[Teaching_Composition] Rhetorical analysis of scientific research report
Laura D Card
teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com
Mon, 09 Oct 2006 18:39:44 -0600
I'm sucked in, too. Just finished grading two classes worth of poetic analyses and should be going home, but must comment. These were sophomores and juniors (English majors who supposedly did well in FYC) who had wonderful insights into the elements and meanings of the poems, but whose language and logic died an unnatural death in the face of having to write in a form and about a form they were unfamiliar with. Heaven forbid I should have given the same assignment to students who had not taken any previous writing courses. So, I guess I'm wondering just what all the hullaballoo is about the freshman comp class being political, when students really need it to be about how to write well. Plain and simple. Clear and concise. Strunk and White. If they can do that, then maybe their ideas, whatever they are, will make enough sense they can convey them in a broader arena.
Signed,
Very Tired Teacher
Laura Card
-----Original Message-----
From: Irvin Peckham <ipeckh1@lsu.edu>
To: teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com
Date: Sat, 07 Oct 2006 09:28:38 -0500
Subject: RE: [Teaching_Composition] Rhetorical analysis of scientific research report
Sucked in again when I should be doing other things.
I think Hairston has been used as a strawperson or a wedge issue by people
who want to use the writing classroom to urge students toward
sociopolitical positiong which which most of us would probably align
ourselves. It's always useful to go back to her original statement that
caused such an uproar. I would like to do that this morning but i really
need to respond to some student writing. the outcry (i remember a session
with John Schilb in particular at the 4cs) repositioning Hairston as
imagining that writing instuction could be class neutral has been one of
the more enduring myths by activists teachers (let me use that phrase for
want of a better one right now). She was quite clear that she was arguing
about degrees of activism, not an on/off choice. Her dominant concern in
that article was that reading and arguing about politics in the classroom
would displace what we had learned about effective writing instruction,
e.g., that we would shortchange process strategies so that we would have
more time to engage students in the reading and arguments. She was of
course contextualizing that concern within previous discussions about
writing teachers (graduate students and lit people) using the firstyear
classroom as a place to have students read & write about literature. I
think the history of the 90s and certainly if one looks at many of the
theoretical articles in our major journals might suggest that her concern
was not entirely unfounded. There is a certain irony in a pedagogy that
began as a student-centered movement (from Dewey through Freire) evovled
into one that regularly concerns itself with student resistance. Even
Will's thoughtful tactic described below reveals traces of that discussion.
I might note that my son, now a successful 27-year-old engineer in Kansas
City endured (that is the way he would have put it) one semester of the
required rhetoric course at Iowa. The teacher had his class read the sorts
of postmodern essays we are all familiar with--and to him, it was general
nonsense. None of the essays had anything to do with what he would be
doing--he knew he was going into engineering (he had been building bikes
since he was five, I think).
He has become a very fine young man. He thinks carefully. He has to write
many documents in which rhetoric is subversively practiced. I remember one
in which he buried a qualified admission of error in a dependent clause in
a ten-page analysis of a road that flooded when it shouldn't have (and
caused several million dollars of damage). This dependent clause occured
in about page 6. That dependent clause was in fact the focus of the issue.
Now if the rhetoric class had taken up an issue like that as evidenced by a
real engineering document--and even explored the ethics of using rhetoric
to bury that admission of guilt--my son would have been all ears. And that
kind of course would have been built around the interests of the students,
not the interests of the teacher (i.e., student rather than
teacher-centered).
================================
Irvin Peckham
Louisiana State University
Director of the University Writing Program
http://members.cox.net/ipeckham
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| cc: (bcc: Irvin Peckham/ipeckh1/LSU) |
| Subject: RE: [Teaching_Composition] Rhetorical analysis of scientific research report |
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My thanks to Will and to Chris for commenting about their classroom
projects. There is much value in studying the rhetorical construction of
arguments. I was wondering if one or both of you could comment about the
politics of rhetoric in such a class. At some point, wouldn't the students
reach conclusions that are political? How do you avoid framing rhetorical
questions in such a way as to not point to a certain outcome? I ask
because back in the late '80's, early '90's, Maxine Hairston started her
crusade against politics in the classroom by attacking a proposed course at
the University of Texas at Austin. These experimental sections of English
composition were going to ask student to analyze the rhetoric of (I
believe) Supreme Court decisions concerning race and gender. Lester
Faigley's Fragments of Rationality summarizes this conflict rather well,
but I unfortunately do not have the page numbers in front of me.
Hairston's actions led to the suspension and eventual cancelling of the
proposed syllabus, and she extended her critique to all composition
instructors who, in her view, were promoting ideology in the classroom.
Hairston contended that students must determine the content of courses, and
that such reading material would intimidate students. Hairston also felt
the student would be indoctrinated into leftist politics taking such an
approach to race and gender. I'm wondering how advocates of her stance
would react to the two of your classroom projects. Is taking the
rhetorical approach you're suggesting an acceptable way to look at both
mundane and controversial topics? Or is any type of assignment that
assumes content inappropriate? Or is it only race, class, gender,
sexuality, and hierarchy, among other cultural and social issues, that are
taboo content in the composition classroom? If it is simply the
introduction of reading and analysis to a writing course, the
disagreement's substance is an old argument between expressivists and
social constructionists/social-epistemics. If, however, we are simply
suppressing particular topics because instructors with political
commitments might give students a fresh, critical view to consider/account
for in their writing, we are marking one set of politics as unacceptable
and masking the other set--the one aligned with the status quo--under the
guise of neutrality and concern for students' freedom of expression. Your
insights, Chris and Will, would be much welcome, as would others.
Bill
________________________________
From: teaching_composition-admin@mailman.eppg.com on behalf of
William-Jennings@uiowa.edu
Sent: Fri 10/6/2006 2:28 PM
To: teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com
Subject: [Teaching_Composition] Rhetorical analysis of scientific research
report
In a slightly different vein, I've used three different reports about
a small plane crash:
1) a newspaper account, including the quoting of an 'eye witness';
2) an excerpt from one of the survivor's testimony in a civil case;
3) the official NTSB report.
Others have done similar analysis assignments with traffic accidents,
structural failures (the hotel walkway in Kansas City), etc.
One could do this with the failure of a business as well...Enron or a
dot com fizzle?
The point isn't to tweak interest through allure of grisly outcomes,
but to see how the language of 'witness', 'testimony', and 'report'
each work to alter perception of an event more commonly associated
with 'grisly'.
Many of my students argue that their pursuit of specific academic
discipline
(various sciences, engineering, business, etc.) is being delayed by
having
to take a 'rhetoric' course.... This sort of exercise & assignment
doesn't
always solve those complaints, but it does offer a different entry
point into
text, context, and subtext.
-Will Jennings
University of Iowa
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