Blogging Pedagogy - rhetoric

"Don't Feel So Down": When Your Students Don't Understand Your References

Jeffrey Boruszak — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 18:30:56 +0000

Author:

Jeffrey Boruszak

Image Credit:

Flickr, wumpiewoo, 2010

I recently had a teaching experience I could only compare to being on a sinking ship—like the band on the Titanic, I played my song dutifully as I sunk into the murky waters. With every word I spoke, attempting to explain the material I prepared, I could sense the students’ disinterest, disengagement, and utter confusion. This wasn’t the first time I experienced this sinking feeling of a total misfire while teaching, nor do I expect it to be the last time. And do you know whose fault it was? Julian Casablancas.

Well, let me clarify—it was not Julian Casablancas himself that sunk my lesson, but rather the expectation that my students would know that in the early 2000’s there was a popular band called The Strokes. You see, I was in my introduction to rhetoric and writing class, and the topic of the day was identifying different kinds of evidence and relating them to the main argument. The centerpiece of my lesson was a group exercise involving an op-ed in The New York Times earlier that week. In “Brunch is for Jerks,” David Shaftel argues that Manhattan’s indulgent brunch atmosphere has hit a critical mass, and that the meal’s ubiquity is evidence of widespread gentrification and the failure of the ultra-hip millennial lifestyle. Or, in the words I figured wanted my students to get—“People may think brunch is still cool, but really it’s just two-thousand and late.”

The key to Shaftel’s argument about the hip-ness of brunch is his use of a Julian Casablancas quote at the beginning of his article: “I don’t know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon.” Shaftel comes back to Casablancas two more times in the piece, representing him as an arbiter of what is cool. “Perfect!” I thought, while preparing the lesson. “This example is straight out of the textbook’s chapter on evidence, and between talking about brunch and referencing a hit rock band, I can keep a fairly dry topic upbeat and engaging.”

WRONG. Once we were in the actual class, my students didn’t seem to really be getting to the “cool” part of Shaftel’s argument. I slowly tried maneuvering them to the paragraphs where Casablancas is mentioned. Still nothing. Finally, a student brings up brunch’s cool factor based on another paragraph. Here is my moment—I ask them to find evidence for the article’s argument on brunch’s coolness, but they can’t find it. As the search gets more and more drawn out, I eventually write Julian Casablanca’s name on the board. Crickets. They’ve never heard of this name before. “He’s the lead singer of The Strokes,” I tell them. Then came the moment I hadn’t been prepared for—my students had never heard of The Strokes.

I had been told this would eventually happen. Another professor told me that his students no longer understand his references to The Matrix, and that one day I would struggle after making what I thought of as a still-contemporary pop culture reference to something my students had no idea about.

And so there I was, caught entirely off-guard by a reference that my students just didn’t understand. And in this critical moment, I fumbled the ball. How do you explain what “cool” is, especially when your reference to what is cool is a rock star whose hit songs you suddenly realize came out over a decade before? Now my students seemed more lost than ever. I wanted to just move on—what I had prepared as the crown jewel of my lesson was a total wash. But there was nothing to move on to—I had to deal with “cool” on my students’ terms, not my own.

And so they left the class with bewildered looks on their faces. It didn’t help that my other examples besides Shaftel’s article also failed to hit their mark (one of these exercises was staging a debate over which Austin burger is better—Whataburger or P. Terry’s…except none of my students had been to nor heard of P. Terry’s). The next class I picked up the shattered dregs of my dignity, and gave them a boring Powerpoint reviewing kinds of evidence to reverse the effects of a disastrous lesson.

And so I am left with numerous questions: What do we as teachers do when we fail to connect with our students, especially when it comes to pop culture? It is something that will only get worse as time passes. But more importantly, what do we do when our references fail? How do we recover? For me the answer is now contingency plans—from this point forward, if I use a pop culture reference as a focal point in a lesson, I need to prepare options so that I don’t leave my class confused and bewildered.

But like I said before—despite my best intentions, this will not be the last time I have a lesson that falls apart in front of me. Maybe it won’t be from pop culture references next time. I’m sure that any teachers reading this have had their share of misfires in the past, and the fear of a bad lesson plan is a constant source of anxiety. So maybe the only option is to take a deep breath, and know that no matter how bad any individual lesson goes, there is always room to recover. Just remember to listen to Julian Casablancas: “Oh baby, don’t feel so down…gonna be alright.”

Discussing Stereotypes in the Classroom

Sarah A. Riddick — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 22:38:50 +0000

Author:

Sarah Riddick

Image Credit:

Ookami-Schiffer. "Don't Stereotype Me!" Deviant Art, n.d. Web. 14 Nov 2014. <http://ookami-schiffer.deviantart.com/art/Don-t-Stereotype-Me-321935197>.

