ like Derrida.... Works insidiously by ... dressing up bulls*** in flowery language.” There are those “adornments” again, and this time they’re floral.

Lest I be taken for a “pseudo-intellectual,” maybe I should get to the point. (Or maybe being readily taken for a pseudo-intellectual isn’t such a bad thing?) Though the work of Silver and Derrida travels in relatively different professional and cultural circles, I think readers of both authors miss something important in dismissing vast sections of that work as purely stylistic or only apparent. Brushing off Silver’s hedges as mere “impression[s]” or Derrida’s “rhetorical” use of obscurity—“exasperating” as it might occasionally be—elides something significant. The hedges of both serve important rhetorical purposes, even if those purposes aren’t “to make completely sure that the idea comes through” clearly and immediately. The last two chapters of Silver’s 2012 book are, after all, entitled “A Climate of Healthy Skepticism” and “What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You.”

But let’s get to the part where I actually say what I mean (pundits, you can start reading here): The various controversies and critiques surrounding Silver and Derrida have made me wonder whether I need to spend more time teaching students to read and write hedges. As a teacher of rhetoric, I am bound up in the tradition of teaching students to “make the weaker argument the stronger.” But perhaps I need to spend more time teaching students to make the stronger argument the weaker: That is, to understand the importance of the prolonged performance of self-doubt as it manifests itself in both the thinking and writing processes of rhetors. To understand that practicing and manifesting such doubts is not just a way of annoying or toying with yourself or your audience, but a way of trying (even if Zizek takes the shortcut straight from the conservatory to the lounge) to get them to dwell with problems, catches, and weaknesses for the sake of fashioning a more incredulously wrought and thus more credible argument in the end. Or perhaps the point is not an end at all, but rather—

Ooh, I’ve gotta go. Fresh Air comes on in five minutes.

That, Those, and the Other

Eric Detweiler — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 04:27:54 +0000

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Eric Detweiler

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via The Atlantic

"[H]ere. Where? There." — Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context"

When I think of the concept “technology,” I think of computers. Well, I think of other things too—mostly things with screens and occasionally things that explode—but if I were asked to draw a picture of “technology,” it’d probably resemble a laptop.

I should know better (or think better), though, than to be forgetful of the technological, mechanical nature of even more familiar things. Take grammar, for instance, which is nowhere and everywhere for a rhetoric instructor. Right smack at the beginning of a chapter entitled “The Rhetoric of Testing” in her book Stupidity, Avital Ronell writes, “He would not have claimed, as did Heidegger to his friends, that his greatest accomplishment was thinking through the elusive premises of technology.... Nonetheless, Paul de Man’s work is essentially engaged with and inflected by the question concerning technology” (97). De Man, Ronell argues, “tracked the unstoppable technology of a grammar.”

I would assume I’m not the only one who’s usually ignorant of grammar’s technological nature. The interface breaks occasionally (I’m looking at you, writer’s block), but everyday writing/speaking/signifying seems heavily reliant on suspending one’s attention toward grammar’s relentless mechanicity and just hammering or yammering away.

But perhaps I’m just living up to Ronell’s book’s title here. If I’ve gotten off track above, I’ll switch metaphors and buckle down: The point is I’ve been less forgetful of grammar’s technological function in the past few weeks, and it’s all thanks to two short words: “those” and “that” (stop me if you’ve heard this one).

You may know the drill. Last year, Elizabeth Warren said the following:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Then, a couple of months ago, Barack Obama reiterated her sentiment on the campaign trail:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

And one line from that Obama speech—“you didn’t build that”—got pulled from its context, becoming the (arguably fallacious) apotheosis of Obama’s economic and moral failings at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

A charitable reading—and I’m not the first to try it—might consider the context of “you didn’t build that” and assume Obama’s “that” was actually meant as a “those” referring to “roads and bridges” or infrastructure in general. Of course, if you want to read with the technological rigor of a grammar machine, the deictic reference is—mechnically speaking—to “business,” which is singular and thus a match for “that.” When the grammar robots rise to rule the world, they will surely remember Obama’s utterance as meaning this: All your business are belong to us.

But—to offer an interpretation of Obama’s reiteration of Warren—reading in line with a “grammatical automation” that accepts “business” as the referent of “that” would seem to require a willful ignorance of context (Ronell 97). Or, perhaps, requires charging President Obama with a great deal of stupidity for letting “that” one slip. A glance at the comment sections of articles on 2012’s Great Referential Fiasco (Thatergate?) reveals plenty of readers who think there’s a deeper, truer context—perhaps psychological, perhaps anti-capitalist—that can help us understand what Obama really meant when the grammar machine broke down on him. His slip of the tongue was a Freudian one, or so the argument might go.

