Crosswhite, Wallace and Heard

    This week’s readings challenge us to break through conventional barriers in curriculum design, argument and in our role in the drama for social justice.  I had to think twice about how I think and act to “the other,” and this is making me question what I’ve come to accept as justice.  In “Repositioning Curriculum Design,” Matthew Heard offers a re-working, in a sense, of Wiggins and McTighe’s “essential questions,” asking us to re-imagine curriculum planning as an opportunity to problematize our thinking and our students’ thinking, rather than, in Brock Dethier’s words, simply trying to “keep your boss happy.” ( 318)  As intriguing as Heard's ideas are, I have to say: easier said than done.  My limited exposure to departmental politics suggests little leeway for personal idiosyncrasies and probably even less when it comes to stepping outside the lines of curriculum expectations.  Nonetheless, several of Heard’s innovations, like “goal-free” evaluations point to a brave, new pedagogy, if and when a teacher has the job security -- and the temerity -- to test conventional limits.

    In The Rhetoric of Reason, James Crosswhite derides traditional argument bereft of emotion, “free from the limitations of culture, politics and commitment.” (41) Instead, he argues for a reconstruction of the theory of argumentation because the conventional assumptions -- that if we could “put aside our strong feelings, . . . our gender, our nationality and ethnic identities, . . . then we could reason our way to agreements” -- in his view, aren’t working. (44)  Of course, it’s hard to argue against Crosswhite's stand on argument.  If our own stalemate Congress weren’t enough validation, just look (if you dare) at the fifty-plus years of dead-end debates between Israel and Palestine (not that you can do so without discussing the sugar-daddy behind the curtain).  Unfortunately, Crosswhite, in this first chapter of his book, engages us only in the problems of traditional argumentation, leaving us to wait for better solutions.

     Like Crosswhite, David Wallace defies conventions that threaten to make us less human.  In confronting discourse in general and the Composition discourse community in particular, Wallace, in his article, “Unwelcome Stories,” takes issue with the pretense that we are to, quoting Lynn Bloom, “‘avoid any suggestion that there’s a real human being’” relating real experiences in our writings and general discourse. (545)  Rather, Wallace champions our rights to speak from a place of truth -- especially on behalf of the marginalized -- despite the dominant politics of the Composition community that both question and resist such daring.  Where Crosswhite puts his faith in fighting for social justice through a reconstructed approach to argumentation, Wallace  advances, quoting Royster, “cross-boundary discourses.”  If I understand correctly, this means to engage the powers that be, addressing issues that have for too long gone unaddressed -- particularly the dominant’s self-satisfied view of itself as the only view, which marginalizes all “others” without regard.   Wallace augments this concept to point the finger at himself as well.  Thus, while he’s a gay man, he takes significant pains to point out his own limits of understanding when discussing a colleague who is both gay and Black.

     You have to hand it Wallace for making the noble effort to “go the extra mile” to understand someone whose shoes he’s never walked in before.  While it’s hardly fair to compare Wallace to Crosswhite since, the latter has yet to unveil his methods fully, for me, it’s hard to deny that Wallace’s approach may well bear more fruit in the long run.  If I get the gist of Crossman’s stance, a re-vamped apparatus of argumentation is what’s needed to bring humanity together.  I’d put my money on Wallace’s take, if only because it’s the only thing that’s ever worked for me: making the effort to try to see another person’s point view.  Unless I’m missing something, this is the first step toward real empathy.  The Spanish-speaking world has an expression that goes far beyond “I’m sorry” and would seem to be the ideal path toward bringing disparate individuals and groups together: “Lo siento” or “I feel (your pain).” 

    As an embarrassingly flawed human with many years attempting self-reflection toward bridging the gap between me and those around me, I appreciate these intellectual moves toward reconciliation.  By themselves, however, I wonder if they can bring us any closer to a sense of justice or peace.  Rather, I worry that they are essentially intellectual moves when what’s needed is spiritual reflection.  Given, such a discussion is probably deemed as controversial in academia as Wallace’s discussions of race and sexuality.  Nonetheless, from my experience, I can’t imagine real success in “cross-boundary” discourse without the profound benefits of coming to know myself, my flaws, my potential, in an ongoing examination of how I communicate -- and sometimes mis-communicate -- with others.  Otherwise, all to often, I end up blaming “the other.”

