1) Bitzer addresses a very specific kind of discourse in his article and examines the ways in which rhetorical discourse is heavily controlled by its situation. As future teachers, are his arguments only helpful when teaching this specific kind of discourse, or do they invite a larger examination of the situations that ask for writing to be done? For example, the inescapable fact that everything our students write for our class will be because we told them to?
2) As we analyze privilege and bias in class, how can we account for the many different kinds of disabilities that we or our students may encounter? How do we make sure that we are really listening to and noticing students' needs, especially when they may not want to make their disability known (either to us or the class as a whole)?
Hi Laura,
ReplyDeleteIt seems to be inescapable that we need to try and reconcile the teaching of adaptive rhetorical practices with the fact that we are always in a controlled environment in a university classroom. On the one hand, I think we as teachers should try and push the limits of what might be deemed conventionally acceptable, giving students a broad (perhaps even bizarre) range of perspectives to try and write from while attempting to let personal perspective obfuscate our own grading scales. On the other hand, established curriculum are established primarily because they have a history of working very well, so they shouldn't be totally rejected in favor of trying to improve pedagogical practices. I think its a tricky line to walk that no one has a clearly correct answer to yet, but I believe it lies somewhere in being unpredictable yet controlled at the same time.
I like your example of the role that our classroom setting plays in the rhetorical situation of our students' writing. I think to a degree, students will be writing because we told them to. However there is a caveat to that. What they are writing about will have different motivations and different rhetorical situations that could exist far outside the scope of the classroom. For example, let's say there is a writing assignment that a student has to create that is a persuasive piece on a piece of policy that they are passionate about. While the situation that is driving the production of such a piece is the assignment, its rhetorical implications could far exceed the scope of the classroom as its rhetorical audience.
ReplyDeleteLaura,
ReplyDeleteThe question of how to make sure we are accommodating students' needs when they don't identify a need for accommodations is really challenging. It's something we discussed a lot in summer session B when I took a class on teaching online and hybrid composition courses. A lot of the readings we looked at for that class suggested that the class need to be inclusive from the get go so that students don't necessarily need to disclose as needing accommodations or that accommodations aren't something added on after the fact in a retrofit model, which is already singling out or othering the student. However, I don't know that ideal is every fully possible and I look forward to our discussion of this tomorrow as I am leading this reading's discussion.