iRhetoric: A New Media Approach to Teaching the Classical Rhetoric Course
The roots of composition stem from Classical Rhetoric with the Sophists in the fifth century B.C.E., followed by the great teacher Isocrates, the idealist Plato, the systems theorist Aristotle, and otherpractitioners to spice. Classical Rhetoric courses typically trace rhetorical theory through Greece into the Roman rhetoric of the statesman Cicero and the educational psychologist Quintillian. The classical system includes the stages of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. And teachers prompt student discussion on concepts like stasis theory, commonplaces, kairos, true and false rhetoric, phronesis or practical wisdom, the topoi, the appeals, how classical inventio differs from its modern sense, neoclassical applications of the classical system, and how the seemingly disparate twin legs of Plato and Aristotle come together in St. Augustine’s Christian rhetoric to form the perfect rhetorical conceit. Teachers also focus on the social functions of Classical Rhetoric’s emphasis on deliberative speeches, forensic speeches, and epideictic speeches. The deliberative is the political, the forensic is the legal, and the epideictic helps the audience understand and celebrate the present. The Classical Rhetoric course emphasizes the situational and the contextual, and this is what contemporary composition theory concentrates on, as well. It’s the rhetorical triangle. There it is: Classical Rhetoric in a paragraph. Simple.
Why, then, was I so concerned when I was asked if I wanted to teach Classical Rhetoric at the graduate level for the first time? In the words of the first XXX, “I live for this sh*t.” iRhetoric. I wanted to revisit classical in depth again. But many of the core concepts of Classical Rhetoric are rooted so deeply in contemporary composition praxis and theoretical approaches in the field of technical communication that they’re often rendered tacit by students. The distinction between true and false rhetoric, for instance, is regularly dismissed as Truth vs. rhetorical persuation. But the distinction in the classical sense is more complex. Graduate students often teach the process of writing in their own teaching as a specific set of stages. But in many ways classical rhetors were far more post-process than new teachers today. There is no one right way for classical rhetors, including Plato, yet it’s our job as teachers teaching teachers to teach them how to teach in the right way. And while there are some similarities between classical and contemporary cultures with socially-constructed meaning making and networked communitiesthat have their own power structures, my students’ lives are a far cry from the city state structures and family values of enlightened Ancient Greece and the powerful yet fleeting state of Rome. Invention for classical rhetors is more like selection than coming up with something new. Stasis for us often means the status quo, but for ancients it referred to coming to a point of disagreement where arguments could then be fashioned. My own department—including faculty and graduate students—have yet to find a static place for critical questions of disciplinary and professional autonomy and committee work. Place in the classical sense is an enlightened location where people argue to make new understanding. And commonplaces in classical rhetoric are more like ideas assumed to be true that are shared in common. Commonplaces is another word for Starbucks for my students, the local brew pub, or most swanky spots with free wifi.
In the chapter on graduate student and teacher preparation in What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain challenges teachers to “think for a moment about the kinds of questions you ask yourself when you prepare to teach” (48). He suggests that what students are to learn, and what learning they’re to transfer, should be among the highlights. Goals and objectives and measurable outcomes. Nothing new. But, as Bain suggests, there are also tactical considerations. “How can I best facilitate these discussions and collaborations? What kind of groups will I form or encourage in the class? […] Am I prepared to make changes in individual class sessions or in the whole course to connect with my students?” (54-56). These are principles of good teaching, yes, but they’re also principles of good classical rhetoric. In this course I’d need to integrate these concepts because all of my students would be teachers, themselves. That would need to be the heart of the matter, as David Smit puts it in The End of Composition Studies. My course would need to teach both specific and generalizable knowledge. As Smit notes, “We get what we teach for. And if we want to help students to transfer what they have learned, we must teach them how to do so. That is, we must find ways to help novices see the similarities between what they already know and what they might apply from that previously learned knowledge to other writing tasks” (134).
Oh, and did I mention this typically-scheduled 18 week course was to be taught in 8 weeks? And did I mention it was to be taught online with new graduate students in a new Ph.D. online program in Technical Communication? Where to begin?