    Of course, when it comes to developing a system of rhetoric for working out fair play, Wallace is right.  Self-reflection is only the first step in any pursuit of justice.  Beyond recognizing my own fallacies and "the other's" innate values and rights, we need healthy communication skills that center discourse on justice and clarity, and reduce the common human habit whereby I find my foot in my mouth once again.  Wallace's most important point, it seems, is that "language and rhetoric are never neutral" (553).  Never?  But we've come so far!  Some fifty years after the Civil Rights Amendment, Wallace reminds us that there's a "real danger in congratulating ourselves on what we have achieved and failing to continuously attend to our complicity in maintaining the discourses of power." (549)  Maintenance is the key word, I think.  Given that improvements have been made, the job is never over.  Maintenance of our discourse is particularly at issue when speaking/writing to/about the marginalized, as Wallace offers: "I want to show engaged respect for wisdom drawn from experiences with marginalization that I have not lived; I want to seek out both what is common in our experiences in speaking and writing from the margins as well as what is different." (551)  He's taking a stand for something too few of us consider: that the battle of equality is never over and must be attended to in every conversation we have, every paper we write, and to do so, this must be an active pursuit, a seeking out.  Thus, conscious mindfulness is essential for social justice because, while there's no substitute for spiritual self-reflection, for most of us, it doesn't occur to us to self-reflect on matters we consider to be "wrapped up" and laid to rest.

     Repeatedly, Wallace brings up the disturbing notion of universal complicity, that we're all implicated in this interchange.  For me, this comes to a head when Wallace refers to Malea Powell, a Native American, who denounces the dominant discourse for its core imperialism.  When it comes to complicity, I wonder who can finally escape the brand of "imperialist" in this country -- except perhaps those who actively educate themselves and others and resist it.  No doubt, Powell is right on the money with his indictment.  Post-WWII liberals sometimes scratch their heads in disbelief at the atrocities in Vietnam or Iraq or CIA assassinations in Central and South America, but, in fact, this is only good old-fashioned Yankee imperialism, born in our North American land-grab, bought with the blood of Native Americans and slaves, an imperialism just raising its head again after a pretense of nobility during WWII -- a war whose start, we now know, was funded by American corporations with full knowledge of the Oval Office.  At the heart of our grand ole tradition of imperialism is the ignorant American who prefers not to know what's going on and looks the other way (an apt description of myself for too long).  Of course, this is central, again, to Crosswhite and Wallace and Powell's appeals for communication and justice because no bridges can be built between us and "the others" so long as we are ("blissfully") unaware of their lot, or if we are so brainwashed with a jingoism that drains us of all humanity that we grow self-satisfied with the narrowness of personal achievements and material accumulation, resistant to the work and the risk of becoming informed about our own complicity.

Mirror, Mirror

When I compare the content of my blogs to those of more daring students, like the esteemed Mr. Fimbres, Ms. Solis or Mr. Luckett (I never knew the world of medieval monks could be so fascinating!), I’m struck by the self-confidence and exploratory nature of their blogs, and, by contrast, the play-it-safe conventionality, of mine.  I appear to have a need to “color within the lines” compared to some more freewheeling writers, who may or may not feel impressed to address the readings head-on.  I suppose that, after diving into the readings rigorously, I use the blog to sum up my impressions in a sometimes predictable fashion, compared to those who use the blog as launch pad, testing the boundaries of the genre.  While I admire these artistic and philosophical departures, I don’t see myself moving in that direction any time soon.  If the shoe don’t fit . . .
    When it comes to speaking back to the writings, if I speak out too negatively, I find myself wondering if I’ve taken too much license, letting my emotions cloud my judgement, to extent that I might have missed essential content.  Yet, when I read Gabriela’s blog last week, as she lambasted a few of the readings, I cursed myself for missing the rhetorical points she found so jarring and objectionable; her points were so insightful, I wondered for a moment if we’d read the same articles.  Nonetheless, while I was writing, I was certainly sincere in my enjoyment of the articles, especially those building curricula from happenings on the Web. 
    I’ve often thought of myself as reading the world with a critical eye, a bit like the late George Carlin questioning everything he would see.  But this class is informing me that I have a long way to go in terms of truly analyzing rhetorically.  In my second rhetorical analysis, for example, while I feel I’ve come a good distance since my first paper, my weak spot is not extrapolating far enough, not exploring, in Gerald Graff’s words, the “So What?”  I guess there’s no better exercise to build that “muscle” than rhetorical analysis and revision.  And blogging in good company.