I’ve got my own feelings on that subject, but I’m not blogging politics. I’m blogging pedagogy. So what’s the pedagogical significance of the words above?

First, I’m always excited (when I'm not distressed) to teach a rhetoric course in an election year. In that sense, I’m excited for what “you didn’t build that” bodes—who could build a class discussion without some a campaign season's deadwood? There is certainly much more of that to come.

Second, I wonder what meaning’s breakdown in such a seemingly obvious context as “you didn’t build that” suggests about how I communicate with students as the semester unfolds. I try to tread lightly when bringing political issues into the classroom, at least insofar as I try to resist taking a firm stance while students think through whether they’d rather vote for “that” or “those”—or “these” or “this” or the other. But though I can anticipate the engine’s sputterings when I’m intentionally playing "devil’s advocate" (sorry, Mr. Eastwood [see 7:18 for another fruitful moment for those teaching rhetoric]), I’m generally cruising too absent-mindedly to notice the tiny hitches every time the grammar bus runs over a deictic term. At which points can I practice more rigorous grammatical awareness and avoid the breakdown, and at which point is it better for me to realize that my grammar or my metaphor is collapsing no matter how hard I try to stay on the same page with my students?

Who’s driving this classroom anyway? The same person(s) who built this road we’re on?

Community and the Rhetoric Classroom

Eric Detweiler — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:02:08 +0000

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Eric Detweiler

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Culture Mass

Jeff Winger is Socrates’ worst nightmare. As an former lawyer disbarred for having a phony bachelor’s degree, and whose central skill on the NBC sitcom Community is manipulating others’ emotions with his words, Jeff bears out almost all of the concerns Socrates expresses in the Phaedrus and Gorgias about what can happen when training and skill in rhetoric is divorced from a strong moral code.

Quick context before I get back to talking about Jeff’s sophistic wiles (and, eventually, pedagogy—I promise): Community is a show about the increasingly unrealistic/delightful adventures of a community-college study group, and Jeff is one of the show’s and group’s central characters. He’s back in school to replace the fake degree mentioned above, and is usually—though not always—a raging narcissist.

As a narcissist, he frequently uses his abilities in judicial speech to make his own life easier: talking his groupmates into giving him extra help on class projects or tests, talking the dean into giving him credit for made-up courses. And his groupmates, ever more aware of his proclivity, venture observations about Jeff that sound strikingly similar to the observations ventured by the Greek sophists’ contemporaries. Jeff “always [knows] what to say and always [knows] when to slap the table” (“Contemporary American Poultry”); thus—like Gorgias’ audiences—his listeners are “willing but not forcibly made slaves” by his words (Plato, Philebus 58a). When he finds it difficult to compose a wedding toast, his friend Annie is skeptical, observing, “You once convinced [someone] that turtlenecks were made of turtles’ necks.” Jeff concurs, noting, “My superpower is being able to assume any position that suits my purpose” (“Urban Matrimony”). Jeff Winger: 21^st-century master of the dissoi logoi.

And then there’s Britta. Another member of the study group, she alternates between playing Jeff’s antagonist, love interest, and conscience. If Jeff’s superpower is speaking well in support of whatever position serves his purposes, Britta’s is being dubbed “the worst” as she alienates friends and strangers alike with her frequently off-putting commitment to social causes (consider montage #1).

In one episode, as the other characters talk excitedly about the delicious nature of their college cafeteria’s chicken fingers, she proudly declares, “I wouldn’t know. I’m a vegetarian. And if you guys knew how they treated the animals you’re eating, you would eat then even faster just to put the out of their misery. And then you would throw up” (“Contemporary”). By the time her speech shifts gears into a pathetic—and not in the classical sense—lament over her pet cat’s health problems, the rest of the group has gone from rolling their eyes to literally sprinting for the door, dashing toward the promise of a coveted chicken finger. In short, Britta Perry is a supremely ineffective rhetor. But—perhaps not coincidentally—Britta is also the moral center of the show.

Why, you might ask, is this relevant to a blog that is not (yet) a Community fanblog? Because, for me, Jeff and Britta serve as frequent reminders of the diversity of students and student attitudes I am likely to encounter as a rhetoric instructor. There are Jeffs, who might see a rhetoric course as an easy “A,” a chance to show off skills they already possess on the way to the meaningless, bureaucratic credential of a college degree. And there are Brittas, who might actually be better at empathizing with and considering the perspectives of the marginalized, but aren’t skilled at considering their peers’ perspectives in a way that will persuade said peers to take seriously the plights of the marginalized. (And, of course, there are Abeds, Annies, Changs, Pierces, Shirleys, and Troys, but this is a blog post—not a dissertation chapter [yet].) Strong persuasive skills with little ethical support, strong ethical character with little rhetorical savvy, and all point in between.

