[Teaching_Composition] Rhetorical analysis of scientific research report

[Neal Lerner]

Russ, that's a powerful story.  One thing I'm struck by is not how  
that group would come to their conclusions as influenced by the Swift  
Boat Veterans, but that there was no consequence one way or the other  
of their final document, no larger arena of ideas to which it would  
need to withstand scrutiny. I agree that it wasn't necessarily the  
role of instructional staff to challenge the ideas in the final  
document, but the artificiality of most classroom writing situations  
(and yours is a wonderfully crafted task) precludes pushing student  
work out into a more public realm.  There's no guarantee, of course,  
that the public realm would offer the kind of challenge you were  
seeking, but I'm wondering how potentially the rhetorical situation  
could have been made that much more complete.

Neal Lerner

On Oct 6, 2006, at 5:10 PM, Russ Hunt wrote:

> Like Irv, I suspect, I've really been trying to find a way to avoid  
> this fascinating and powerful discussion . . . and I've now  
> capitulated, partly because yesterday in the hard mail I got copies  
> of an essay I wrote which ends by describing an incident that seems  
> to me at the dead center of what we're talking about. I didn't know  
> what to do then (though I made a decision) and I still don't.
>
> It's at the end of a piece I wrote about "authentic" teaching.  It  
> recounts an incident where a group of students were investigating a  
> historical incident where people's beliefs were challenged or  
> changed. They'd started by looking at John Kerry's testimony about  
> Vietnam in 1971, but their progress was (I thought) derailed by the  
> Swift Boat Veterans' Web presence. I resisted telling them what I  
> thought of the Swift Boat Veterans, preferring to try to create a  
> situation in which they'd discover the "truth" (as I saw it). They  
> never did.
>
> A fuller account is here:
>
> http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/authcons.htm#knot
>
> I've been thinking hard about this in the light of this discussion.  
> Any thoughts anybody has will be welcome.
>
> -- Russ
>
> Russell Hunt
> Department of English
> St. Thomas University
> http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/
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