Blogging Pedagogy - ethos

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.

Self Disclosure in the Classroom

Laura Wallace — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 22:10:11 +0000

Author:

Laura Wallace

Image Credit:

bighappyfunhouse.com

Full disclosure: this blog post may include some self-disclosure.

Although my Rhetoric 309K course, Rhetoric of Confession, obviously revolved around public self-disclosures, I did not require any public self-disclosures of my students beyond whatever they chose to reveal in their Learning Record self-assessments and self-designed assignments. Nevertheless, when I tell people about the course, usually the first thing they want to know is whether any students confessed "anything weird." They seem to assume, perhaps from reading my academic work and my Tumblr, that my classroom would be a kind of group therapy session with feelings flying and uncomfortable revelations spilling out all over the place. In actuality, only a few students ever made their own confessions, and most of those happened on paper, only seen by myself and a few classmates. I told my Confession students almost nothing about myself.

Returning to the literature classroom this fall after two years of rhetoric, I was assigned to teach E314V: Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture. Talking to professors and other graduate students who have taught identity-based courses, I heard over and over again the idea that "it's all about the text"--that we should discourage discussion of personal experience because student discussions should be grounded in the assigned texts. Focusing on the text is important for a number of reasons, but for me, the most important may be that while the text's accessibility may vary from reader to reader, if everyone in the room has read the same text, it's the object from which the discussion springs (I'll save the literary theory for another day). The text is the closest thing we have to common ground in the literature classroom. I don't want personal experience to be a bar to discussing it, nor do I want anyone to feel put on the spot because of personal experience they do or do not have. We can all read the texts and interpret them: let's start there. This is what I told my students on the first day.

I also told them I would never ask them to declare any identity labels for themselves, and that anyone in the class could be gay or straight or bisexual or pansexual or..?, anyone could be trans or cis, etc. etc. and obviously those identities inform our readings, but such disclosures are not required.

Then I told them I was going to break my own rule for two minutes. I acknowledged that, in the LGBTQ studies classroom (and other identity-based classrooms), instructors often don't explicitly identify themselves or their investments, often because they assume students will read them in certain ways. However some things aren't visible and sometimes it feels important to use our words. So I used mine, and came out as bisexual. Then I segued into some jokes and I also told them a bit about my academic work.

When I decided to come out to my students I thought I was doing it for my own comfort. At DWRL orientation, I told a friend/colleague I was planning to do it and she encouraged me, pointing out that probably most of my students have never heard someone in authority come out as bi and that it would mean something if I did. Which made it not (just) about my own comfort or credibility, but about setting a tone and creating a space. Which seems to have worked.

Although quite probably they would have anyway, several students came out in funny ways, in their info sheets on the first day, like the student who wrote "I'm also Jewish :)" or the one who just wrote, in the section where I ask if there's anything else I should know, "LGBT" with an arrow pointing to the G. A few students directly mentioned my statements, stating that they were coming out to me because I had come out to them.

Personal experience/identity has also come up in classroom discussions, with mixed results. A few examples: a student came out as straight in order to excuse her own ignorance of queer politics (and plead for enlightenment). Another student who rarely spoke in class wrote an impassioned blog post about Cherríe Moraga and the student's own experience of being Mexican American, which led her to share in class an anecdote about a friend who she believes is in the closet. Other students had opinions about this (why did she assume he was gay? because he was effeminate? etc.), which led to an interesting discussion about visibility and safety, which led us directly back to Moraga's essay, “La Güera,” which itself is a work of theory that could also be described as confessional. While at times personal anecdotes derail our conversations, and force me to ask the class, "what does this have to do with the reading?," for the most part, I've found that judicious self-disclosures by both instructor and students have made our discussions richer, helping us recognize each other as complex humans and reminding us of why we are in this classroom in the first place.

The Medium is the Mentor: How Failing With an LMS Altered My Teaching Ethos

Casey Sloan — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 00:39:55 +0000

Author:

Casey Sloan

Image Credit:

Ervins Strauhmanis

It took me a while to accept that I can never have all the answers. It took even longer for me to realize that this is a wonderful, fortunate fact. As an instructor, a tenacious part of me clung to the fantasy of a future of flawless knowledge and perfect leadership. Sure, I’d tell myself, I flail about now and again in front of my students, bewildered by a question or flummoxed by a comment I wasn’t expected, but that’s just because I’m relatively new to my course materials, to this emerging technology, to [insert convenient excuse here]. I liked to think that someday I’d be completely comfortable fielding any and all student issues and problems. I’m letting go of that idealized notion of myself as a pedagogue chiseled out of marble while embracing the teaching potential of uncertainty. I’ll tell you why.