Above and Beyond Either/Or

     They say it’s unbecoming to gush, but I have to say this week’s readings were the most interesting and most applicable I’ve read in some time -- great!  As we’re all moving toward our final rhetorical analysis projects, it seems fitting that these four articles are models of rhetorical analysis.  At the same time, I enjoyed the common thread of “back-and-forthness” that they advocate as a rhetorical tool and as a dialectical spirit. 

For Jackson and Wallin, what’s needed in our teaching of argument is more argumentation, that is, focus on the dialectic process.  They point out that we can ask our students to write for the imaginary audience, as Ong suggests, but, in the age of YouTube, this methodology is quickly being outmoded by interactive technology that our students are already using.  While the Internet has its share of drawbacks -- anonymity that can give way to mistreatment of interlocutors -- the authors recommend a “crosspollination” of thought (380), a back-and-forthness to develop “hybrid writing activities,” (391) borrowing from in-class rhetorical techniques and YouTube debates, like the one the authors analyze rhetorically following the Andrew Meyers tasing at the University of Florida.  I think this is one of the most exciting ideas I’ve ever heard of.  I enjoy blogging and occasionally responding to colleague’s blogs.  But, as a teacher, I can see where a “hot topic” could capture a kind of passion that probably only comes from a current event.  In the same way, Alex has a found a way to do that that gets his students involved in critical thinking and social action through local metropolitan politics.  We can all take a lesson from Alex, I think.

There’s a back-and-forthness as well in Wang’s vision of blending Chinese and Western feminist thought to create a new hybrid form, gleaning the best aspects of each.  Where Western feminism has a tendency to argue in a strictly binary us/them fashion, still Wang finds some aspects useful; while initial Chinese feminism was loaded with paternalism (written by Chinese men), she’s not throwing it out completely either.  More representative of her tack, the article deals primarily with the development of Chinese feminist rhetorical terminology and the rhetorical analysis of Chinese feminist rhetoric as represented by authors Chen and Yang.  I found it unusually open-minded of Wang that she refuses to fully embrace the us/them dichotomy of Western feminism, along with what I understand to be the feminist ambivalence toward women’s role as mother and/or wife.  From my experience, having come of age during the 70s and 80s, educated women that I knew, whether or not they called themselves feminists, generally rejected traditional women’s roles out of hand, often disparaging women who would “settle” for motherhood as “baby factories.”  (In truth, I have no concept of the current feminist platform on this subject, so things may have changed.  In fact, until I read Kirsch and Royster, I was under the apprehension that American feminism had faded out.)  By contrast, Wang finds Chen writing vigorously to propose new, positive, creative roles for women in the home and beyond.  This I find both brilliant and common sense, the opposite of an either/or mentality which, in my experience, has the potential for frustrating men, women and the children they’re raising as well, especially contributing to eroded self-esteem for husbands and sons and a lack of intimacy between husband and wife.

Kirsch and Royster present a rhetorical analysis of American feminist writing, at the same time focusing on the back-and-forthness of dialectics to raise the bar on re-examining feminist literature, to take it beyond “the three Rs -- rescue, recovery and (re)inscription.”  (647)  Their method involves a closer look at the writings and the women who wrote them (“tacking in”) and pulling back to view the subject from a broader perspective (“tacking out”). (649)  Perhaps equally important, they say their methodology is built on the give and take of the personal, “paying attention to . . . intuition and sensory experiences,” e.g. Malea Powell’s visceral reaction to the writing of Charles Eastman, on one hand, and examining artifacts with professional scrutiny on the other (657).  I found this passage moving, not so much because of the emotional impact, but because Kirsch and Royster are broad-minded enough to embrace the value of “intuition and sensory experiences,” which strikes me as one of the truly feminine qualities inherent in human beings.  Though we all possess it, for me, women have this in an abundance.  By contrast, I can’t imagine any male organization insisting on such a feature as fundamental to their methodology.  I salute Kirsch and Royster who, like Bo Wang, choose to include this archetypal -- not stereotypical -- feminine element, rather than mistakenly diminishing their femininity by too keenly emulating men, who by and large, don’t even acknowledge such a trait.

