Blogging Pedagogy - Twitter

Digital Feminism and the Bachelor

Lauren Grewe — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 16:34:50 +0000

Author:

Lauren Grewe

Image Credit:

Scott Smith

Can tweets about The Bachelor be feminist?

Throughout the Bachelor Finale and the "After the Final Rose" episode, Chris Harrison promised us, the "Bachelor Nation" an "unprecedented announcement." After much speculation on Twitter and at home, Jimmy Kimmel's gift of a steer named Juan Pablo and the coerced promise that Ashley S. would appear on Bachelor in Paradise, Chris Harrison revealed the big announcement: there would be two Bachelorettes next season instead of one, and the men would get to vote which Bachelorette would stay to the finale based on who would be the best wife. Supposedly this was because the "Bachelor Nation" was divided between Britt and Kaitlyn.

On the couch, my friend and I gasped. That's horrible! It's giving the men all the power! The point of The Bachelorette is that the woman gets to choose the men. Alas, Chris Harrison did not agree with us.

We quickly took to Twitter to read what the "Bachelor Nation" really thought. What we saw was horrified tweets from women about this new turn in The Bachelor's history. Many women saw this as a betrayal of women, letting the men be in charge yet again.

You might be wondering what The Bachelor has to do with pedagogy. Let me explain.

My experiences with using Twitter in the classroom have been decidedly mixed. I found that my students were hostile to the idea of more homework in the form of tweeting and that many of them did not already possess the social networking knowledge of how to use Twitter.

I want to use the feminist tweeting about The Bachelor as an example of the way that Twitter can build community, raise issues and promote discussion. Although there are many other examples of this that relate more closely to social justice, I think that The Bachelor tweeting will help students relate to social media in a more everyday manner.

To practice this kind of tweeting in the classroom, I will have them live tweet a short video clip like an advertisement. By honing their observations down to 140 characters, the students will learn to be precise.

While The Bachelor might not be all that pedagogical in itself, the lessons tweeted from The Bachelor may prove more instructive in the classroom than at first appearance.

Live Tweeting as Pedagogical Practice

Cate Blouke — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 17:56:36 +0000

Author:

Cate Blouke

Image Credit:

How to Live Tweet an Event with Purpose

While I've grown fairly accustomed to live tweeting at academic conferences, I took those practices into my classroom this week with surprisingly delightful results. Not only did it yield a better sense of what my students were thinking, but they also inspired at least two or three future lesson plans.

As my class is entering into a unit on design, having my students watch Helvetica was an obvious choice for the "reading" list. I could have had them watch it on their own, and come to class prepared to discuss it. Or, I could have showed the film in class without

Researching Public Issues with Twitter

Kendall Gerdes — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:21:41 +0000

Author:

Kendall Gerdes

Image Credit:

Class Twitter account, @rhetoric306, with Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (5th ed.) as background

I ask my RHE 306 class, Rhetoric and Writing, to focus their writing for the semester around a single public issue. I want students in my class to concentrate on the kinds of disagreements that, however intractable, demand a response. So I ask them to frame their issues as policy questions. As we near the time when I ask students to begin researching their issues in earnest, I've been looking for ways to improve my lesson on library research.

I usually tour students around the library website, walk them through different resources, databases, and ways to search the library site. I also like to give them an article that cites it sources and show them how to track down these sources' originals. They tend to come away from this exercise as big fans of Google Scholar—probably because it's not too far away from what for most of them is already their primary research tool: Google.

Incorporating Your Own Research

Because I allow my students to select their own topics for the semester, I often get a wide range of mostly current public issues. I'm not a news junkie, but I could be, so I restrict my news intake to my favorite cable news podcast and to Twitter. That usually gives me some broad knowledge about the kinds of topics my student choose. As I set my students to in-class exercises like practicing summaries, I like to bring in articles I find that relate to students' topics and maybe challenge their established ways of thinking.

Where do I find those kinds of articles? Well, Twitter. I've been on Twitter (@kendalljoy) for about 5 years, and because I like to read everything I've missed since the last time I checked Twitter, I like to keep the list of people I follow relatively small and manageable. That means I unfollow people I don't read carefully and add new followers only when they have consistently interesting tweets.