As a teacher of rhetoric, my tendency is often to valorize the Brittas and dread the Jeffs, feeling—like Socrates—that effective rhetorical instruction without an explicit focus on ethical content risks creating narcissistic manipulators. Despite the excess of credit such a worry likely grants to a one-semester first-year rhetoric course, it’s a worry that pesters me every time a student offers an inadvertently xenophobic comment in a class discussion.

My inclination with such comments is often to jump in with a brief counter-declamation, one that demonstrates—for instance—why men aren’t innately superior to women as college professors. But, in my more reflective moments, I wonder if I’m giving the student-communities I facilitate too little credit. After all, it’s rarely the teachers on Community who effect change in the study-group characters—the students effect change in each other. When Jeff gives persuasive speeches intended to prevent the group’s fragmentation, he doesn’t do so because he’s received in-class ethical instruction. It’s because the sense of community engendered by the group has fostered in him a sense of ethical responsibility for its members’ well-being (cue montage #2).

And beginning to understand her groupmates is one thing that helps Britta better communicate the import of social causes.

Obviously Community is artificial (but hey, so are Plato’s dialogues), so its merit as a ground for reflecting on one’s teaching practices might be doubtful. At the very least, however, I do find it helpful as a reminder of how potent a persuasive influence students can have on each other, and a check on my occasional urges to assume ethical caveats in the classroom must come from the teacher. Perhaps I instead need to leave more time for my students to respond to and complicate each other’s perspectives, myself learning to ask questions that effectively open spaces for ethical inter-student communities, rather than tending towards Socratic monologues that seek to impose morality from above.

Works Cited

"Contemporary American Poultry." Community: The Complete First Season. Sony, 2010. DVD.

Plato. Gorgias. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 1987. Print.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995. Print.

Plato. Philebus. The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamund Kent Sprague. 1972. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001. 39. Print.

"Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts." Community. Hulu. 2012. Web. 1 Apr. 2012.

Trust Me, I'm a Teacher: Some Reflections on Teacher-Student Power Relations

Eric Detweiler — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:43:50 +0000

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

Randall Monroe

Let me immediately note that I’m not intending to demonstrate universal truths with the following anecdotes. My intent is just to share a couple of particular rhetorical situations and the reflections to which they’ve led.

I was 22 years old on my first day as a college instructor, wearing a tie for the first time in years and resigned to the fact that I looked maybe 18 in the right light. I was excited as well as nervous, probably breaking a state record with how fast I covered the syllabus before asking the students if they had any questions. And right out of the gate I got this inquiry, asked dryly and pointedly:

“How does it make you feel that some of your students are the same age as you?”

I don’t remember if I had explicitly stated my age or if this student was conjecturing, but my response ran something like this (the exact quotation was, unfortunately, not recorded for posterity):

“Well, if my qualifications for teaching this class were based on my age, I’d have reason to be concerned. Since those qualifications are presumably based on me having a more thorough knowledge of writing strategies than those of you enrolled in this course, however, I don’t think our relative ages should be a factor."

One more anecdote before I get down to business: Starting with my fourth semester as a teacher, I had the chance to adjunct at a historically black university. I loved the experience and the students, but much of my first semester there teetered on the end of disaster. I had less than 50% attendance on some days, and my students and I frequently talked straight past each other in “discussions” of course readings. On a day when I had especially low attendance, I made an off-the-cuff remark about my intention to crack down in the future to end such disorder. In response, one of my students—a regular visitor to my office hours who rarely hesitated to speak her mind—pointed out something that seems obvious in hindsight: Given America’s history of deeply troubled power relations between white individuals (myself) and black individuals (all but one of my students), perhaps harsher discipline was not what was needed. Indeed, as she noted, such talk on my part could be perceived as deeply offensive if phrased thoughtlessly, only serving to disaffect students even more.

With that revelation ever-present in my mind, my second year at that university went much differently. I found myself constantly working to diffuse and diffract the power inherent in the position of “instructor” back to my students. Of course I still worked within the institutional constraints of grades, assessed student papers, and lectured at times. But I found myself posing more questions in the margins of papers rather than making fixed statements about needed revisions. I waited longer before assuming a class discussion was stalled. This led to a lot of anxious laughter on my students’ parts, but also caused them to take more control over the content and direction of discussions. In general, I tried harder not to presume I knew where my students were coming from.