One of my primary aims in a rhetoric classroom is to equip students with the skills to thoughtfully respond to the world around them. What that means, as fellow instructors know well, is that sometimes it is appropriate to discuss rhetorical arguments that make the audience uncomfortable—a discomfort that could potentially halt or hinder discussion in the classroom. Moreover, given that every person in a classroom brings with them a distinct set of past experiences, influences, and perspectives, certain arguments and texts can affect some students more personally than others.

As an instructor, I make a conscious effort to establish upfront a classroom ethos that is founded on respect. We respect each other’s viewpoints, as well as those featured in our discussions, and I encourage my students to maintain this respect throughout the semester. Of course, despite the classroom being a “safe space” for reflection and discussion, it can nevertheless be intimidating for a student to vocalize what they notice in a text, especially when they view the text as stating something offensive. One moment in a recent class discussion of mine illustrated this point wonderfully, albeit unexpectedly.

Having defined some key rhetorical topics (induction, causation, correlation, definition, analogy, and difference), I asked my students to assess a variety of texts that feature these strategies. Samples included two-to-three straightforward sentences, an excerpt from an argumentative article about a recently controversial issue, a series of photographs, and a few excerpts from television and film. One excerpt came from the final court scene of Legally Blonde, a well-known film that continues to circulate regularly in popular culture. Specifically, I chose the moment in which Reese Witherspoon’s character Elle Woods realizes that a male witness in the trial could not have been involved with the female accused, despite his testimony that he had been. Elle comes to this conclusion after the witness, Enrique, identifies her shoes by their designer. After watching the one-minute clip, one of my students eagerly began to speak about which of the topics she observed, but she quickly and nervously prefaced her response with a clarification that she herself did not support what she was about to say.

This is precisely why I chose this clip. This moment at the water fountain is, in my opinion, the film’s defining moment. Elle’s eyes widen, and she runs into the courtroom to inform her team about what she is now completely certain: Enrique is gay. Her argument is, approximately: “Enrique knows designers. Gay men know designers. Therefore, Enrique is gay.” According to my students, Elle draws a correlation between Enrique’s sexual orientation and his knowledge of fashion designers based on a stereotype about gay men. Rather than challenge her argument, the accused agrees with her, adding another stereotype to the mix (Enrique listens to Cher). Thus, Elle, who has been struggleing to succeed throughout the entire film until now, takes over the defense and wins the case.

Legally Blonde came out in 2001. Many might say it was a career-defining moment for Witherspoon, and the film was so successful that it has a sequel and a Broadway adaptation. That said, nearly a decade and a half later, my classroom full of young undergraduates watched this one-minute clip and uneasily recognized the rhetorical power of a moment that until now had likely provoked no more than a chuckle. As my students agreed, the basis of Elle’s argument in this scene—an argument that catapults her to victory in the movie—is both flimsy and based on a stereotype.

For me, this was a wonderful teaching moment. Not only did my students recognize a rhetorical topic at-work, but they also demonstrated an understanding of how far-reaching, significant, and even insidious argumentation strategies may be. To put the aforementioned student at ease, I took a moment to commend her on being conscientious enough to distinguish herself from an offensive argument, and I reminded the class as a whole that in our classroom it is okay for us to talk about what we observe in texts without claiming personal responsibility for them. In fact, that is one of the most important reasons for taking this course: to learn how to respond thoughtfully to others while establishing and maintaining one’s own position.

Open… Like a Book?: Writing New Media and the Materialities of Textual Production

Amy Tuttle — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 20:10:16 +0000

Author:

Amy Tuttle

Image Credit:

Amy Tuttle

New ideas give way to new methods. And since new media changes the way we link ideas to ideas and ideas to readers, perhaps our experiences with new media should prompt us to reconsider what we “know.” Specifically, educators might be well-served to consider the ways in which new media writing differs from traditional, humanist prose, as this deliberate differentiation could open up (rather than foreclose) epistemological and pedagogical possibilities for the digital humanities.

With new media, a text’s materiality is enacted through the practices of its composition. Thus, rather than seeing new media writing as an analysis of specific media (or of the broad tropes of formal convention that often guide writing pedagogies), approaches to teaching new media might benefit from a focus on writing as a (series of) material, knowledge-making practice(s). Investigations of material practice as it pertains to new media writing have the potential to offer rich avenues for the exploration of the complex ontological and epistemological relationships among subjects, objects, and identity, which, in turn, could lay important groundwork for understanding the digital humanities’ responsibilities to democratized knowledge and invention/innovation.

A focus on the material meaning-making practices of new media writing introduces expanded understandings of what new media texts mean or can mean. In Writing New Media, Geoff Sirc suggests that a move from prose writing and concepts of metaphor toward more open systems of freely associated “collections” of heterogeneous writing affords new media writers the responsibility to make connections (143). Thus, a new media writer can experience a fuller realm of possibility when he or she is not self-conscious about trying to follow and master formal conventions of style. In other words, some of new media’s libratory potential lies in becoming less concerned with content and more conscious of our materials.