Twitter for Instant Research

I only just realized I've been depriving students of one of my own main research tools: Twitter. Yes, they need to learn to do scholarly research using the library resources, but this kind of research often leads to useful finds on an issue's background and history, or to relatively refined opinion writing that's been through a slower editorial gatekeeping process. They need all that. But sometimes they can't distinguish it from anything else they'd find online: daily news, blogs, etc. But that kind of up-to-the-minute material is useful, too, especially when students are writing about issues that are even now the subject of public debate and new policy proposals: gun control, immigration reform, abortion restrictions, and the like.

I'm developing a lesson plan to teach my students to conduct research with Twitter. (In a few weeks, I'll post it to the DWRL's Lesson Plans site) What I envision is a class Twitter account (@rhetoric306) and an initial requirement of a professional Twitter account (I'll allow students to use personal account but invite them to create a fresh start if they'd like); a proposed hash tag for class tweets that is short, unique, and informative; and a tweet introducing one high-quality Twitter account relevant to their topic that they'd like the class to follow. The goal will be to get students to help each other conduct current research even as they learn to distinguish between the kinds of material they'll find informally online and the more academic resources they'll need to get through the library.

Twitter Dreams

I've been looking for ways to incorporate more digital and social media into my classes, but I can be choosy about fitting the form to the lesson. I'm excited about using Twitter to teach public issues research because it feels both a little technologically adventurous and because its germane to the classroom topic. My hope is that my students will invent ways of using our Twitter network to help each other and to write that I haven't been able to anticipate.

Meanwhile, I'm drawing up guidelines to help them formally learn to use the medium and to maximize Twitter's research potential. I can already imagine the conversations we'll provoke about commonplaces, expertise, journalistic reporting versus opinion writing, and invention in 140 characters. Are you using Twitter in your classroom? What are the issues you'd want a lesson plan to address? What resources have you found for students using Twitter in class? Tweet your answers to me @kendalljoy!

Ethos, Summary, and 9/11 Truth

Kendall Gerdes — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 14:30:21 +0000

Author:

Kendall Gerdes

Image Credit:

Tweet by @AriFleischer, fmr. Bush Press Secy.

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.

Because I'm teaching Crowley and Stancliff's rhetoric textbook Critical Situations, 9/11 is a thread that runs through our class conversations all semester. The example of 9/11 is used to illustrate many of the rhetorical themes and concepts in the book. On 9/12 this year, I took an opportunity to turn my class's attention more fully to the powerful issues attending 9/11 and the conflict between the official account of what happened on 9/11 and the revisionist accounts, more commonly known as conspiracy theories. Students had read the Critical Situations chapter on ethos, and I planned the following exercise and discussion.

Summarizing: Neglected Intel

We began by reading and summarizing a NYT op-ed by Kurt Eichenwald. In "The Deafness Before the Storm," Eichenwald argues that the Bush Administration neglected intelligence information in advance of 9/11. He suggests, though he does not explicitly claim, that this intelligence could have been used to avert the attacks. In fact, in his conclusion, he claims that we cannot ever know whether the attacks could have been averted. His relies on his reading of spring and summer 2001 presidential intelligence briefings, preceding the famous August 6 briefing, that warned of Al Qaeda's intentions and plans to attack the United States on US soil. There were even arrests made in connection with 9/11 that subsequently lead nowhere. Meanwhile, neoconservatives in the Bush Administration were advocating war against Iraq, going so far as to argue that "Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein" (2). Students identified the main and supporting claims quickly--even though the article was a bit technical, it was brief.

Ethos: "9/11 Truther"

Then we shifted our discussion from summary to ethos by watching a clip from Rachel Maddow's interview with Kurt Eichenwald (question begins at 7:45). Maddow's last question for Eichenwald is about a tweet from former Bush Administration Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, in which Fleischer called Eichenwald a "truther" because of the op-ed. Maddow glosses the epithet "truther" as a charge that one thinks "9/11 was an inside job," adding "that therefore you should be dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theorist." Eichenwald accedes to the characterization of "truthers," adding to it the notion that "George Bush intentionally orchestrated 9/11," and then argues that his article is a purely factual description of the "real history" of 9/11. Eichenwald rejects the label "truther" and rebukes Fleischer's use of the epithet. After we watched the clip, I asked my students to discuss the issues of ethos at play in the exchange.

