The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Six: Rhetorical Community

We are training writers in our classrooms. We are teaching students how to engage in public discourse. Or are we just assigning essays?

This week’s reading on “Democracy’s Lot” by Candice Rai looked at some of the physical spaces where rhetoric happens. Her book focused on one neighborhood in Chicago where the dual struggles of gentrification and affordable housing are at odds with each other. While published in 2016, the topic of democratic debate in community spaces seems especially timely for 2020. In her conclusion, Rai muses: “As ancient rhetoricians attested, the best way to arm a citizenry against the pernicious use of rhetoric is to train people in the art of rhetoric.” This is our role in teaching our students composition, we are preparing them to enter into public rhetoric.

“Democracy’s Lot” focused on areas of debate in Uptown. The future use of a vacant lot, the subjects of murals in public spaces, and the presence of day labors looking for work across from a U-Haul location all led to engaged debates in this community. These are the types of debates our students will encounter in real life. On a large scale, these are the conversations happening all over the United States in 2020. The role of modern police departments, the usage of racist and stereotypical images on products and as mascots, the existence of statues and monuments honoring slave owners, confederate leaders, and those responsible for genocide are all topics in the public forum this year.

Rai writes:

“Given the complexity of rhetoric, discovering the available means of persuasion, as Aristotle defined rhetorical invention, calls for immersive methodologies and the inhabitation of the sites of rhetorical production where one might study the places of invention.”

In the current movements we are seeing, the “sites of rhetorical production” are the streets being physically occupied, the ongoing occupation of which has given a physical presence to the words of protests that have been shared for years. Black Lives Matter is not a new movement, the arguments over the mascot of the Washington football team are not new either. There have been protests for both of these movements over the years with little results. It took a cold-blooded murder caught on camera and literal riots to enact positive change in these areas.

Rai also writes that:

“Therefore, if one is interested in the power of language to do things, one might shift focus to understand the nature and qualities of the forcefulness and consequences of language as the primary object, of which “truth” of an argument need not factor into its power—or, at any rate, is but one concern among others.”

While this quote focuses on the power of language to accomplish things, the physical act of occupying space lends additional weight to the words being used. Rai makes note of this too in her discussion of “positive loitering” which was used to impact day laborers in Uptown. To send the message to the day laborers that they were no longer tolerated, the neighborhood CAPS organization used as many bodies as they could to send the message. Rai quotes one homeowner from Uptown as saying:

“We’re sending them the visual message [through positive loitering] that it is not just me…but it’s this group of people, it’s the police, it’s someone from the Alderman’s office occasionally, it’s U-Haul, it’s Public Storage, it’s the car dealership over there, it’s the hospital. Everybody is not ok with this and we are all standing here hanging out letting them know how many of us there are…It’s the whole community. And that’s been shocking to them because they assumed it is one or two people who just stared out their windows and called the police all day, and I think they were a little surprised by that.”

This is how the current Black Lives Matter movement is gaining so much traction. The murder of George Floyd was outrageous enough to provoke large-scale public outrage, enough outrage that it led to action in the form of people taking to the streets, enough people to make public entities realize that this movement is more than a passing fade or a few outraged individuals. And while many of the positive changes that have occurred so far may seem superficial (see ya Aunt Jemima) they are reflective of a large-scale shift in public opinions. The meaningful change of policing reform may still be a long ways off, but these smaller changes still matter and reflect larger changes to come.

I’m thinking also of the very public actions that many cities have taken to paint the words “Black Lives Matter” on the streets. While such an action is largely symbolic, it is still meaningful. Rai writes of murals and other symbolic statements:

“In this sense, icons, like topoi and rhetorical structures more generally, are such powerful tools in everyday democracies because while people can access them within their idiosyncratic and situated contexts of everyday life, they are also tools that transcend the details of those contexts, which means—among other things—that they can resonate broadly, forcefully, and flexibly across social space and political positions.”