Significantly, an increased consciousness of the material practices of new media writing departs from traditional humanist approaches to writing in that new media methodologies and pedagogies might allow for the critical analysis of both a text’s content and the means of its production. More specifically, in attending to the materiality of texts, new media writers work to collapse the hierarchical distinction between textual analysis and textual production—between reading and writing. In other words, new media writing fosters multiplicity, and the material practices that accompany new media writing might help students identify a range of literacies. Additionally, new media texts trouble the academic and disciplinary binaries of alphabetic/visual, “high” culture/“low” culture, and “real” work/“not real” work. Therefore, by refusing to position textual analysis over textual production, pedagogies of new media writing can demonstrate a resistance to binaries of normalization or centralization.

Methodologies of decentralization can untether writing from its content, and as a result, new media has the potential not only to support existing social and cultural theories and practices of writing, but also to disrupt and change those positions, leading to potentially significant (and sustainable) long-term social change. Both students and teachers (and every combination of the two) occupy a variety of subject positions within a single class setting, and, in the best possible cases, the reconfiguration processes inherent in the material practices of new media have the potential to shift the focus from what things mean to how things mean. Therefore, teachers of writing must consider how pedagogical theories of writing and the “everyday practice” (to use de Certeau's term) of writing work (or don’t work) together in relation to the larger, more systemic issues regarding the nature and value of various kinds of scholarly work.

Surveying Perspectives

Lindsey Gay — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 13:06:54 +0000

Author:

Lindsey Gay

Image Credit:

Lindsey Gay

As the semester winds down, I have been thinking about my students’ responses to my course topic. Death and dying are universal facts, but our various responses to them are far from universal. This week I asked them to complete a short, anonymous survey that summarized their individual responses to the different topics we covered and conversations we had.

This semester marks the third time I’ve taught RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Death and Dying (Summer ‘13, Fall ‘13, Spring ‘14), and it’s gone a bit differently each time. As the semester winds down, I have been thinking about my students’ responses to my course topic. Death and dying are universal facts, but our various responses to them are far from universal. As part of my students’ Learning Records, I asked them to reflect on their own perspectives on death and dying, and to chart how their perspectives or feelings change as the class progresses. “Perspectives” was in fact one of our central course strands, along with Analysis, Research, and Writing. From the very beginning, I assured my students that my goal with Perspectives was not to change their belief systems or their values, but to get them accustomed to determining where their own perspectives originate, how they are formed and influenced, what is valuable about them and why, and what influences their perspectives have in their own lives. This week I asked them to complete a short, anonymous survey that summarized their individual responses to the different topics we covered and conversations we had.

In their Learning Records, my students have often offered profound insights into their own ways of considering death and dying. They report that though they perhaps gave the subjects little or no thought prior to enrolling in this course, they have since found that death and dying are quite interesting topics. Some students realize that their views, whether liberal or traditional, were certainly not the only valuable ways of approaching these topics. Some students have been introduced to death and dying at young ages, having had siblings or parents pass away; in these cases, I have found that the individual may be either much more reluctant to enter class discussions, or much more apt to do so with the confidence that comes from personal experience.

In fact, my students this year have offered so many different perspectives on death and dying that I’ve found it hard to collate them. For my own course development skills, I wanted some way of generalizing their reactions. Were there any specific aspects of the course materials or topics that they agreed on? Did we as a group sufficiently address our Perspectives course strand--that is, did we respectfully, critically, and analytically engage our own experiences, feelings, biases, and beliefs? Admittedly, this idea came to me pretty quickly as I was looking over the day’s lesson plan, so I had to devise the survey only hour before class began. Depending on the results, I may reconsider the utility or worth of some questions.

The results (zoom in!) were interesting. Though I expected the students’ responses to the first seven questions (based on discussions during class and in their Learning Records), I found their responses to #8 unexpected. Some of our most spirited classroom discussions were about legislative or unusual issues, but those received low interest ratings. I wonder whether my ranking system (where 4 = highest interest) ended up being confusing. The responses to #9, where I asked students to tell me what they wish we’d discussed, were incredibly varied: subjects ranged from suicide, to death rituals in other cultures, to Halloween.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results. I wanted to engage the students in a slightly different medium, which an online survey accomplishes. Mostly I just wanted a way of gauging their responses that was geared directly toward the course material, as opposed to the depersonalized Course Instructor Surveys they fill out at the end of each semester. I have also been fairly confident of the rhetoric-specific material I’ve presented in class, so I left that out of the survey. I thus confined the survey to purely topical issues of death and dying, rather than issues of rhetorical skill and practice.

