Rhetoric

I'm pleased to see that the new issue of Lore is out, which features the Digressions section on academic blogging. I've got a brief essay in there, and if you'd like to respond to it, please feel free to do so here. I'll probably be posting responses to some of the other essays here too; I don't have time right now to read them, but several of them sound intriguing. I'll probably start with Dennis's piece.

UPDATE: Responses from Torill and Kristine.

At AoIR 2003, in a roundtable on qualitative internet research, Annette Markham said (my paraphrase):

We need to place our research in history; ahistoricity is a problem. Go to other researchers' work even if you're working with a new technology--other researchers have already thought through epistemological and theoretical problems.

A sensible statement, one to which I don't think many people would object, but still, I came across a nice illustration of this claim and would like to share it. Rhetoric, Community, and Cyberspace, an article about MOOs, was written by James P. Zappen, Laura J. Gurak, and Stephen Doheny-Farina, published in 1997, but based on research they did in Fall 1994 during a ten-week colloquium in the Diversity University MOO. It struck me that one could pretty easily substitute the word "weblog" for "MOO" in this passage, that the issues and questions raised continue to be quite relevant (last paragraph of the article):

Traditional rhetoric focuses its attention upon a single rhetor (or perhaps single rhetors each in turn) seeking purposefully and intentionally to persuade an audience within a single community upon the basis of shared beliefs and values. We found in our colloquium in the MOO a kind of rhetoric and a kind of community that seem to us to be quite unlike anything that we see in the mainstream of the tradition--a rhetoric and a community characterized by a multiplicity of languages and perspectives and a consequent challenge to the rhetor to find the opportune moment to enter into and influence the course of a discussion. Though we recognize the current limits to the access and use of this technology, we nonetheless believe that the MOO has potential to become a contemporary rhetorical community--a public space or forum--within which local communities and individuals can express themselves and develop mutual respect and understanding via dialogue and discussion, and we believe that the graduate students who participated with us in our colloquium demonstrated this possibility through their own positive action in making this space their own. Given the potentially global reach of the MOO, we also believe that it has potential not only to transmit information across time, space, and cultural differences but more especially to provide a forum for dialogue and discussion among people of vastly different cultural backgrounds and beliefs, to become, if we choose to make it such, a contemporary rhetorical community in cyberspace.

How is it that I lived my entire life except for the last 2.5 years in the south and never heard or even heard of Leroy the Redneck Reindeer? My attention has only been brought to the song today by Joanne Jacobs and Joe Kelley, who point to a controversy surrounding the song; a school in Texas is planning to perform it in the Christmas show, and a parent -- the white mother of a biracial child -- is complaining, citing embedded racism in the lyrics. There is, for example, a reference to a Confederate flag. Jacobs and Kelley reacted the way one might expect given their political affiliation; they're disgusted at what they perceive as PC's having gone too far. I find a couple of things interesting about this case. First, the Houston chapter of the NAACP is apparently supporting the parent, Jennifer Scott. Second, the story doesn't really give us any context, and I have all kinds of questions that need to be answered before I can form an opinion about this case. Is this boy the only child of color in the school? If not, can we assume the other parents are fine with the song? Have the children already been rehearsing the Christmas show and singing the song? Has the singing of the song contributed in any way to the little boy's getting teased (which I can imagine would be heart-wrenching for any parent, so perhaps she was desperate for recourse?)? Putting the song aside for the moment, do the school and its employees have a history of racist remarks and practices? Are any of the parents of the other children members of the KKK, and do they feel that their views are somehow approved by the inclusion of this song (yeah, I know that's a long shot, but I'm wondering)? How are the Civil War and the Confederate flag presented to the children in history class? And so on.

Oh yeah, and Charlie has just upgraded me to Drupal 4.5 (thanks, Charlie!). I'll have this default template for a while until I can carve out a little time to tweak the style sheet.

Just a quick blink to point out Foucault Studies, a new electronic journal through the Queensland University of Technology. The first issue is up, and they're accepting submissions for the next.

Check out this piece by Nicole Converse Livengood of Purdue University, written for Linda Bergmann's Writing Across the Curriculum seminar. It's a good prolegomenon-style essay, especially for people who don't know a lot about weblogs and would like to explore their potential uses in writing classes.

I love Joni Mitchell so very much. I wish I could listen to her all day today, but duty calls and writing deadlines abound. Oh well, today in class we're going to be discussing Mr. Kang Goes to Washington, and I'm looking forward to it. I hope it will be a good way to reflect on election rhetoric at a certain level of remove, being that it's Clinton/Dole and not Kerry/Bush.