If there’s a back-and-forthness to the Enos and Borrowman article, it would be in the subject matter.  Like Jackson and Wallin, they’re inspired by the possibilities of using the Web to teach composition, so, by definition, there’s a built-in interconnectedness, though, where the former method teaches students the concept of audience, the latter teaches ways of establishing ethos for online sources.  Spotlighting Arthur Butz and his Holocaust denier friends’ websites, the Enos and Borrowman illustrate both the challenges of ascertaining online authors’ credibility and various techniques for discerning the legitimate from the fake.  Going back to the topic of our final rhetorical analysis project, this article cleverly models a variety of ways some websites pull the wool over the eyes of the less than savvy.  More than a precautionary guide for our students, we can probably all benefit from paying attention to these subtle ploys in the era of the hyper-slick online ruse.  We would all do well to read this again to soak up the insight, from the rhetoric that avoids even discussing the Holocaust to the false assumption that Butz is on the level just because he’s a prof at a top university, to the other impressive-looking websites he’s linked to.  I imagine there must be hundreds of charlatans on the Internet -- OK, thousands!  If that’s depressing at first thought, it’s a reason to smile in that they all provide opportunities for us to teach this invaluable critical thinking skill to our students, using their tricks as teaching material.

I’m curious: What do my colleagues think about feminism these days, and in what ways is it important in their lives?  To what extent have they been shaped by feminism?  Which has had a greater role in shaping who you are today -- feminism or the Web?

Audience & Agency

    This week’s articles raise some complications and point to opportunities for classroom applications as well.  Principal are the notions of audience and agency -- what they imply generally and specifically for FYC writing.  As Michelle notes, Goffman goes on for many pages about various forms and functions of talking.  While I, too, found this less than fascinating (am I his intended audience?), I have to concede that complicating our thought on audience, to some degree, is exactly what our students need.  Initially, I feel, most novice writers tend to have either no perception of audience, or perhaps a vague, simplistic concept, which can lead to vague, simplistic compositions.  On the other hand, while it’s healthy to stretch our minds to consider the 31 flavors of speaker and audience, I’m actually more reticent to push students too far in this direction, to the extent that they freeze up -- exactly the opposite of where I want to take them.
    The more I read Goffman, the more it occurs to me that we both talk far less and far more these days.  Increasingly, we have less occasion to speak face to face with colleagues, friends or even adversaries, in part due to electronic media, in part because we’re all so busy.  Even in Congress, where a few years back they installed closed-circuit television cameras, I understand that representatives more and more are avoiding debate on the congressional floor, opting instead to receive speech summaries from assistants who take notes from the CCT.  At the same time, nowadays, everyone’s multitasking, returning phone calls or texting while driving; makes you wonder how Western Civilization ever got along without the smart phone.  Is all that purposeful talking or are we hooked on them like sex addicts chasing sex?  Potentially, all this intercourse (!) could be positive for our students, ever mindful of audience on some level.
    When Goffman downplays the legitimacy of TV audiences, calling them merely “vicarious” because they cannot interact in real time, I feel the writer does his own theory a disservice.  His article is truncated at best if his intentions are limited to speaking.  Certainly this is exactly the scope of his paper, but, for our purposes, his thoughts merit broader application for the classroom, which begs our re-imagining the his points for the written word.  If he calls the TV audience vicarious, this is only one step better than those out of earshot, relegated, as he says to “unratified” listening.  For the student writer, considering audience means considering the ratified as well as the unratified, that is, if we’re willing to truly lead them down that rabbit hole.  As general communicators, this notion of the unratified raises the sobering subject of uninvited readers taking in social media -- like this blog! -- though, the more we know about government surveillance, the more likely it is that the uninvited invite themselves on a regular basis.
    Kershbaum raises the thorny issue of feeling like a failure in communication when our audience rejects, not only what we’re saying, but who we are as agents.  He refers to Hockenberry’s misadventure with a woman who rejected the way he represented himself as disabled: “I did not realize I was part of her own confrontation with the experience of disability.”  At first, his urge is to foist his agency upon his audience: “...I am John!...You must deal with me as I think of myself.”  (58) At length, he sees that communication is not so simple.  This again complicates things for our students.  Just when they were settling into a solid understanding of the writer/audience relationship, the author defines rhetorical agency as “a negotiation in which individuals do not have full control of their own identity.” (60)  Like Kershbaum, students are apt to find this disturbing at first, but it may be useful as a pre-lesson to peer review work, where some students are often dismayed by their peers’ apparent misinterpretations.  Ultimately, language and meaning are never neutral, but are socially constructed.  As a teacher, I need to take this as a caution as well, when reading a student paper, not to jump to conclusions about the content in writing simply because, initially, it represents “facts” differently than I’d preconceived them.
    Cooper offers a similar lesson, namely not to presume that we have the answers, though I feel she shoots herself in the foot by using Obama as the personification of this concept.  Cooper’s perspective of refraining from a rush to decision can be richly instructive for student brainstorming and, again, for me to keep myself open to options in the classroom.  I like the way she makes her point by citing Cass Sunstein, a close friend of Obama in law school, who says of her pal, Barack, “with Obama, it’s like Learned Hand when he said, ‘The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’” This is a spirit worth emulating, from the science lab to the English class to the floor of Congress.  For young writers, it forces them back to seriously re-consider their opponent’s counterpoints, an essential step for successful argumentation.  In the case of the president, however, especially now, as this former anti-war candidate marches into battle while flatly ignoring the polls that overwhelmingly decry such bloodshed, it’s truly difficult to imagine a character who has turned his back on Cooper’s idea of open-minded dialog more than Barack Obama. 