Using Basic Media Theory to Teach Rhetoric

Sarah Sussman — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 16:14:01 +0000

Author:

Sarah Sussman

Image Credit:

Lens Blog, New York Times

“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”

― John Dewey, Democracy and Education

Perhaps like many of my students, it was my art and photography classes that taught me how to close read. How does one draw a chain link fence? Slowly creating each gray line allowed me to think about the fence abstractly. Trying to photograph that same fence from different vantage points similarly changed the whole look of the fence, reinforcing that fences could be metaphors; that photos were constructed and had meaning. The time and attention to detail that art requires pairs naturally well with the kind of microcosmic thinking that close reading and analysis calls for. As instructors, we frequently bank on this dual power that visual media has: to make lessons memorable, and to help students to think about problems more abstractly.

More and more, instructors opt for multi-media lesson plans because they offer an experiential, and thus more impressive example to hold onto. As instructors, we are also frequently telling our students to see things at a remove, to “go meta,” or to remember to pay attention to the meaning of form and the construction of the argument in whatever it is we’re studying. In this post, I’m going to talk about how we as instructors can enhance our use of multi-media tools in the classroom while reinforcing that edict -- to “go meta”-- by using techniques from basic media theory.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to find the same argument across multiple forms of media. Though you could use this technique to teach many aspects of rhetoric, the example I’m sharing in this post is one that I use primarily for teaching ethos in my class, “Rhetoric of Photography.” In class, I show students three different photographers who have published large bodies of work about one topic. In this instance, I focused on three different photographers’ documentation of Hurricane Katrina. The disaster is particularly compelling for discussion because it connects conversations about good citizenship and democracy with visual media, satisfying the Chicago School of media studies’ invocation to use communication and mass media for the good of democracy. It’s also useful because it follows in the edict of the Rhetoric 306 model (the basic introduction course to rhetoric at UT Austin) to teach civic discourse.

The tragic incident is particularly noteworthy when teaching ethos through multiple forms of media because, aside from 9/11, Hurricane Katrina was arguably the most photographed event in U.S. history, and because disaster relief efforts usually raise questions about ethos and ethical behavior for volunteers. In New Orleans, a city where new coming artists are constantly vying for some connection to the organic strength of the local culture, this anxiety to build credibility also becomes evident in the way photographers justify their purpose for working there. This same argument can be traced in the photographer’s interviews, artist’s statements, and finally, the pictures taken of the event.

I begin the lesson by examining the photographer’s personal website where we, as a class, pay attention to fonts used, formatting, and the biography or artist’s statement. I ask the students to draw some conclusions about the photographer’s ethos based on that small sampling and to guess what we’ll see in their interview. Then, we watch an actual interview. After watching the interview, we discuss the form of the interview. We pay attention to the credibility of the station, the location, the interviewer, body language, background music, and other aspects. Finally, we see if we can identify the ethos and throughline expressed in the interview in their body of work.

The three photographers whose work, biographies, and interviews we analyze are Lewis Watts, a professor at UC Santa Cruz whose life work has largely been dedicated to documenting African American culture. Though he lives in California, New Orleans is like a second home and his photos of New Orleans after Katrina mark a continuation of an already sustained presence. Then, we look at Magnum photographer Richard Misrach, whose work focuses on post-apocalyptic landscapes and seeks, in postmodern fashion, to let graffiti speak for his subjects. In his book about Katrina, Destroy this Memory, the only narration is the one created by the graffiti. In the interest of space, I’ll only share a play-by-play of my student’s this semester’s analysis of our final photographer, photojournalist Mario Tama.

Tama’s work on New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is called Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent. As a class, students were impressed by minimalist style of Tama’s webpage, which they interpreted as a sign of professionalism. They also appreciated that in his description of his book he says part of the proceeds go to charity, but were curious about the exact amount. Noting in his bio that Tama is from New York, students were inquisitive as to how Tama would explain his connection to New Orleans in the interview. Then, we watched a CBS interview with him. We thought about the ethos of CBS as a network, and the outdoor, rainy setting. Overall, the class was skeptical of some clichéd language like “people picked themselves up by their boot straps” and saw his repeated invocation of phrases like “my own people abandoned by my own government” as a way of building the imperative for his presence as an artist and journalist. As a class, the students decided that he tried to establish ethos by proving that his work performed a cathartic, unifying function on a national level, and a humanitarian level. The class identified his throughline as a religiously ambiguous tale of human redemption and resilience, as well as an effort at building his New Orleans ethos through that same sense of national unity.

Then, we looked to the photos to find support for the throughline that we had identified in the interview via attention to visual and compositional elements. I try to pause for as long as possible on each photo to truly exhaust all possibilities for close reading so as to show students just how much they can do and hopefully build up their confidence by showing that a wide array of interpretations can be useful and insightful. Below is our close reading of one photo which we read with the aid of a guide on compositional elements of photography:

The first compositional element we looked at is vantage point. Tama captured the photo (see above) from the same vantage point as the group of men who are victims of the hurricane. Here, we see Tama as a man of the people, belonging, and easily being able to slip into conversation with the people in the photo.