This semester I am teaching a version of 309K and I decided to switch to Canvas for my classroom learning management system. Not only did I choose to make the great migration away from Blackboard, but I made the resolution that I would go totally digital for the first time. Papers, peer review, grading, syllabus, all of it, everything, online. Over this past summer I watched countless videos on how to run a class through Canvas, determined to be an expert by the time I asked my students to use the LMS. Of course, the first time I asked my students to conduct a peer review through Canvas, we hit a few snags. My students bombarded me with concerns I hadn’t preemptively thought through. “The prompt doesn’t say how we should use the highlighter. What do we strike through? Do we download the original document? Can we track changes?” Uh oh. I felt any control I thought I had over the experience slipping away. My teaching ethos suffered for it, and I could sense myself getting uncomfortable. That’s when one of my students asked me if he could use Word to conduct his review so that he could track his changes. “You know how to do that?” I asked. “Sure.” He responded.

That’s when I basically turned my students lose, and the results were fantastic. I asked them to mess around with the available tools, admitted that I couldn't be muc help, and encouraged them to experiment. I’m going to ask each student to give a brief presentation on the method she/he developed for her/his own peer review. Some used Word, some stuck with the Canvas layout. By letting them know that they had room to explore an unfamiliar system, without me there to tell them precisely how to use it, we were collectively able to generate a variety of ways to approach one lesson plan. When a few of my students had basic functionality issues with the site, I encouraged them to think about how, instead of asking me for the answer, they might go about answering their own questions using internet tools at their disposal.

Effectively, I’m now trying to think of digital resources as landscapes to explore, not as tools that come with definitive instructions. I’m also trying with newfound determination to foster a learning community where the members can lean on one another (and on themselves) instead of me.

Optional Collaboration and "Winging It"

Megan Eatman — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 22:21:21 +0000

Author:

Megan Eatman

Image Credit:

Screenshot from an in-class composition

I’m a big fan of "winging it" in the classroom, a practice my colleague Scott Nelson addressed in a 2012 Blogging Pedagogy post. Typically, my improvisation is restricted to my lesson plans, which I leave informal and loose so that there is room to shift gears depending on the class's needs, interests, and concerns. This semester, though, my “winging it” extended to the broader arc of the course. Once I got to know my Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing class, I rewrote their final paper assignment to include collaborative and multimodal options. The resulting projects were exciting, but that shift also led me to consider how flexibility affects student perceptions of the instructor’s ethos.

My section of Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing, a lower-division class aimed at students who already have credit for our introductory Rhetoric and Writing course, had four units. In the first two, students wrote analytic papers that discussed features of an online public of their choice; in the second two, students wrote arguments for or about issues important to that public. The third unit required students to construct a multimodal composition, and the fourth unit originally required a traditional textual composition. Normally, I would reverse those assignments so that students would have to flesh out an argument in text before writing on the same issue in other media, but I wanted their projects to be “born digital” rather than translations of existing papers. The results were good. Students turned in assignments in which it was clear that medium wasn’t an afterthought.

I had a feeling that I wanted to rewrite the Unit IV project before I saw the results of Unit III, and I had warned students (both in class and with a note on the assignment page) that the assignment was undergoing revision. But, while I wanted to offer students the option to continue their exploration of multimodal composition and produce larger, more complicated projects than they could achieve individually, I also didn’t want to disappoint students who were counting on writing a traditional, individual paper. Ultimately, I created an assignment with two options. Students could either remix their Unit III argument for a different audience and in a different medium, or they could produce a multimodal collaborative project on a topic of their choice. Since all the Unit III arguments were multimodal, an individual, traditional paper was still an option, but I also tried to facilitate collaboration. Early in the unit, I asked students shared their project ideas in small groups, and several of the groups became collaborative work groups after those meetings. Of my 17 students, nine ended up working on collaborative projects, and the other eight worked individually. Of those eight, four turned in text-based arguments.

While I was happy with this change and the resulting projects, having a collaborative option, as well as the option to do a multimodal or traditional argument, made teaching the last unit somewhat more difficult. I had to ask students to decide on a project plan very early in the unit so that I had an idea of their needs, and most classroom activities had to be tailored to have value for a wide variety of projects. For the most part, we focused on broader issues of argument construction: for example, finding appeals to suit specific audiences and anticipating and addressing counterarguments. If I were doing this sort of project again, I would have asked students to focus more on identifying the conventions of different kinds of arguments in different media and publications, because some students seemed to master some of those conventions more readily than others. Since we had already done a unit on multimodal composition, I think those activities would have been especially helpful for the students who chose to do traditional textual arguments. Spending more time discerning how an article in Slate is different than a college essay in structure, not just appeals, may not have had immediate utility for the multimodal groups, but could have still reinforced a method for understanding different rhetorical situations.

