Professor Responses to 1302 Students

One of the core critical pedagogy is to have professors listen to students, instead of merely talking at students. Freire's explanation of the banking model is especially important for often marginalized bodies, such as community college students, where MA or PhD professors have assumed they know everything, and essentially steam roll though lecture and course schedules. After this natural disaster after the tropic storm #Harvey, I found most students dazed anyway, and then coming into a course called "Rhetoric and Composition" further surprised that the professor actually address rhetoric and composition studies. This is partly a failure of the college, which does not really teach rhetoric and composition studies in the 1301 course, which I argue is often an institutionalized language control instead of kairotic choices.

Regardless, after Day 1, the students had many frustrating questions about a hurried introduction to the term "rhetoric," and this post attempts to respond to some. I also acknowledged that our second meeting was much more successful after I read the student comments, let the students digest through the ideas, and warm up to each other as they build more confidence to bring their ideas to the meeting. Students must talk to each other, the professor must listen and learn from students, and then collectively, we build each other and protect each other.

1. What the heck is this thing "rhetoric"?

I'd first disagree with some summaries. The discipline of rhetoric is not fragmented, but it certainly is expansive and my professional colleagues are very, very busy looking at multiple rhetorical frameworks. I feel that some of the confusion is the pop culture term, where "rhetoric" is seen as "hot air" or useless, or even deceptive. Another problem is that many professors -- in Literature and History -- often never studied Rhetoric and rely on very limited and European models, often limited to a few terms such as logos, pathos, and ethos. This is not the whole of rhetoric and any limitation in a college discussion is both disservice to the academy and to the students.

Rhetorician John Lucaites gives a better, contemporary understanding of rhetoric, emphasizing relationships of individuals and society, mediated through communication:

Rhetoric was not a practice that culminated in the amassing of objective knowledge or the generation of purely abstract theory, but was rather a performance that needed to be interpreted and evaluated in particular, interested local contexts. 

If we see that rhetoric is a system of choices by both the author and the audience,then we see that the student's own cultures and local contexts can provide more critical awareness of "interpreted and evaluated" texts. Instead of merely looking at logos, pathos, and ethos, we look for the text's history, circulation, silences, credibility, and how communication is always and increasingly a threat to oppress others. As some students emphasized, rhetoric is pervasive, universal, but often unrecognized, like fish in water.

When students choose not to speak in the classroom, this is a performance and the other students interpret and evaluate those silences. Similarly, when students bring their own life histories/languages/experiences to the classroom, then other students and the professor interpret and evaluate those discursive acts, and this is rhetoric. Our class studies specifically multiple rhetorical acts in Aldine so that we capture a "real" local context, then I hope students will practice public sphere rhetoric in all communities. Silence is death.

2. What did students struggle on Day 1? 

I found the most intriguing question, "How do some people never change when disagreements?" Sometimes, this is because someone is locked into what is called "bullshit rhetoric" where they no longer interpret and evaluate the discourse and evidences. I've written elsewhere about bullshit rhetoric, and we should be very aware of bullshit in community colleges -- both with adolescent students who are really inexperienced with multiple ideas, but also fossilized professionals who are too comfortable with their ideologies without exchange. 

But another reason people don't change their ideas is because they don't need to. If we start with unnecessary choices -- is flour tortilla vs maize tortilla choices -- these are neither interpreted nor evaluated. These are merely tastes and this discussion may might be a distraction, but truly irrelevant to saw public issues. But when our preferences are beyond taste, and they go into ideologies -- such as religion, beliefs of "truth," and what is a civil society -- some people have entrenched themselves too much of the body. In other words, some people see their history as a component of their body's past and future. When the body is threatened, people stop using emotional and cognitive strategies to change. 

For example, pre-war Germans had a very powerful ideology with alternative histories, religion conflating with politics, and idealized bodies that allure entire populations to argue that X is truth and X is beautiful and therefore we must do X, including militarization, conquest, oppression, human enslavement, and more. But after the war, most Germans reviewed their history, their politics, and the visual of brutalized bodies. Within years, even decades, most Germans would never consider discourses of white supremacy and state-sponsored executions. But this national rhetoric could not have changed without a massive framework and paradigm shift. 

My students are not Germans stuck in their ideologies from 1930s and 1940s. But I do find students locked in their bodily ideologies because of

1. Lack of experience of alternative discussions, with people from other religions, different bodies, and different languages and histories. College should help students listen to other stories and learn. If we cannot do this in a rhetoric course, I have failed.
2. Perhaps more experienced than adolescents, but still been very strongly steeped in single ideologies, including adoring military, white nationalism, and the cult of Texas exceptionalism. When students are steeped in discourses such as K-12 schools and the military, they have been listened to a single story, often rewarded through peer pressure. Here, the best resolution is to truly embrace an alternative story, such as engaging with Muslims, pacifists, migrants, and translingualism. 

We should know that the college will not do this for the students. Students must go out of their comfort zones and college is one of the last chances we will have this before we get locked in the corporate world, which is another regressive ideology. Leaving comfort zones and engaging contact zones (Pratt), students will live critical rhetoric and strengthen both in the academy and in the civic sphere.

Follow Professor Martin's Twitter account for more resources on rhetoric, writing, and local resources.

References

Lucaites, JL and CM Condit (1999). Contemporary rhetorical theory.

Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 33-40.