Next, we looked at setting. The setting in this same photo is a coliseum for sporting events, which is something that we associate with the leisure and excess of a prosperous nation. The place for sporting events, also a sign for national unity (i.e. the Olympics) is starkly contrasted against the scene of post-apocalyptic rubble and displaced people.

After that, we pay attention to pattern. The repetitious and orderly pattern of the stadium seats highlights Tama’s point – that a prosperous nation has abandoned its people, as they come into shocking contrast with the organic shapes of crumpled paper, and miscellaneous supplies or debris are strewn everywhere.

Finally, we are free to examine balance. Horizontally, the image is divided into thirds. There are the people on the ground, the empty bleachers, and the more abstract acoustical ceiling. What is most interesting is the way that the slant of light diagonally bisects all of these planes shooting from the upper right-hand corner, stopping at the sleeping man. This beam of light is a sign of the “resilience” Tama talks about. It comes off as a secular or religiously ambiguous symbol of regeneration and hope. In this light, the national space of the coliseum registers as a sacred space, viewers might consider the architectural affinity that this space has with a mega-church, or note the American flag in the upper-right hand corner, again, affirming unity, which Tama used to build his ethos.

For those who are curious, my students’ final takeaway was that Lewis Watts presented a successful ethos through offering gracious credit to his friends (in his bio he mentions his indebtedness to more established New Orleans artists) and repeatedly used words like “humble," and did not focusing exclusively on Katrina, but on the city and people as a whole. His images showed that he had been a part of New Olrean’s culture for some time, and he didn’t make any effort to hide that it wasn’t his birth place but was very up front about the fact that it was a locale he enjoyed visiting. Misrach’s ethos was also ultimately successful for my students because his project was humble in scope. They said they liked Misrach’s ethos because “he didn’t try to do too much” and “didn’t pretend to belong to New Orleans” or to try to play a self-important “savior” to the people of New Orleans, but rather, tried to find an artful way to package graffiti from the people of New Orleans in a way that they still found uplifting. A few students did note that it may have been the cheerful jazz music playing during Misrach’s interview that made us like him so much.

Overall, I think this was a successful lesson plan because it drove the concepts of situated and invented ethos home, and additionally offered a nice bolster of what I mean when I talk about "going meta" by paying attention to not only venue and context when assessing a source’s credibility, but formal and compositional visual elements as well. Ultimately, I think this instilled a new sense of confidence in that students were able to rehearse their knowledge of the interlinking between form and content in a way that they might not have thought about before.

The Modified Jigsaw Classroom

Lindsey Gay — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 16:13:57 +0000

Author:

Lindsey Gay

Image Credit:

ACSD.org

Last spring I participated in a seminar through the Center for Teaching and Learning, and one of the biweekly sessions was on effective classroom organization. I resolved to try the Jigsaw Classroom model for my Fall 2013 class.

The Jigsaw Classroom is based on permanent student groups of around 4 students. More or fewer could work, though I've always liked the 4-person size. The basic idea is that the group members will work with each other throughout the semester. The advantages of this model are that activities retain some level of consistency, and students grow more comfortable participating within a stable group. Additionally, within each "home" group, each student is assigned a number--1, 2, 3, or 4--and when appropriate, the instructor separates all the groups into each number category. All the 1s will get together, all the 2s, etc. Each new group can work on a separate part of an activity or instructional concept, then when the main group of 1, 2, 3, and 4 gets back together, each student can instruct his or her home-groupmates about each concept. You can see an example of this structure in the image that heads this blog post.

For my first foray into the Jigsaw Classroom, I ended up seldom using the second part of this organizational strategy. My students remained in their home groups for nearly every group activity. First, I'll discuss how I organized the groups. I wanted their composition to be deliberate instead of random, especially because teaching in a computer classroom introduces the hurdle of some students not being familiar or comfortable with technology. I therefore created a Google Doc in which each student gave some information about their comfort level and experience with the types of tech we'd be using in our class. After each student had added their information, I began organizing the groups. I wanted each group to have at least one person with high skill and comfort levels, and one person with very low levels. I also tried to make the groups as gender-balanced as possible. I divided my 21 students into five groups (one group had five people), they chose their group name, and we got down to business.