From the very inception of my teaching career, then, I’ve been faced with and intrigued by the complications inherent in the power relationship(s) between teachers and students. As I’ve dug through the articles and books surrounding composition studies and rhetorical studies, however, I’ve found a dearth of formal materials on the vagaries and variables of that relationship. To be clear, there’s plenty of great material on what we might teach in writing courses (just consider debates between expressivists, current-traditionalists, social-epistemic compositionists, and advocates of rhetorical theory). There’s also a lot of material on how to teach—how directive or nondirective a writing teacher should be, whether or not to provide models, methods of assessing student writing, etc. What I’m interested in is how we position ourselves/are positioned as teachers relative to our students.

This last subject seems only tangentially addressed in scholarly work in the fields of English studies, left primarily to education scholars or left off the page/screen altogether.[1] As two excellent recent posts on this very blog attest—I can say “excellent” since I didn’t write them—addressing college-writing classrooms’ particular power dynamics is often reserved for informal conversations between new instructors (“Using Embarrassment”) or dealt with by isolated instructors coping with specific classroom exigencies (“Learning to Let Go”).

As a result, a lot of discourse on the subject is left to common sense and guesswork. For instance, “As a young instructor, the only way to win my students respect is to be a rigorous taskmaster and swiftly undercut rebellion.” Or, alternatively, “In order to mitigate the potential fallout from the inevitable screw-ups during my first semester of teaching, I’ll be a pushover to grant students as few potential gripes as possible.” Both these positions may have practical merit in particular pedagogical situations, but remain simplistic.

There are two frameworks, one in rhetoric and one in composition, that seem potentially fruitful for thinking the student-teacher relation through more carefully. On the rhetoric side, there’s the concept of “ethos.” Many of us teach ethos every semester. I talk with students about how to analyze its use in argumentative texts and how to construct their own ethos in particular rhetorical situations. We look at politicians’ ethos, journalists’ ethos, situated ethos and invented ethos. But my thinking about my own ethos is often cursory (e.g. should I wear jeans or dress pants to teach in today?), especially after the first few weeks of the semester.

On the composition side, there’s the inherent interest in power relations present in the progeny of social-epistemic pedagogy. If we see the composition classroom as a place to encourage students to become more active and engaged democratic citizens, we may try to make visible naturalized power structures, crafting writing assignments in which students analyze and challenge authoritarian discourses, conventional political wisdom, etc. But what are we reflecting in our own teaching practices? What about the assumptions about authority present in the classroom?

In other words, though the framework for thinking through how we position ourselves as instructors in our classrooms may already be present in our pedagogy, the everyday nature of our relationship to our classrooms and our students may lead us to exempt our own subject positions from critical consideration and analysis. But what better, more readily accessible way to make the content of our pedagogy concrete than to apply it to the situational power structures present in our own classrooms?

Most of my comments above are in their nascent stages, and thus may be muddled. To end, then, a few specific questions that might emerge from these considerations:

What unspoken commonplaces underlie the ethos I craft for myself as a teacher (e.g. “teachers should appear professional,” “it’s better to appear too lenient rather than too strict,” etc.)?
Is the traditional teacher-student binary worth challenging? If so, how should/might/do I challenge it in my classes?
Are my comments on student papers intended to be authoritative or dialogic? How are my students reading my comments?
What archetypal relationships bleed over into how I understand my relationship to students (e.g. parent-child, coach-player, sage-disciple, peer-peer)?
What assumptions might my students have about the “proper” roles for college instructors and students, and what might be the origins of their assumptions (e.g. parents, older siblings/friends, popular culture texts, former teachers)?
How might students’ assumptions shift with their perceptions of individual embodied teachers (i.e. how they see the teacher as marked in terms of sex, gender, class privilege, race, age, etc.), and how should we shift/resist shifting our individual ethos in response to such perceptions?
Is my expertise limited to the forms and methods of “composed”/”rhetorical” discourse, or should I also be an expert on particular content(s)?
Can a willingness to give up one’s authority as a teacher result in a paradoxical reclamation of authority based on students’ perception of your confident humility (I’m cribbing from “Using Embarrassment” here)?

What I’ve read is of course limited, and you may know of some eminent scholar whose thoughtful work on this subject renders this post moot. If so, do share!

[1] There are some texts that address this subject—Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers is one controversial example, and there are stray articles like Marshall Gregory’s “Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Teacherly Ethos” from the seminal issue of Pedagogy. And, of course, there’s Plato’s good old-fashioned Socratic method.