Finally, I wondered about how my flexibility in the classroom affected my students’ perceptions of me as an instructor. For me, “winging it” is the result of confidence and experience. This is a class I’ve taught before, a student population with which I’m familiar, and I feel comfortable enough as a teacher that I don’t worry about a sudden mutiny. For students, however, improvisation may make me look less prepared or less experienced because the prior experience that allows me to reconstruct assignments on the fly is obscured. That concern would not stop me from adapting lesson plans and assignments to suit the class’s needs, of course, but it has inspired me to reflect on how improvisation affects my ethos and, importantly, how it might play differently for me, a relatively young woman, than it does for some of my colleagues.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

Randall Monroe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Embarrassment to Build Trust with Students

Foley — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:41:08 +0000

Author:

Marjorie Foley

Image Credit:

Freakin' Facts

I recently had a conversation with a couple of other instructors at UT about what to do when you've realized you've made a mistake about a student's grade, especially what to do if you've assigned a grade that is lower than what the student actually deserves.

Oftentimes, as younger or less experienced instructors, we have a tendency to believe that we cannot change a student's grade for the better because then they'll always question our grading practices, and then we'll have to deal with lessened authority in the classroom and constant requests for grade changes.

In the conversation with my fellow instructors, we discussed a couple of different solutions that would be, hopefully, fair to the student. One of these solutions was to bump up other grades over the course of the semester so that the student's final grade would be what it ought to be.

The other solution, which is the one I advocated, is simply to tell the student that you made a mistake and change his or her grade. I have done this before (yes, I make mistakes!), with no lessened authority and certainly no constant challenges to grades.

Of course, I have a teaching style in which I try not to be too authoritative in the classroom--I prefer students to feel comfortable challenging what I say because I believe that voicing those concerns allows 1) students to engage with the course and learn more and 2) me to become a better teacher, a better lecturer, and a better defender of rhetoric.

I'm also a "traditional" grader--I assign letter grades to each assignment rather than using a portfolio-based review system, and then I meet with the student. It's in this process of paper conferences that the student and I have the opportunity to discuss grades, wherein I go through the paper with the student and discuss all the comments I have made, which they have already read.

Once or twice in this process, a student and I have gone through a paper together and I've wound up at the end of the conference saying something like "Wow, why did I give you a C? I'm embarrassed that I made that mistake. Here, you deserve a B+. Sorry about that." I think that's totally ok.

In fact, if you're up to date on recent research out of UC Berkeley, you'll know that being embarrassed about mistakes actually makes you seem more trustworthy to others. So, feel free to suck up your pride (or anxiety about mistakes!), act a little embarrassed, and give 'em an A. They'll certainly appreciate a better grade, and they might like you more for admitting your mistake.

Teaching Ethos with No Impact Man

Rosen — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:32:11 +0000

Author:

Stephanie Rosen

Image Credit:

Jimmy Gardner

This semester I’ve had my students teach each other key terms and concepts in rhetoric during weekly student presentations. After each presentation, I plan an activity designed to put the concepts just learned into practice, often using a text I provide or one from their research projects. I designed one such activity on “Ethos in No Impact Man” with specific attention to problems former students have had with ethical appeals. Because many students wrote incomplete analyses of rhetorical appeals, I provided guided questions which elucidated three main parts of successful rhetorical analysis. Because some students misunderstood altogether the concept of rhetorical appeal, I put students in groups so that any major questions could be answered by a classmate. And because students sometimes struggled with texts that made less explicit rhetorical appeals, I provided a text which makes many obvious ethical appeals (so many that, although each group was only assigned a two-page excerpt, no group had trouble finding examples).

These activities are often a lively portion of our class meetings, so students were already enthused when they settled down to the task. I was pleased to find that groups worked well together and stayed focused for the ten minutes they were given. The guiding questions, plus the assignment to synthesize their findings in a few sentences, gave them plenty to do. Furthermore, the fact that their sentences would go on a wiki page being projected on a screen for all the class to see kept their writing at a high level.

The most interesting part of this exercise was the presentation at the end, in which each group read its findings aloud for the class. Because everyone was analyzing the ethos of the same author, hearing all the groups’ findings yielded a very thorough and complete sense of Beavan’s ethos in this chapter and the purpose that ethos serves for the arguments he makes in his book. Sharing our findings this way also showed students how they could build up a more sophisticated understanding of an author’s ethos in their own analyses (in their essays) by analyzing multiple examples of ethical appeals in the same text.

This activity, fairly simple in assignment and structure, was successful precisely because of its repetitiveness and accumulation. Students need to hear many examples of good rhetorical analysis in order to understand how to write such analysis, just as they need a demonstration that the quantity of evidence can actually change the quality of the claims it supports.