Rhetoric, Technology, Culture Spring 2011

I really liked this podcast; I thought you did a nice job synthesizing the readings with supplementary material and explaining these concepts in very straightforward language. I particularly liked your use of excerpts from North and Shaugnessy about pushing composition teachers to take chances. As you state, this might mean altering classroom parameters of authority and privilege so as to enact a student-centered learning environment. This aligns with concepts of praxis within the liberatory pedagogies of Paulo Freire, bel hooks, and Ira Shore, each of whom espouse a variety of democratic approaches to classroom management based on rhetorical precepts.

As a graduate student and (first-time) introductory composition teacher, I’ve been playing around with just these same concepts in my 101 and 201 courses, and it can indeed feel like standing on one’s head. Yet I think this is only in relation to naturalized (Western) classroom practices and performances that we are used to participating in, as under/graduate students and teachers. Here, the authorial presence of the teacher as centrally distributed lesson planning and assessment machine suggests a behavioralist approach that Freire called “the banking concept of education,” one in which teachers are active and students passive.

At this point in our rhetorical reading and training though, we have been exposed to alternative methods and constructivist pedagogies that refuse to privilege such stereotypical interactions, but when the time comes to enact them in the classroom, it can still feel like scarily new territory. We, as composition teachers, have to break new ground away from a style of teaching that has/had become naturalized for many of us while growing up.

The benefits of course, are many, as you discuss, as student-centered teaching allows for increased engagement with course material and encompasses a (wider) variety of student learning styles, potentially enabling students who were previously underdeveloped. The use and affordances of technology in the composition classroom helps to stimulate composition beyond mere paper writing and offers access to the creation of multimodal texts, depending on software/hardware access.

I would also argue that a student-oriented teaching style also aligns with the project-based approach articulated in technical communications, as experienced within this very rhetoric course. I’m having my 201 students create digital project portfolios this semester, and I couldn’t be more excited about it :)