In general the groups functioned just like groups randomly-chosen each day: class activities such as locating examples of certain concepts within a particular reading, or performing a rhetorical analysis of an image or song, were much as they had ever been. However, when we planned more in-depth activities, such as a group presentation or a trip to the Oakwood Cemetery, the permanent group idea really paid off. The students were more comfortable working on activities outside of the classroom with people they had already gotten to know. Group dynamics in general seem to be pretty high-functioning. At our individual midterm conferences, I asked each student their opinion of their groupmates' participation levels, functions, leadership, work ethic, and the overall effectiveness of the group. The vast majority of students felt that the workload was evenly shared, that certain roles (like note-taker or class reporter) were fulfilled on a generally rotating basis, and that the group experience was overall rewarding. One group became so close-knit that they elected to do their final digital research project together instead of individually, which puts them in each other’s' company for quite a while.

Initially I wanted to experiment with the Jigsaw Classroom because my previous Course Instructor Surveys noted that more groupwork would have been beneficial in those classes. I had never really considered myself "good" at setting up group activities, so I consciously pushed myself to try something new. I'd say that I have increased by at least two- or threefold the number of group activities I've incorporated into my teaching. Though it took some additional effort at first, I have definitely become more comfortable and confident with designing group activities and monitoring my students' participation through their home groups. It helps that the students consistently work with classmates they have come to know and are comfortable with, instead of having to navigate a new group dynamic every time. (I have also been lucky that no students have complained about their group members, though I made sure that any complaints or concerns would be addressed with the utmost respect and seriousness!)

Confessions of a Teacher with Bias

Meredith Coffey — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 20:00:06 +0000

Author:

Meredith Coffey

Image Credit:

alexmuse

I spent a great deal of my first year teaching Rhetoric—last year—discussing bias with my students. Time after time, I reminded them: everything you’ll read has some kind of bias, but that’s okay, because bias isn’t inherently a bad thing. Though it is, I pointed out, a thing you’ll need to take into account.

And yet, all the while, the desire to hide my own bias held tremendous sway over how I presented myself as a teacher. Around the time I began graduate school, a politically conservative friend had confessed that she had been miserable in college, in no small part due to her discomfort in political science classes at our predominantly liberal institution. In those settings, she explained, professors often declared their political attitudes in a way that alienated the few students who held other positions. Her experiences of classroom anxiety worried me; I certainly didn’t want my own students to feel uncomfortable voicing their views in class, or even worse, to suspect that I might discriminate against them! To combat this risk, I determined that the easiest fix would be to avoid revealing my political, social, and other potentially controversial beliefs.

Naïve though it may seem, this strategy seemed doable enough at first. Even when I showed clips from the 2012 presidential debates, my students readily took to arguing over which rhetorical fallacies fell flat and which were effective; they picked apart statements by all candidates with equal zeal. I bit my tongue a few times during class discussion, but for the most part I felt like I was right on track with my “neutrality.” (I was surprised to learn that they didn’t make assumptions about my beliefs based on my affiliation with a humanities department. I was even a little proud when several of them mentioned that they had no idea which presidential candidate would be getting my vote.)

Eventually, however, I began to find myself struggling with the ethics of staying so consistently silent. In the interest of student confidence, I won’t recount the specifics of my turning point here. Suffice it to say that, in a class presentation, a student took a particular stance on a controversial issue—a position s/he earnestly defended, and by no means an unusual one—but nonetheless a stance that I found deeply morally troubling. Not wanting to shame the student, and still afraid to expose my own political leanings, I offered a weak counterpoint and mostly let it go. Class discussion moved on.

As soon as I walked out of the classroom, I knew my reaction had been absolutely wrong: ethically, pedagogically, personally wrong. Almost a year later, I still regret that I didn’t enable a “teachable moment”—worse, that I chose to hope that students with whom I profoundly disagreed would feel at ease, while in the same breath I effectively cast aside concern for students with whom I profoundly agreed. As any student of Rhetoric would have guessed, my effort to create a mask to hide my bias had resulted in a mask that instead suggested I had an entirely different bias. I realized more fully what I’d been telling my students all along: the fact that I come into the classroom with bias doesn’t necessarily make me a bad source. And in this case, I very strongly felt that working with, rather than against, my own bias would have made me a better teacher.

Clearly, I had to change tracks. I spent a semester halfheartedly trying to keep any remotely sensitive topics out of class discussion, which was certainly less interesting, but I don’t deny that it required me to make fewer tough decisions.

This year, though, I’m teaching Rhetoric of Tourism, so I knew I couldn’t—and genuinely wouldn’t want to—avoid all such questions. My students are writing about cultural authenticity, the distribution of labor within the tourism industry, travel to Cuba, and all other sorts of politically sensitive, but absolutely important, problems in tourism. So I’m trying a new approach. At the beginning of the semester, amidst all the other disclaimers (no late work, three tardies count as one absence), I told my students that I planned to offer my own point of view when I felt it was important, but that they should always feel safe and encouraged to express their own takes (so long as they remained respectful!). I didn’t tell them which presidential candidate I voted for last year, but unlike my Fall 2012 students, I bet most of this group can guess. I haven’t yet seen my new strategy through to the end of the term, but I’m hopeful. And I remind myself that my students are well aware that I, like anyone else, can’t eliminate my bias altogether. After all, if they weren’t aware, I’d hardly be doing my job.