On the Border

It’s weird how I feel empathy for Villanueva much more than I do for Noe.  Or for Grant.  With Noe, I put myself in the teacher’s position, a position that is fraught with responsibility to assimilate or acculturate students into academia, with all of its Western culture implications.  I don’t have a problem with this, at least not from a teacher’s view.   If I were a student living and studying in France or Russia or China or Brazil, I would assume that my success in that society would depend to some significant degree on how well I mastered the discourse; it would serve me well then to try on the clothes of that university, that culture, that nation.  My understanding from language learning is that language reflects a culture.  If I try to communicate in Spanish using American idiomatic expressions, I will generally fail.  Success depends on both my mastery of the language technically and my understanding of, and blending into, the culture.  If this is true for me, then this would seem to hold for my students as well.  Moreover, I feel I have an obligation to help my students to fit into the garb of the university and the garb of the culture as much as I can without asking them to compromise unduly.  How do we decide where to draw the line?  We need to dialog about it together.

On the other hand, when I read Villanueva, I see the issue from the side of the minority student being forced to speak the dominant language.  Why is this?  Perhaps it’s that Villanueva expresses the awkward hybridity of assimilation that leaves people feeling “tonto” or foolish.  I feel empathy for such people because I’ve felt “tonto” myself so many times.  This feels human, vulnerable and three-dimensional.  On the other hand, Noe celebrates the myth of the trickster, much as Grant celebrates the trickster Ehu and the Signfyin(g) Monkey, the evil genius archetype, not a three-dimensional human.  This means, in the words of Grant and Noe, that minority people’s best tool is the rhetorical technique of double-talk, pun and the put-down, all of which seem to set up the minority student in an adversarial role in relation to the dominant society and, it seems, to the teacher.  Personally, I don’t need to feel I’m an educational savior, but I’d really rather not have to assume my students deem me Satan from Day One, and are trying to put one over on me.  Maybe I’m taking Noe and Grant too personally, but that’s my take for now.

On the other hand, Villanueva makes an excellent point that our assimilating students tend to be filled with “anger like Levia or resignation like Rodriguez” (though I’ve read Rodriguez and, to me, he didn’t sound resigned so much as divided).  Clearly, if our students are truly arriving in class angry or resigned, then we need to give them opportunities to express this, and this needs to be acknowledged as part of the classroom reality. 

As a teacher, I suppose I feel deeply, awkwardly tonto myself when confronted with imagining an open-minded solution that embraces all cultural variations in writing yet guides students responsibly into mastering compositional skills needed for college and beyond.  I suppose the best I can do, as Noe says, is to create a classroom that is a border and not a boundary.