Collecting
I collected syllabi from courses I took as a graduate student in Classical Rhetoric, from scholars whose work I respected, and from every teacher who has taught Classical Rhetoric before and has left their syllabus online. I found most teachers approached the course through the lens of teaching the dialectical and rhetorical divisions of Classical Rhetoric while working through pertinent rhetors chronologically. I even went back to the courses I took as an undergraduate. The very first course I took in college, Philosophy 101, used a book by Thomas Nagel called What Does it All Mean? I re-read it. On page 5 it says, “The main concern of philosophy is to question and understand very common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them” (Nagel). I believe in that. And a more recent book I was devouring by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson at the time, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, went a step further:
Perhaps the oldest of philosophical problems is the problem of what is real and how we can know it, if we can know it. Greek philosophy began with that question. The issue for the Greeks was whether, as Greek religion assumed, our fates were ruled by the whims of the gods or, as Greek philosophy asserted, our capacity for reason gave us a sufficient understanding of the world to survive and flourish. (94)
The philosophy is emebedded in the cultural realisms of the day. If many of the core concepts from Classical Rhetoric were taken from granted by my students, I began to think, I could use that. How did they know what they knew? This was the question the Greeks were asking, too. But epistemology itself is difficult to untangle, especially in an online class. Lakoff and Johnson write of Plato’s concept of Not-Being, for instance, which I knew I would have difficulty explaining online, this way: “degrees of knowledge arise by combining the Degrees of Being metaphor with Knowing Is Seeing: Your degree of knowledge depends on the degree of Being of the object of knowledge. This establishes a correlation between degrees of Being and degrees of knowledge” (367).
Good god.
I collected every “Plato in 90 Minutes”-like book I could, read those, and quickly found they said little that applied to what I wanted to say. The Introducing graphic novels on Plato and Aristotle, however, are quite good and I resolved to include them in the required reading list. I pined away through the collections of Classical and Roman rhetoric texts at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon. It was my former home away from home in grad school, and there’s something central and home(r) to Classical Rhetoric that takes you back to your roots as a teacher and scholar. D’oh. That was my second realization. I could use my making our tacit assumptions about core classical concepts itself an example of knowledge-making that was essentially what classical rhetors were doing, and second, I could highlight that classical is central to who we are as teachers and citizens today. It is our home. I re-read the central texts on Classical Rhetoric like those by Kinneavy, Enos, Moss, Rorty, Farrell, Berlin, Vitanza, Foss, Kennedy, and Crowley. I re-read the primary texts typically and atypically covered. I thumbed through more recent issues of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, Written Communication, and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. I looked online at the web resources of scholars like Lee Honeycutt at IowaStateUniversityand Collin Brooke at SyracuseUniversity. I started to collect what I would later call “Userful Perusings” on my course site;the best of the best links out there such as Wikipedia, timelines, core concepts, key principles, bibliographies, and critical essays. I later asked my students to do the same.
But collecting taught me that I would need to invent my course in the classical sense. I had to be selective and choose decisively, or better yet, I needed to create a system whereby my students could be selective. I wasn’t envisioning a “choose-your-own-adventure” course, exactly, as there are core concepts to cover, but it needed individualized post-process-like entry points for students to slip into the knowledge and try it on for size. I needed an apparatus or structure. I needed something that built on the style that would reach my highly-achieving students. I needed something that would push the delivery envelope and would be interactive, as situation and context undergirds classical thinking. I needed something that would provide core concepts in ways that students would apply personally, perhaps uses in their own concurrent teaching, and remember.
I didn’t have the experience and intellectual strength—and perhaps still don’t—to teach it in the way that makes the most sense to me: backwards. If “Where do our ideas come from?” is the central question of the course, then it seemed logical to me to begin with the end in mind. What do we know now? Where did that information come from? Start with St. Augustine and look at his rhetoric. He included both the ideal and the systematic. Tease back where those to threads come from. It makes more sense to me to move in that direction rather than chronologically, but in a fast-paced online course, starting where most people start—the Greek city state structure and oligarchy and the need for lawyers—seemed easier. I chose the chronological root, but I used new media tools in ways that classical rhetors word: the medium and the message is the message.
The Sophists
Xxx
Userful Perusings
Kathy Yancey’s mantra for portfolios is collect, select, and reflect. My “userful perusings” are my selections for the course. But they are post-process selections.
Requirements
Xxx
Reflection
xxx
Works Cited
Bain, Ken. What the BestCollege Teachers Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004.
Brooke, Collin. “Collin vs. Blog.” SyracuseUniversity. June 20, 2005 <
Honeycutt, Lee. “Lee Honeycutt’s ePortfolio.” IowaStateUniversity. June 20, 2005 <
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. NY: Perseus, 1999.
Nagel, Thomas. What Does it All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Smit, David. The End of Composition Studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.