Field Trips in the College Classroom

Lindsey Gay — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Lindsey Gay

Image Credit:

Lindsey Gay

I can remember taking only one field trip after I left the K-12 system. Between three universities in my undergraduate and graduate career, only one lone little undergrad geology course featured an off-site learning experience as a standard part of the curriculum. Therefore, when I realized that I had the chance to take my own RHE 309K students on a field trip, I jumped at the opportunity.

Some background: I am teaching The Rhetoric of Death and Dying, a class which combines the analysis of public discourses about death with cultural and personal study. The past few weeks have comprised our unit on rhetorical analysis, and just prior to the field trip the students had been preparing for a group presentation analyzing a notable public memorial somewhere in the world. I knew when I developed the course that I wanted to combine analysis of a large-scale public memorial with analysis of small-scale private memorials, so I planned on taking my students to Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery. Oakwood is one of the oldest public cemeteries in Austin, with gravesites dating from the 1840s. It is also conveniently adjacent to east campus. My class period is also 75 minutes, which was a good length of time in which to accomplish this trip.

My students were very excited about the field trip, but I quickly found that this trip would be as much about learning how to be a responsible citizen in the world as it would be about the arguments that tombstones and cemeteries make. The week before our trip, I polled the class to see how many students had ever actually been to a cemetery. Only about half raised their hands, and of those most said they had just gone for a graveside service and had not walked elsewhere in the cemetery. They essentially had no practical experience of how to conduct themselves in such a space. We talked about constructing the ethos of a mourner as opposed to a visitor, and what it meant to maintain a respectful vocal volume and physical presence in a cemetery.

The other thing that most of my students had no experience with was taking the city bus. There is a bus stop near to our classroom on campus that takes riders directly to the cemetery in a mere 7 minutes, so I encouraged my students to take the bus with me rather than drive their own cars. When I mentioned in class that Capital Metro bus service is free for students, there were a lot of open mouths! I described how swipe one’s student ID in the payment station on the bus, and how to follow bus etiquette about not hogging two seats to yourself. I sent out an email with information about which stop and when we should meet and which bus we should take, and about half of my students (10 out of 21), accompanied me on the bus. Afterwards, the same group caught the same bus back to campus. I noticed that some of those who rode the bus with me were the same ones who expressed concerns about never having used a city bus system before, so I was glad that they stepped out of their comfort zone into this real-world activity.

At the cemetery, students split into assigned groups and I gave everyone a Cemetery Scavenger Hunt worksheet I created. I wanted this assignment to be about more than just finding interesting things at the cemetery, so I designed the worksheetto reflect on the types of arguments students found on tombstones and in the general situation of the cemetery and its parts. While I wandered on my own taking pictures of the groups and the cemetery, I kept an eye on my students and checked in with each group every now and again. Everyone was working their way through the scavenger hunt; no one littered, engaged in horseplay, or moved any personal objects lefts at gravesites; every group I checked in with had their own favorite tombstone or family plot. They enjoyed speculating on the histories of some of the families buried in Oakwood and hypothesizing why some grave markers were so much smaller and closer together than others. When they saw the stark difference between the white section of the cemetery versus the “colored” grounds, they discussed what arguments were created by the lack of durable gravestones and non-central placement of that section of the cemetery.

Overall, my first foray into fieldtripping was a success. I wanted my students to interact with rhetoric in the real world and on a smaller, more intimate scale than indicated by their group projects. They considered not only the written rhetoric of epitaphs and inscriptions and the visual rhetoric of common figures and images carved into the stones, but also the rhetoric of experience. Walking around a quiet, grassy, semi-wooded space filled with other people’s memories creates a rhetorical situation in and of itself. I was glad not to lose track of anyone in the cemetery or on the bus, and it turned out to be a good lesson for everyone in rhetoric, planning, responsibility, and appropriate behavior. Learning does indeed continue outside of the classroom.

Thank You, Mr. Putin

Cole Wehrle — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

Cole Wehrle

When I talk to fellow teachers about students in Rhetoric 306, the complaint is curiously uniform: students struggle with limiting their engagement with a source to the level of rhetoric. Though the distinction between a particular argument and the subject of that argument can seem perfectly clear to teachers in the field, it’s a divide that continues to puzzle students, sometimes deep into a semester. I think the problem owes quite a bit to the structural design of most rhetoric classes, which initially emphasize summary and other descriptive modes over analysis: hey teach students to map then, shortly after ask them to hypothesize.