Let’s end by reflecting again on the “power of language to do things.” Even in cities where the leaders prefer to paint the words “Black Lives Matter” before actually crafting policies and protections designed to save Black lives, will the words alone lead to a change of attitudes and beliefs of those who drive over the words daily? Are words here enough? (I mean, obviously not, but is it enough to start with?)

And how does all of this apply to the composition classroom? I think it’s important to craft assignments that lead students to a growing awareness of the community around them and the dialogues that are already taking places so that our students are better prepared to join in such dialogues.

This is my last “official” post as the Comp/Intent blogger. I will be posting reviews of each of the books I’ve read during this class to Goodreads. Hopefully as I continue to read on my own more posts in this series will follow. Thank you for reading along.

The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Five: Community-Based Composition

So…service learning…community literacy…bringing the classroom into the real world. Engaging students with community-based writing projects can show students the meaningful impact that writing can make. It can also show them real world applications for what they are learning in the classroom, taking the learning from theory to practice. But what does it mean to provide students with real world writing experiences?

In “Tactics of Hope” Paula Mathieu gives some great examples of what not to do in planning for community-based writing experiences. It is far too easy for professors and universities to establish relationships with outside organizations which only benefit the university. These are often shallow, short term relationships with no history or mutual goals. Mathieu even cites examples of students being sent to outside organization with no prior understanding being established. One of the many challenges of community-based writing projects is the academic calendar. Outside organizations do not operate on a semester-based system, and trying to fit a meaningful writing project into a semester is both challenging and somewhat artificial. Mathieu states that “Writers working in the public realm often need a long-term vision to get a sense of the impact of their work.” Often a commitment beyond a semester is needed to see progress with such programs.

Another challenge that is seen in community-based writing projects is that the university, and by extension the student, is seen as the expert and the community is seen as somehow deficient or in need of fixing. Such centering of the university is why “service learning” leaves such a bad taste in the mouths of organizations. Mathieu spends a great deal of time explaining that these organizations and the people in the community have their own expertise and knowledge that should also be centered and honored. She says:

“The value in all of this work is to create relationships that not only claim reciprocity in a general way, but create bodies of knowledge that undercut elitist notions that frame communities, especially in urban areas, as sites of problems that only academic experts can fix. Tactical projects prioritize and exchange of skills or ideas over ameliorating a problem.”

In other words, students are coming to partner and to learn versus to teach or fix. I can imagine how, in certain situations, some students could eagerly try to take on the role of the expert rather than as a partner or even as an assistant in such relationships. Such an action by a student would lead to failure, and the relationship would not produce what it might otherwise have accomplished.

This concern is elaborated on in another work, “Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement” by Linda Flower. She writes:

“Community members typically exist as participants in social projects, not as partners with expertise who must be respected as agents in their own right. So to the extent that such partnerships are diminished—and people from mainstream and elite circles become experts, leaders, directors, service providers, and tutors—the possibility of a community for inquiry with others, across difference, evaporates.”

What might students be striving to do instead of usurping the lead in such projects? Flowers writes that “The community literacy I am hoping to document is an intercultural dialogue with others on issues that they identify as sites of struggle.” Mathieu’s work reflects on the ideal working relationship as well. The term “tactical” is used throughout “Tactics of Hope.” Mathieu uses the phrase first coined by Michel de Certeau. Of tactics, Mathieu says that “Tactics are available when we do not control the space,” and that “Tactics seek rhetorically timely actions.” Combined these two brief descriptions leave one with a clear idea of action in an unfamiliar area. Mathieu further states that: “A tactical academic balances personal convictions with close connections and dialogue about the work he or she does, not to arrive at final answers but to build some useful projects that hopefully will do good work in the world.” This gives any community-based service project a very clear goal and a pragmatic focus.

This is an active, engaged form of rhetoric. Flower writes “If rhetoric and composition is to achieve the personal, public, and social significance to which the field lays claim, it must recover the practice of “doing” rhetoric in its wider civic and ethical sense.” She continues: “The rhetoric of making a difference demands more than critique from academics or conventionally acceptable prose from students; it required an audience-attuned rhetoric, capable of turning critical reflection and personal exploration into rhetorical action.”

