Question: In what ways do you use principles of rhetoric in your teaching, research, service, and/or grant writing today? Where might some of those principles come from, historically?
This is a difficult question for me to answer because I have so little formal instruction on rhetoric; however, I will do my best.
At the start of class, Dr. Rice wrote that we should think about these five things, which I will focus on in my personal reflection:
1. audience awareness (core to rhetoric)
2. critical thinking (also core)
3. diversity/multiculturalism (including non-Western approaches)
4. grammar/style
5. communication as a part of grammar/style
Audience awareness and critical thinking are the most important to me in my job. These are things I utilize on a daily basis both for myself and for my students. Our new curriculum for both our Composition and Advanced Composition classes are really founded on the idea of writing to a particular audience, so I emphasize that a lot. For me, this involves addressing ethos, pathos, and logos, along with logical fallacies (in the Advanced Comp classes only). I try to get students to think about who they are writing for so that they can then think about what that audience already knows, what they need to know, and what they will be resistant to in the student's argument. This is something we work on in various stages throughout each eight week class. (It's definitely not long enough, though - not by a long-shot.)
Thinking about audience also necessitates critical thinking. Thinking about what their audience needs is intrinsically linked to their thinking about what they want (and need) to say, how they will say it, and how they will respond to what others have to say. I always try to push my students to think beyond their current positions, and they do the same for me.
I used to more explicitly discuss diversity and multiculturalism in my classrooms, but now that I teach at DeVry my curriculum is mainly prescribed, so I can't bring in my own interests. However, as a professor I experience this facet constantly. We have a very large population of Hispanic and Hmong students in Fresno, which is reflected in our classrooms. Many of these students grew up in California, but some did not. Regardless, most come from first generation homes and, therefore, are straddling two worlds. Even if a student is fluent in English, she has varying expectations between her home life, her academics, her work life, and her friends. I have seen this cause much tension as students try to fit into one community, but fail because they are using the discourse of another. Or I see students who have been told their own language/discourse doesn't matter or that because they are back with Standard Academic (White) English, then their ideas are poor, too. The unspoken rhetoric of many higher education institutions is definitely that our (White privileged Standard Academic) ways are best, so you'd better figure out how to master those. Since my campus is very business-focused, I hear this subtext a lot. This is why I want to focus on making the online classroom environment more equable for those who do not embody this privileged stance (that we often assume is not privileged, but expected). But I digress.
Aside from my work with my students, I clearly use audience and critical thinking to do, well, everything! I know when to keep my mouth shut, what language to use, and when to be passionate about certain issues by understanding my audience. I view with a critical eye just about everything I read and see, scanning for logical fallacies and mentally tallying all of the holes in the arguments I see presented. I have a gut desire to rage against those who set up double standards for anyone they see as "other," and see out others who are writing/speaking against discrimination.
Now for where this stuff comes from, right? The only rhetoric course I took was my first one back in the summer '13 semester with Kristen Moore. I didn't really think of it as a rhetoric course because we focused more on learning what publics are and are not, but after going back through some of my notes I see that it actually was Public Rhetorics, but we never really talked about rhetoric. It was all about defining publics and understanding how they can be used to understand other things. I know that the idea of rhetoric goes back to Aristotle, and that he identified ethos, pathos, and logos, but that's pretty much it. Habermas writes about interlocutors - who is qualified to be one and in what context one becomes one - but that seems to have more to do with authority than the actual rhetoric. Honestly, this is why I'm taking this course. I thought it was more of an intro to rhetoric class, but most people seem to know a lot more about this than I do. I know I'll leave this class being able to write the heck out of this second question though!