This semester, while teaching my 309: The Rhetoric of Independence, I opted for a somewhat different approach. Because many of the students in 309 have tested out of the department’s Introduction to Rhetoric course, I wanted to be sure to provide all of the students with a basic background and vocabulary in the discipline before we moved on to our particular subject. In order to do this I designed a heavily abridged version of that introductory class which fit into two 75-minute classes. Of course, two class periods can hardly equal the scope and depth of 306. Nevertheless, collapsing 306 into such a small space allowed me to experiment.

My first decision was easy. Instead of moving from summary to analysis I would instead begin by glossing over the critical vocabulary (ethos, pathos, logos, etc) used in analysis and then move into their argumentation around their subject’s rhetoric. We spent some time applying this vocabulary in a variety of exercises which asked students to engage deeply with advertisements (both political and commercial). After about 45 minutes the students had a pretty good sense of what to look for and we moved on to the second step. Here I began with a simple conceit. After watching a Romney political add I announced to my students, “One rhetorical function is more critical than all the others.” I then divided them into groups and had them work on figuring out which was the “correct” element. Then, as the groups presented their findings, I put them in conversation with the discordant opinions of their classmates and allowed space for rebuttal. By the close of the second day of classes, just about everyone had a strong sense of the elements of a work that were “fair game” and how to build an argument around those elements.

Still, they had yet to put it into writing, and I was unsure what text I should assign them. I knew I wanted it to be a print source. Though videos, photographs, and print advertisements teach easily, they engage with a different subset of skills that can leave a student off-balance when he or she encounters a knotty print source.

And then I read Putin’s op-ed in the New York Times (which can be found here). With all the art of a first-year rhetoric student, Putin drowns his audience in panoply of argumentative ploys. There is almost too much fodder to wade through, and, what’s more, it’s rendered in a crisp style that hardly makes it beyond its 2^nd page.

What’s more, the ongoing crisis in Syria is so confounding, morally ambiguous (and frustrating) that forcing students to anchor their arguments at the level are argumentation comes as relief. “Don’t worry guys,” I told them at the end of class, “you don’t need solve the problem on the ground, just on the page.”

Embodying a Controversy

Axel Bohmann — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Axel Bohmann

Image Credit:

Art E. Rial | Body Worlds 3: The Thinker

This summer, my parents asked me to review an article they were writing for a handbook on systemic counselling. The topic was using the body as a resource as well as an agent in problem-solving strategies and decision-making. Mom and Dad wrote the interaction between cognition and embodiment (and their fundamental inseparability), the bi-directionality of psycho-somatic processes, etc. All of which I felt was very interesting, but at the time seemed slightly too obvious to really excite me. But as I think about my teaching this semester, I keep coming back to the issue of embodiment and I realize that, yes, I have been aware of it for quite some time but, admittedly, have failed to … well, embody what I knew.

An example from the rhetoric classes I teach (it's intermediate level this semester, but I speak mostly from my past experience with introductory courses). In these, each student has to select a controversy to map, analyze chosen positions in depth, and finally take her own stance. One of the key realizations I want students to make is that a controversy is much more multi-faceted than “pro and con.” To that end, my students get to use a number of tools for visualizing the relationships between individual stakeholders when they work towards mapping their controversy (color coding, mind mapping, etc.). Students typically find these quite helpful.

Yet as they begin defining and verbalizing their own position, I've noticed there often is a relapse into the two-camps model. And I as the instructor am probably not innocent in that regard. An exercise I've been doing at the beginning of Unit 3 (constructing arguments) serves as a good example: this is only a slight variation of the split-the-class-in-half-then-debate exercise I am familiar with from high school. There are three groups and each gets assigned one position in a given controversy, usually with the third group mediating between the first two. They get into three different corners of the room and rhetorically batter away at each other (well, there is a reflection part to it, too, but that just as an aside). I think it's quite telling that the third group often ends up aligning more or less with one of the first two and feels like they argue that group's point only less decidedly.

The problem is that this splitting up into distinct blocks with predetermined position glosses over a lot of the nuances students have learned to identify when mapping and analyzing controversies. It presents positions as fairly unitary and static, and puts direct argumentative confrontation center stage.

This semester I hope to use space, movement, gaze and posture in better ways to help students navigate their controversies with more flexibly and elegantly. I'm not sure about the exact details yet, but I am thinking about smaller group exercises where each individual has an assigned set of basic beliefs and a goal expressed in proxemic terms (e.g. “try to get Kim to stand as closely to you as possible” or “separate Max and Kabriesha as far from each other as possible”). I would probably have each group member put forth an argument in turn and have everybody else react to this argument physically (by moving away from/towards others, directing their gaze one particular way, etc.). The goal would be for students to see that their arguments influence everybody in the controversy, even the ones that do not move, since the constellation inevitably gets altered. Also, this could be really helpful in getting them to think about navigating multiple audiences: convincing one group without agitating another, for instance.