I've been preoccupied with revising my teaching philosophy statement. I had one that I wrote during my

master's program, but I've lost the file, and I'm sure I'd cringe if I could see it now, anyway. I've

attended these kinds of workshops

on how to write a teaching philosophy statement, but I remain unsatisfied with the statements they advise

us to write, and indeed with how a lot of people not associated with these workshops advise graduate

students with regard to teaching statements. Often the teaching statements I'm talking about are more like

leadership statements, consisting of not much beyond

href="http://trc.virginia.edu/Publications/Teaching_Concerns/Spring_1998/TC_Spring_1998_Chylack.htm">first-order principles

; they're mostly "what I do in the classroom to accommodate diverse learning styles"

and not very philosophical at all with regard to rationale. I'm interested in creating a

discipline-specific teaching philosophy statement (and maybe that's one of the problems with the teaching

philosophy statement workshops I've attended: They're trying to teach people in many different disciplines

how to write a teaching philosophy). One key variable here is the fact that in my department, there's an

emphasis on a high level of consistency across sections of first-year composition. In fact, at each of the

three schools where I've taught, there have been certain books, topics, and genres I was required to

assign, and I guess it'll be that way wherever I go in the future too. My point is, I don't know how much

of my teaching philosophy is going to be a retroactive justification of what I already do, and how much

will be a vision of what I'd do were I given free reign (and what would I do? I don't exactly know.).

Before I haul off and write a teaching philosophy, I have to think through the have-to/would-do issue and a

few others. Here I'm trying to survey writing pedagogy from a distance and figure out what I'm aligning

myself with, what I think is worthwhile and effective. I'm only raising questions and problematizing terms;

no answers here, sorry. First, there's the murky idea of "good writing." What's that? What definition do I

agree with? I only bring it up because it's an obvious goal of rhetoric courses, which reminds me: If

possible, I want to have a coherent teaching philosophy I can implement in first-year composition, public

speaking, and technical communication classes. What is "academic discourse," and is it an acceptable term

to use? Sometimes I get the sense that it's verboten. "Academic discourse" has been criticized for being

disconnected from experience and the personal and being positioned outside of students' grasp, both in

terms of accessibility and potential for authority and ownership. It has been characterized as language

that is hegemonic and elitist, marginalizing women, students of color, and working-class students. Some

have questioned its value in the "real world" for students who don't plan on going to graduate school.

Okay, so we have the tricky terms good writing and academic discourse. I'm going to hit pause

on those for the time being and turn now to what I consider the most important question my teaching

philosophy statement should answer: Why? What do I think is the architectonic principle guiding

college-level writing? Is it to prepare students to get a job and enter a corporate setting? Is it to

prepare students to be informed, ethical, articulate citizens of the polis? Are these two mutually

exclusive? (No, not at all, a point made quite well by

href="http://www.slimcoincidence.com/blog/archives/000481.html">one of Krista's mentors

.)

If the goal is to help students become informed, ethical, articulate citizens of the polis, this goal can

be embodied in any number of assignments and curriculum designs, such as: letters to the editor, service

learning projects, visual rhetoric assignments such as posters, flyers, etc., research papers on current issues, new media work like

href="http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~edbauer/blogs/jenny/archives/001063.html">documentaries

about the

city, raps in the style of

href="http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Why-lyrics-Jadakiss/D51CB439F9F5669748256EAA0005A88C">Jadakiss

' "Why"

or

href="http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/I-Can-lyrics-Nas/27BA8A58E4406BED48256C93000A5718">Nas' "I

Can,"

and the work on sentimental discourse that some of my friends in literature are doing (which is

great stuff, and I have an aside on it). I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. Even the

much-maligned "critical pedagogy" works in the service of the citizen goal, as does the personal essay,

which I'll readily admit despite

href="http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/archives/2004/11/15/assignment-sequences/">my reservations

about

it, and I know I'm being a real crabcake in that thread. :) Which curriculum designs and assignments do I think are the best suited to meet the larger goal?

These are the questions I'm thinking about so far. I know I'll need to speak to the implementation

of the philosophy with descriptions of exercises I do in class, and I need to discuss other issues too, such as authorship, collaboration, audience, and my use

of weblogs, which I intend to foreground. Any thoughts to help me? I'd appreciate them.