Introductory Post

Hello everyone, and welcome to my blog. As you can see, I have interests in a variety of pedagogy matters and am looking forward to adding a section on L2 matters.

My name is Nathan Serfling. I am currently a third-year part-time PhD student at Old Dominion University, where my emphases are rhetoric and writing studies, and writing pedagogy. I have special interests in online writing instruction, rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy, and faculty development and other administrative matters. I am also a full-time instructor at South Dakota State University (SDSU). There, I teach Composition I and Composition II, as well as the occasional Introduction to Literature.

SDSU is a mid-sized (about 12,000-13,000 students) Division I school. However, the population is relatively homogenous—mostly middle-class, white students from South Dakota and the surrounding states. My experiences with multilingual students have been relatively limited as a result. I have had only a handful of multilingual students over the years. While I did have more interactions with multilingual students as a tutor in our university’s writing center, even these were experiences were few and limited in scope. As SDSU continues to grow, though, we are attracting a much more diverse student population, and I anticipate that my limited experiences will multiply quickly.

This brings me to the focus of my blog in this section. My home department is small and consists of mostly literature faculty. These faculty teach some sections of Composition II, and GTAs, adjuncts, and full-time instructional staff teach the bulk of Composition I and Composition II courses. I am hoping to use my readings here to explore issues of faculty development (both within departments and across the university) regarding L2 pedagogy with the ultimate goal of extending the pedagogical skills and practices of my colleagues.

And the Debate Goes On: Lundberg and Gunn's Response to Geisler

Lundberg, Christian, and Joshua Gunn. “‘Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’: Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanistic Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 83-105. Print.

In Lundberg and Gunn’s response to Cheryl Geisler’s piece on the ARS convention (see my previous post), they raise the concern that Geisler’s “report” had less to do with accurately reporting on the metting than arguing against the postmodern (or posthumanist, to use their term) views of agency. They argue that Geisler’s attempt to locate agency in the agent is a problematic attempt to maintain a view of the agent as autonomous and a mistaken conflation of the agent with agency. Such a view, they claim, is narrow in its conception of agency. They also characterize as narrow Geisler’s representation of posthumanist theories.

They begin their discussions likening the agent/agency relationship to the playing of an Ouija board, establishing an indeterminate view of agency. (After all, any one player or some other worldly spirit may be moving the planchette.) This indeterminate view represents for them the more postmodern view of rhetorical agency. Rather than trying to locate agency within the subject or the rhetor, they argue that agency can and does exist in a number of potential agents. The subject, too, is influenced by a number of external influences and is thus “produced” (86), making it harder to claim that the subject can always have agency.

But rather than this “problematized” sense of agency leading to agential paralysis or precluding the possibility of the agent having any rhetorical effects, they claim that the posthumanist view examines the agent/agency relationship as only one trope that allows us to investigate and interrogate these ideas (98). This is part of their desire for a “restless and relentless thinking” (98) about subjects like agency to add multiple, complicating, and ultimately illuminating layers to that idea.

In many respects, I find their discussions thought-provoking. I, too, agree that a continual examination of the relationship of the agent and agency and of the possibility of locating agency within entities and forces beyond the sbuject will give us a deeper understanding of them. However, I tend to agree with Geisler, who in her response to this piece, claimed that this theorizing does not really get at her pedagogical concerns about rhetorical agency (109). Indeed, theory takes a dominant place in Lunberg and Gunn’s article, and I too wondered where the rhetorical rubber is to meet the pedagogical road. Certainly, theorizing agency will ultimately serve many benefits in developing how we view and analyze agency, but we should not theorize exclusively or at the expense of pedagogy either.

Work Cited

Geisler, Cheryl. “Teaching the Post-Modern Rhetor: Continuing the Conversation on Rhetorical Agency.” Rhetorical Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 107-12. Print.

The First Shot of the Geisler and Lundbeg/Gunn Debate on Agency

Geisler, Cheryl. “How Ought We Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency?: Report from the ARS.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (2004): 9-17. Print.