What does such action look like? We often think of writing as a disengaged action, and we often teach writing to be separate and free of the personal. Strict academic writing tries to eliminate the personal altogether. But for community-based literacy projects to be effective, they must embrace the personal. Flower writes:

“But for disenfranchised groups, denying one’s identity as a working-class student, an inner-city African American, or a migrant laborer denies the reality of social difference, of power, and inequality—the very issues these groups want us to see as public concerns. When a discourse insists its members suspend, ignore, or neutralize the identities of women, workers, peoples of color, gays, and lesbians, it effectively removes those realities from deliberation.”

What does this mean for my writing classroom? I feel that while community-engaged learning can be an important addition to some composition classrooms, I feel it doesn’t really work with the time constraints that I work under as an adjunct professor. However, I still feel like I gain important and validating tactics from these readings. At the community college I teach at, as well as the university I teach at, my students are the disenfranchised public described by Flower. They are working students, first generation college students, immigrants, first generation American, they are multilingual students, they are a diverse mixture of students that I am privileged to teach. These two readings reaffirmed for me the importance of empowering students to write what matters to them, and to use their voices to promote positive change in their communities.

The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Four: Teaching in the Time of Covid-19

The reading for class this week was about service learning, which is awesome, but the reading triggered other thoughts for me, so I’m going to save service learning for another post.

Upstairs my eleven-year-old is playing “Phantom of the Opera” loudly on the Alexa. She’s supposed to be unloading the dishwasher, but she’s playing with the two-year-old. I can hear their conversation from my desk. A few feet from me sits my oldest, age fourteen, who is practicing Spanish on an app on her phone. Behind a closed door my husband tries to work, the nine-year-old is with him playing on an old Nintendo 64 we dug out of storage for the pandemic. Somewhere there’s a six-year-old, who knows what she is doing.

In the introduction to “Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment)” Anne Frances Wysocki quotes the following from N. Katherine Hayles: “In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment.”

Once a student sent me a long email as I was getting ready for class. He was in a terrible car wreck, there were fire trucks and ambulances, the other driver was injured, he was waiting to give the police a statement. There was no way he’d make it to class. He named the intersection of the accident; it was right on my route to campus. I responded that I understood, of course, and told him to be safe. As I drove past the intersection five minutes later, there were no signs of an accident of any kind. I received another email from the student saying thank you, and that he was still waiting to give the police his statement. I didn’t feel angry, but it made me question every student sob story I received after that.

In our reading this week, “Tactics of Hope” by Paula Mathieu, she quotes another work, an article called “The Sites of Pedagogy.” This article argues that “pedagogical theory premised upon the classroom as a constant is no longer acceptable…We must learn how to adjust our pedagogy to account for the changing nature of the classroom.”

Later this month, I will learn what the fall will look like for my children. My oldest is starting high school, and really wants the whole high school experience. I don’t know what that will look like for her.

My fall is online. At one college I will be teaching asynchronously and will post video lectures and announcements to try to form some kind of connection. I will have phone conferences with students for ten minutes each twice during the semester during which I will quickly give a run down of how to improve their drafts. I will never see these students. For the other college, I will be teaching synchronously over Zoom, three classes back to back on Saturdays. I will smile big, maybe even put on lipstick and a nice shirt. I will wave goodbye emphatically. I will struggle to connect over video conferencing, to feel a connection. My husband will try to keep our five kids occupied and quiet.

In “Writing Bodies: Somatic Mind in Composition Studies” Kristie S. Fleckenstein says that “The need to control the degree of disruption in a physical writing scene evolves with the belief that an academic must shut out life, must separate the life of the work from the life lived, the body from the mind.” But such separations aren’t really possible now, are they? Any barriers students or teachers had erected between the “life of the work from the life lived” are gone during this pandemic.

