Rhetorical Weaving

It's late and I'm tired but I know I won't be able to sleep. Too much intellectual stimulation in class tonight. So, I decided to write on my blog while the impressions from tonight's presentations are still fresh in my mind. Again, when there is so much information presented, I need to use the "gold pan method" of swishing around everything poured in and start swirling through until I reach the nuggets that speak to me-some pattern I can weave out of all the knowledge bestowed.
I've decided to focus on the three rhetoricians that were featured by the presenters tonight because I do see some distinct patterns emerging among: Giambattista Vico, John Locke, and David Hume. They lived between 1632-1776 and all were products of their times, but more importantly, every man challenged the thinking of their time. Vico felt students should have input in their educational outcomes, Locke questioned the divine right of the monarchy, and Hume challenged the reliability of ancient history. Of course, this is a simplistic analysis-each did much more but these are some of the "nuggets" I've captured.
Each man viewed their culture as their identity. Vico said "culture was foremost" it determined how you obtain knowledge. The Scotsmen, Locke and Hume, were considered inferior by their English neighbors because they were not born into the dominant English culture. Certainly, this affected their world view since both espoused the theory of "Empiricism". This is the theory that ideas come through our experiences. The experiences of an educated Scotsman
could not be the same experiences of an educated Englishman. Locke would have had a different vocabulary to express his experience as a member of the culturally disadvantaged, while Hume changed the spelling of his last name so the English would give it the correct Scottish pronunciation.
By today's standards, some of Locke and Hume's logic seems outrageous. Locke declared "all men created equal" but owned shares in a slave trading company, while Hume felt females should read history so they "could engage in conversation which 'can afford any entertainment to men of sense and reflection'" (282). Vico promoted altruism but died impoverished.
Yet, today's standards are today's standards, in part, because of their liberal ideas for the times in which they lived, and in the true spirit of ancient oratory, they were good men speaking out to not only challenge the politics and policies of their age, but to persuade a different outcome.

How kairos informs rhetoric

Richard Enos in his essay, "Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric" makes a compelling case when he states "works are best understood when viewed not as isolated and autonomous events but as intertextual, that even discrete texts are part of a diachronic chain of being" (14). In other words, the historical development of a physics text deserves equal respect with the development of a canon of literature. What are the roots of influence? Not surprisingly, there will be significant overlapping of social and political forces that shaped the language of those respective works. Enos stresses that in studying the historical development of any text, primary sources will provide the more reliable evidence. So what does this have to do with rhetoric? According to Enos, historical development of a body of written works is through understanding the development of the culture that produced those works-in any genre. To understand that culture is to understand their cognative processes. He further argues, "cognative processes affect society because they are the operations by which people make judgments" (17). My reading of this is that the more accurate the historocity of the culture, the more accurate the historocity of the texts that culture produces.
James Kinneavy's essay "Kairos: A Neglected Concept" takes a different approach as he attempts "to show the relevance of some important concepts of classical rhetoric to modern composition" (79). Kinneavy carefully traces the historocity of the Greek word "kairos" which is defined as the "Ciceronian notion of propriety" or "the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the time, place, speaker, and audience involved" (82-4).
This takes us back to Enos's argument that the cognative forces of a culture affect that culture's judgments. Why do we think the way we think? What is the geneology of any given culture's thought process? Kinneavy advocates it is the responsibility of higher education to include kairos in its student writing program and "that the student write some papers about the ethical concerns of his or her personal interests and career choices" and that "The student should be asked to inquire into the aspects of his or her discipline that will morally affect the student's decisions in the present and in the foreseeable future" (98). What is appropriate action? What are the ethics behind that action? Questions rhetoric asks; answers kairos informs.

What I Think I Know

During the spring of 1961, a delegation of educators met for the purpose of reviewing "what is known and what is not known about the teaching and learning of composition and the conditions under which it is taught, for the purpose of preparing for publication a special scientifically based report on what is known in this area" (193). Research in Written Composition is the report that was produced under the collaborative efforts of Drs. Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. Initially, their task was enormous as an ad hoc committee of twenty university educators initially identified more than 1,000 bibliographic citations relating to research done in a similar vein (194). What follows in their chapter "The Preparation of This Report" is an exacting account of how their research project was conducted.
The purpose of my blog entry is not to delve into their methods but to focus on the complexity of the conversation that has and will continue to take place "about how writing should be taught" (193) which has challenged the beliefs of my own pedagogy.
Are my beliefs based on "scientific research"? Are they based on emotional jerk-knee responses? Are they based on experience in the classroom and other teaching venues? I'm discovering, when pressed, what I think I know is problematic. After all, if the Executive Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English examined this issue at a national level, utilizing the talents of university professors who find it difficult to produce irrefutable evidence; the implications for the individual classroom teacher to produce measurable results is ominous.
The importance of this chapter was to provide credibility for the results of their research which will influence teaching approaches at a national level.
An individual pedagogy statement demands no less; Tuesday night's class discussion affirmed that I hadn't done my research. What do I believe about "the teaching and learning of composition and the conditions under which it is taught"? I must admit at this juncture, I don't know.