Geisler claims her goal in this brief article is to recount the meeting of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies (ARS) meeting that addressed rhetorical agency. Specifically, this meeting developed into a discussion of how to combine the interpretive practices of rhetoric with its productive ones, especially in the wake of postmodern critiques of agency that had weakened or threatened the importance of rhetorical agency. As she “reports” on the meeting, though, she challenges those who claimed that rhetorical agency is illusory and ultimately argues that rhetorical agency is crucial for educating students and for the future of rhetoric as a discipline.

Scholars at the ARS meeting generally agreed on two issues. One was the definition of rhetorical agency: “the capacity of the rhetor to act” (12). The second area of agreement was the idea that postmodern critiques of the possibility against rhetorical agency necessitated renewed discussions of it. She notes that some of the postmodern critiques are applicable to public rhetorical agency, but she claims that the greater access to agency that “subaltern groups” have and the growing questions about agency because of new media are creating an atmosphere in which rhetorical agency may need to be considered in entirely new ways.

In addressing these critiques and the new directions of agency, the attendees addressed the illusions of agency, the importance of the rhetor’s skill, and the conditions of agency. The last two she covers relatively quickly. Regarding the rhetor’s skill, she addresses Jasinski’s claims of viewing the rhetor as an orchestrator who must bring together and respond to fragmented and contingent circumstances (a combination of autonomy and external influences). In her discussion of the conditions of agency, she mentions the discussions that centered on the material and historical constraints that influence rhetors today. But she focuses mostly on illusions of agency. She notes that some, like Joshua Gunn, argued that agency is an illusion and as such we should acknowledge this and “directly [confront] our irrelevance” (12). Such a move, she argues, not only makes the educational mission of rhetoric nearly impossible (if students don’t have agency, how are they to act through rhetoric?) but will also remove any potential for change and any meaningful responsibility for people to act. Thus, rhetoric cannot focus only on its interpretive mission; it must also include a productive mission as well.

While this article consists of fewer than ten pages of discussion, it is densely packed with some useful synopses of some of the most significant discussions about rhetorical agency that have been taking place over the last few years. She makes a strong case for the need to tie interpretive modes of rhetoric to productive ones, especially as they inform educational practices. Furthermore, she offers some sense of how postmodern ideas of contingency and fragmentation can and do work with notions of rhetorical agency. However, as I will address in my next blog post, some who attended the ARS meeting felt Geisler misrepresented some of the discussions took place.

Neurons, Obama, and Rhetoric--Oh My!

Cooper, Marilyn M. “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” CCC 62.3 (2011): 420-49. Print.

Like Leff in my previous blog posting, Cooper examines rhetorical agency as an idea called into question and seeming more unlikely (even impossible by some accounts). But rather than specifically examining the role of tradition as a means to recuperate ideas of rhetorical agency like Leff, Cooper examines the possibilities of more recent notions, especially complexity theory and neurophenomenolgy to examine how agency is both autonomous and collective, both conscious and unconscious.

Complexity theory positions rhetorical agency within a system of multiple agents that interact with one another in a sort of perpetual “dance of perturbation and response” by which the agents influence one another (421). Neruophenomenology—which I must admit is a concept I need to reexamine more fully—“combines neuroscience and phenomenology to develop understandings of cognitive processes and brain dynamics as embodied nonlinear self-organizing systems interacting with the surround” (421).

Cooper uses this combination of ideas to analyze President Obama’s speech on race that he delivered in Philadelphia during his presidential candidacy. She argues, first, that rhetorical agency is both an active response by an individual to a particular situation (emergent) and a series of unconscious neurological processes and internalized contextual understandings (embodied). Second, she argues that both rhetors and audiences are active agents in the process of persuasion. Rhetors often view themselves somewhat incorrectly as causing action or persuasion, though she says this is necessary for our ability to act and to be willing to act as agents; instead, she claims that persuasion also rests in the audience members’ reception and evaluation of the rhetor’s language. Thus, while the rhetor does maintain certain, significant amounts of free will, she/he has a responsibility to the audience to view them “as responsive beings who [. . .] will understand or assimilate meanings in their own way” (441).

