Digital Romantics: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and "Radiant Textuality" in the classroom

Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog with Internet logos in the distance

I’m teaching E 314L: “Reading Poetry” this semester, with a fantastic set of students of all levels of proficiency who really like to dig into the big issues motivating our poems. Early in the semester when we read Donne and other metaphysical poets, our classroom discussions often coalesced around two or three centers of gravity for each poem. Though opinions and readings about what the poems are up to might be divergent, we could normally, as a class, agree on a few choice passages as the cruxes for making meaning.

Encouraging Class Participation with Google Docs

Graphic comparing Google Docs and Enterprise 2.0 platforms

Classroom dynamics can vary widely from one group of students to the next. This fact has really struck home now that I’m teaching two sessions of Rhetoric and Writing: “Disability in Pop Culture.” I walk into both classes with the same lesson plans, with (one of) the same interpreters, and with the same kinds of technology available. Many variables are different; different buildings, different classroom space (in terms of size), one interpreter is different, different days, different time of day (although both take place in the afternoon).

Negotiating Student-Instructor Relationships on Facebook

All young instructors know it: that dreaded moment when a student, former or current, adds you as a "friend" on Facebook. We encourage students to call us by our first names, and cultivate a sense of informal comfort in the classroom. As young people closer in age to our students than our advisors, we also realize that Facebook has become a near-universal social networking outlet, filled not only with friends but cousins, colleagues, and (gulp) parents.

Using Mind Maps to Analyze and Assess Reasoning

Mind map depicting arguments about traffic congestion

Chris Ortiz y Prentice raises an interesting question in “Why we just can’t seem to teach logos.” As Chris says, analysis challenges both instructors and students as we struggle to understand the multi-faceted Greek term “logos.” Given rhetoric’s long and at times contentious relationship with formal logic, I agree that we should take a broader approach to the analysis of reasoning in persuasive texts.

Ethos, Summary, and 9/11 Truth

Ari Fleischer Tweet, begins Digusting op-ed in NYT by a truther

Marking 9/11

This year, in 2012, my first-year rhetoric students were mostly third graders, seven- and eight-year-olds, on 9/11/2001. Their memories of 9/11 were cloudy, mostly of a fearfulness they didn't fully understand. Some of them remember leaving school with their parents; others remember staying in classes with TVs on, watching the news report on what was happening. That's what I did as a high school student on 9/11.

Hidden Collaboration: The Internet, Syllabi-Making, Assignment-Planning, & YOU!

Standing among bookshelves, a woman holds an open book with bright lights shooting out of it

We’re a few weeks into the fall semester now, and I’ve just finished hammering out my assignments for E 314L: “Banned Books” using lots of in-person feedback from my peers and my teaching mentor, along with tons of help from resources on the internet. While talking about assignments and syllabi over a hot beverage with friends and colleagues is my cup of tea, the online resources I used were absolutely indispensible for coming up with the specifics of my assignments.

Posture, For One and All!

Title page and image from book entitled Your Carriage, Madam

You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool empirist to believe that we must learn how to move and hold our bodies. Yet who among us learned anything about posture at school?

That, Those, and the Other

President Obama speaking to a little girl who's built a block tower, words You Didn't Build That imposed over image

"[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.

Identifying Visual Conversations

Damaged school bus sits among wreckage in Post-Hurricane Katrina Mississippi

In my RHE 309K, Rhetoric of Tragedy, I often ask students to analyze or otherwise engage with images. It seems appropriate to the content, since images often play a large part in how violent or disastrous events are defined, and it creates less reading, which my students seem to like. With my Using Images for Invention lesson plan, I hoped that an engagement with images related to their tragedies would expose some of the students’ own assumptions and feelings in relation to the event, as well as make them aware of affected parties that they might not have otherwise considered.

Rhetorical Video Games

Retro image of young couple standing in front of a large Atari home computer

I ran my Mass Effect 1 lesson plan today, and I must say that I’m all fired up about it. Why? Because it worked. Turns out, you can use a video game to teach a rhetorical concept, and not just as a medium that can be rhetorically analyzed, but as a modeling technology that enables (indeed requires) the cognitive work rhetorical concepts entail.

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