Students Respond

The first thing my students remarked on was not the way Fleischer aims to damage Eichenwald's credibility by calling him a "truther," nor the way both Maddow and Eichenwald concede that actually being a truther would have Fleischer's desired effect. It was not the way the epithet collapses a range of revisionist accounts or "counternarratives" into egregious and crazy conspiracy theory. We did discuss all those things, but the first thing my students remarked on was the damage Fleischer does to his own credibility by reacting to Eichenwald with dismissive anger, refusing to engage his article's claims. I think doing the summary exercise before the ethos discussion gave students to see Eichenwald's argument on its own terms, and not on Fleischer's. So, did they think Eichenwald was a truther?

The answers were mixed. Students agreed to the summary of Eichenwald's argument as carefully moderated; not overstated based on the evidence he cites. The Bush Administration neglected critical information in advance of 9/11. But, most students thought calling Eichenwald a "conspiracy theorist" implied a belief that 9/11 could have been stopped and that the Bush Administration neglected intel on purpose. One student was sure this belief could be fairly attributed to Eichenwald, even claiming Eichenwald's position likely meant he was not a Republican; still, the same student agreed that Eichenwald's article did not make those claims explicit.

The pedagogical goal of our discussion included but also exceeded helping students get a handle on summary and ethos. I think Critical Situations gives us examples from 9/11 (and from the early American feminist movement) as deliberately charged rhetorical examples. They are available to be worked over with our students because the controversies they inspire are still unfolding. The currency of the materials we used helped students remember the huge footprint 9/11 left on our nation's policy and on our political imaginary. My hope is that our discussion of the widely despised debate over "9/11 Truth" showed students how this debate puts one's credibility at stake as it constrains what is sayable, or hearable, about 9/11 today.

Theorizing Social Media in Pop Culture Contexts

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:22:40 +0000

Author:

Elzabeth Frye

Image Credit:

Elizabeth Frye

Social media has long stood out to me as something rhetoric instructors should discuss in the classroom. Aside from email, it is perhaps the most commonly used technology by our students and ourselves. Increasingly, it’s the medium through which we access news stories and forms of information and promotion. Yet, because it raises questions about the overlap between public and private and what’s acceptable or desired in terms of pedagogy, I’ve often hesitated to use it. I don’t necessarily want students to find me on Facebook or Twitter, and I think that most of them would feel the same way. That said, using either of those social media sites as a means of communication for my class has been something I’m avoided. While I know other instructors have used them with great results, I haven’t figured out a way to make them work for me. However, I still think they provide a significant opportunity for discussing argument and appeals.

Because I teach RHE 309K – The Rhetoric of Celebrity, it makes a lot of sense to talk about the use of social media in popular culture. Throughout the semester, students observe and analyze various sorts of media—print and digital—in which arguments are made about particular celebrities and cultural relevance. They also are asked to observe and analyze how celebrities make arguments about themselves. Because social media increasingly functions as a legitimate PR campaign for both celebrities and celebrities as businesses, examining the field allows them to think about digital ethos, argument, and multiple audiences.

I ask them to examine a celebrity Twitter feed or Facebook page of their choice and then in a developed blog post on the class blog to evaluate the celebrities’ social media presences in terms of argument and rhetoric. They consider who appears to be speaking, i.e. if it appears to be the celebrities themselves or their handlers. I ask them to think about how the celebrities imagine or gesture to a viewing audience. I also ask, what kind of ethos is promoted? Are there other rhetorical strategies being used (kairos, logos, pathos)? Are there conversations with others? Who is being addressed or not addressed? Because we’ve already dealt so much with visual rhetoric, students also examine the visual impact of the page and how it connects with the celebrities’ images in terms of other images that are circulating about the celebrities. Students also post screenshots to the blog.

In class we discuss whether there seems to be a common rhetoric and whether celebrity use of social media appears to be different from or seems to align with regular folks’ tweeting and posting. The exercise allows all of us to discuss social media in a way that preserves personal boundaries but is also directly relevant to the content of the course.