As a side note, though my grasp of neuroscience’s role in rhetoric is rather tenuous and too limited to offer a strong evaluation of Cooper’s use of it in her argument, I can say this is one of the more approachable pieces on “neurorhetoric” that I have encountered at this point. More to the point, despite some of the claims reminiscent of the cognitive arguments that developed at the height of the process movement and Leff’s analysis of classical rhetoric’s view of audience (see my previous blog post), Cooper’s article offers a sense of new directions in the considerations of rhetorical agency—ones that bring to bear the new understandings of the interactions of the biological, the psychological, and the social aspects of communication.

821 Blog 2: What's Old Is New

Leff, Michael. “Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003): 135-47. Print.

Michael Leff’s attention in this article is the connection he sees between “tradition” (or what we might term classical rhetoric) and rhetorical agency. In particular, he is interested in exploring the tension of individual rhetorical agency and the influence of community on the rhetor. From his perspective, the rhetorical tradition serves as a sort of mediator between the ideas of writing as an individual and writing as a member of a community (or writing for an audience in general).

Leff establishes his sense of the postmodern conceptions of both tradition and agency by claiming that postmodern views oversimplify how traditional/classical rhetoricians actually addressed agency. For example, he points to postmodern claims that clascial oratory was unidirectional (from the rhetor) and that the audience played an essentially passive role. But he notes that these views are inaccurate to the realities of traditional rhetoric. While he acknowledges that many rhetoricians of the classical period did address (quite strongly in some instances) the importance of the rhetor’s ability to persuade (even manipulate?) the audience, he argues that classical views were much more complex. Leff instead provides numerous examples (from Isocrates to Cicero) of rhetoricians discussing the influence of the audience over the rhetorical choices made by the rhetor. Thus the rhetor is both shaped by the community and an individual participant within that community. He looks to Isocrates as an example of this, particularly his address on changes to Athenian democracy he hoped to see initiated. Isocrates carefully selected his sources and worked within the expectations of the community not to upset their perspectives on democracy but to advocate for the changes he wanted.

Though brief, the historical context that this article provides on rhetorical agency is quite helpful. It complicates the views of traditional/classical sensibilities as more social than many tend to think of them (or at least as he claims some tend to think of them). His focus on classical rhetoricians underscores the importance of the rhetorical past, advocating that we cannot and should not shrug off tradition simply because we have “new” perspectives that we think conflict with past notions. However, I feel that Leff approaches some of these complicated theoretical notions too briefly. He accuses postmodern theorists of oversimplifying the practices of traditional rhetoricians, yet I feel he does much the same to the postmoderns, suggesting in a few sweeping sentences to have captured their entire view of classical rhetoric. Indeed, this fosters the very sorts of neglect that concern him. Perhaps what we need is not only a willingness to examine past theories more deeply but present ones as well.

Rhetoric and/or/not Composition?

Horner, Bruce, and Min-Zhan Lu. “Working Rhetoric and Composition.” College English 72.5 (2010): 470-94. Print.

In this article, Horner and Lu examine the seemingly settled relationship of rhetoric and composition, exploring how these terms are used in the field and what relationships (political, pedagogical, and theoretical) are implied by certain uses of the terms. Their argument rests on the idea that for rhetoric and composition to be a flexible discipline, the understandings of “rhetoric” and “composition” need to be constantly revised to reflect the histories and the changes in material conditions of the work of the discipline.

They begin by plotting the various uses of rhetoric, composition, and rhetoric and composition. They find that these terms are either synonymous with each other, with writing, and/or with English; that the terms are rarely defined; and that rhetoric and composition often appear in a hierarchical relationship. Such uses of these terms, they argue, effectively hamstring the possibility of a dynamic and non-hegemonic discipline. They emphasize the need for a more conscious sense of what these terms mean to us and for a more developed sense of “the histories and conditions” of the work of rhetoric and composition (475).