During the spring semester, when everything moved online and I first tried teaching over Zoom, I had one student who would take his dog on a walk during class each week while using his phone to Zoom with us. I would watch his head bobbing with his strides and the sky above him as I tried to keep my train of thought delivering the lecture I usually gave in a classroom with white boards and physical space to pace in, to students sitting still paying attention.

Mathieu goes on in “Tactics of Hope” to say of “The Sites of Pedagogy” that “Pedagogy, they argue, must be attentive to individual “sites of pedagogy,” which they define as “the locations of pedagogical address,” the “spaces in which interactions between teacher and student occur”.”

There have been several articles about what the fall semester will look like, what different colleges are doing. Colleges and universities are special spaces, providing students and faculty alike with spaces to inhabit for teaching and learning. At my community college, there is a library reading room with windows overlooking the lake. At my university, most buildings have public work spaces. When I was attending community college, I lived with several loud roommates in an apartment. I used spaces like these on my college campus to study and prepare. Having that college space was invaluable for me as a student. Now as an adjunct professor, I still use such spaces for office hours, for grading, for meetings with students, for writing my nonfiction books. I love my home, it is loud and chaotic and wonderful, but it’s not the best work environment. And while I always do a certain amount of work from home, I still rely on my campus time for a bulk of my work.

Mathieu continues to quote from “The Sites of Pedagogy”: “While it may be obvious that pedagogical processes are affected by the setting in which they occur, we understand far too little about this relationship to be able to maximize its learning potential. Gaining a better understanding of the sites in which we teach and learn is critical to improving education.”

What will a return to college mean for students who will not have college spaces to occupy? Even with limited reopenings, campus spaces will not be what they are usually. The library will not be a space to linger, nap, socialize, work, it will be a space to quickly get in, get materials, and get out. The eating areas will likely stay closed, the tables will stay empty. The study nooks and work spaces will be unoccupied.

“In order to empathize with someone’s experience you must be willing to believe them as they see it and not how you imagine their experience to be.” -Brene Brown.

I normally get a certain number of emails from students in crisis each semester. My two colleges are unique: each has a large number of multilingual students, of first-generation students, of working students. I love working with these students, they remind me of my college experience: I was a first-generation working student. But these students face unique challenges. Since we moved online mid-March, I’ve had more panicky emails from students than usual. I’ve also had more students disappear than usual. I’ve reaching out, but received crickets in response. I had a student explain she can’t write at home because of domestic violence, I’ve heard of relatives dying, I’ve had several students become the sole breadwinner when family members lost jobs. I’ve had a student in health care share than she’s now working sixty hours a week, up from her usual twenty. I’ve taught online before, this is not online teaching. The space our classes occupy has fundamentally changed as all spaces have changed due to this pandemic. Even if I get a class on campus, I won’t use the space the same way, I won’t move in the same way.

Does the erosions of boundaries force us to pursue a more embodied way of teaching and learning? How do we adapt our pedagogy to this new space? I have so many questions about what we are doing, and how these readings connect to teaching and learning during this pandemic.

My goal in this blog is to bring the readers concrete advice for teaching. Here’s my advice for teaching during the pandemic:

1.      Believe your students. Even if you’ve been lied to by students before, believe them now. We all need more empathy.

2.      Forget the syllabus. Okay, no, not completely, but when it comes to all your carefully crafted policies and penalties, consider ways to be more flexible with those. Read through your policies carefully and consider reframing them. How can we help our students navigate this new space with all the demands that come with it?

3.      Just as you strive to care for your students, care for yourself. This fall will not represent your ideal work environment. The space you teach in will be far different for both you and for your students. Acknowledge that, and find ways to live with that.

Granted, some students will opt to put college on hold, but many will not feel like this is an option. College has become a critical step for beginning careers and building a future. This current situation is no one’s ideal. We owe it to our students to try to make navigating this new learning space more comfortable for them and for us.