Blogging Pedagogy - politics

Thank You, Mr. Putin

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

Author:

Cole Wehrle

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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.”

Over the Hedge with Nate Silver and Jacques Derrida

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

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

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.

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!

That, Those, and the Other

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

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

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?

The End-of-Semester Talk

Jay Voss — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:05:50 +0000

Author:

Jay Voss

Image Credit:

Storyful.com

Towards the end of the semester, I always like asking students to reflect upon what they have learned and to assess the value of it. This is probably a fairly standard practice – I remember teachers doing it to myself since second grade – but it seems more necessary in these days of budget cuts and attitudes fostered by entitled entertainment. Big pictures are good, especially when you’re teaching rhetoric to a room full of science and business majors. The moment for this reflection always comes at that point in the semester (for myself and my students) inwhich work isn’t divinely inspired but rather fragmented and hurried, an ethic not necessarily lending itself towards deliberation. This semester I was just thinking I’d have the moment with my students during the last week of classes, before they ran off to jump their last hurdles of library books and/or end up in the pool. But then a cup of coffee got me thinking.

I was at Starbucks and had just read Paul Krugman’s recent column, “The Amnesia Candidate” (22 April 2012). The article is a thoughtful evaluation of Mitt Romney’s most recent campaign rhetoric, and is especially efficient in the way it attacks the former governor for blaming some of Bush’s legacy on Obama. While Krugman does concede that Obama could have handled economic matters differently, he ultimately concludes by asking “Are the American people forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work?”. This is a complex question. You hear cynics complain all the time that American voters have a 6-month attention span, which is often compromised by consumer culture’s narcotization. I think this is probably true to a degree, but how could it not be given technology’s onslaught of information? It isn’t so much a question of whether or not voters can recall that Romney’s speech was given in a warehouse which was shut down during the Bush years – to suggest as much is to blame the average American voter for not having the mind of a Princeton professor, which would be ignorant. “Work” here, it seems to me, is a question or whether or not Romney can emotionally engage his base. The more that Americans are thinking critically about their environment, the more likely they are to realize (not remember) that the president has very little to do with the economy.

This got me thinking about the goals I set for my own students, as well as why the University of Texas might require first-year non-majors to take a basic composition course. I investigated Romney’s rhetoric a little bit, found a new TV ad that advances his “Obama Isn’t Working” slogan and sought out the warehouse speech that Krugman takes him to task for. I printed out eighteen copies of Krugman’s Op-Ed and was ready to have “the talk” with my students. The discussion opened with a general discussion of what they learned over the course of the semester, which as a group they had no problem recalling all the various concepts. It was hard for them to contextualize this learning, however. Obviously, some said that it’d help them write better in the major, etc. But not a one of them could tell me why such a course was required at a public university, nor why Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin insisted upon similar programs of study when they founded the universities of Virginia and Philadelphia.

We started with Romney’s latest TV ad. The students had a lot to say about how it resembled a movie trailer, and how its particular unemployment statistics for North Carolina weren’t necessarily impressive (“that’s only the amount of people that can fit inside the Longhorns football stadium”). When we got to Romney’s speech, my students nailed most of the points that Krugman makes in his Op-Ed. The only point of Krugman’s they didn’t get to was the question of whether or not “the American people are forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work.” My students weren’t eligible to vote back when Bush was in charge, and I got the impression from them that there were more important things in high school than reading the morning paper. And who am I to blame them for this shortsightedness? Romney’s attack wasn’t working here not because they remembered enough of the past to see its fallacies, but rather because they were thinking critically about their environment. I passed around Krugman’s Op-Ed and they saw that collectively they’d reached his conclusions. Now asked again what they learned over the course of the semester, the answer was obvious and apparent.