To apply these methods of “working” rhetoric and composition, Horner and Lu examine how this work would affect the first-year writing course and graduate level courses. For them, a more productive first-year writing course would resist “the dichotomizing of rhetoric and composition” (480) that arises in debates about the role of the course—service or something else, for example. Their vision is a course focused on rhetorical concerns but those that arise from and are to be “reworked” in student writing. They see some graduate curricula as positioning rhetoric as historical and composition as pedagogical and theoretical. Such a separation limits students’ abilities to fully contextualize both the history and theory/pedagogy of the discipline and reinforces the hierarchical relationships that keep the two separate. On a broader scale, then, they are looking to a more inclusive sense of rhetoric and composition, one that values both the theory and the practice as mutually informing instead of mutually exclusive.

Admittedly, I take for granted the relationship of rhetoric and composition and rarely give much thought to how I use the terms, how I view their relationship to one another, and how this may reinforce certain hierarchies between the two. And though I am hesitant to discount the need for “real world” writing skills in undergraduate composition courses (as they seem to want) and have no experience teaching graduate courses on which to evaluate their claims about graduate programs, I do find their sense of the entrenching positions of rhetoric and of composition as doing the discipline a disservice. Throughout the article, they pose numerous questions that anyone seriously exploring rhetoric and composition and their relation to one another needs to consider.

664 Blog 5: New Assessment Practices for New Texts

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Looking for Sources of Coherence in a Fragmented World: Notes toward a New Assessment Design.” Computers and Composition 21 (2004): 89-102. Rpt. in Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Michelle Sidler, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 293-307. Print.

Kathleen Blake Yancey speaks to a gap (though one that is shrinking now) between the common promotion of intertextuality in the digital age and our assessment of the resulting multimodal texts. We often still rely on print sensibilities to evaluate and assess digital texts and are, as she says, “held hostage to the values informing print, values worth preserving for that medium, to be sure, but values incongruent with those informing the digital” (293). Therefore, she calls for a new language of assessment for the new types of texts our students may be producing.

The key area she addresses here is the idea of coherence. She first emphasizes that coherence refers to relationships. In print texts, these relationships rely mostly on the relationship of words to each other and to the context in which they appear. Coherence in such texts often remains relatively stable, and this stability establishes certain values about what constitutes “good” writing. This leads her to a slight (but useful) tangent regarding word-processing software’s effects on assessment, including surface correctness promoted by grammar- and spell-checkers and instructor dominance of texts aided by the ease of commentary allowed by such software. Recognizing these matters is an important move toward stronger assessments of digitally-produced texts.

After developing this awareness, instructors must be aware that coherence in digital texts is more complex than what we discover in most print texts. Yancey’s solution to assessing these multiple and multimodal coherences is a heuristic model that establishes a fixed schema but one that remains flexible for the various types of multimodal texts in may need to respond to. Her heuristic consists of four questions:

1. What arrangements are possible?
2. Who arranges?
3. What is the intent?
4. What is the fit between the intent and the effect? (301)

She then applies this model heuristic to examine the coherence of emails and, more valuable to instructors, to a digital portfolio to demonstrate (convincingly, at least in her terms) how these questions emphasize digital values of coherence.

Yancey’s article is certainly valuable to instructors who are planning to assign writing projects that ask students to compose with various digital tools and produce multimodal texts. First, those instructors do need to consider how they are assessing digital texts and whether their values still come from print or if they are making the shift to more digital values. Second, her heuristic provides a starting template instructors can tweak to fit more local contexts as needed and one that reminds instructors to focus on the multiple coherences of digital texts. However, Yancey does not provide much detail regarding assessments of content or language. Should our assessment of these areas rely on print values, or should this change as well? And if so, what would those changes look like? While these questions are beyond the scope of her article, instructors still must remember to consider more than coherence as they reevaluate their assessment practices.