Good Morning, Obama’s America

It was refreshing to wake up into a world free of injustice today, thanks to all those people who voted for Obama. That’s all it took. Change. Now, solvency for everything.

A couple of things that are blowing my mind, besides cynical hyperbolic claims.

1. Joe The Plumber, your war correspondent in Gaza.

2. Russia Today’s Wolf Camera – Watch the wolves they cared for and released (!) into the wild live via webcam. Suck that, CNN.

3. Will Ferrel is a plagiarist, at best. His anchorman character is a total rip off of Ted Baxter, from the Mary Tyler Moore Show. More evidence that guy is an idiot. More evidence that I am too for totally forgetting this great character until recently.

4. Norman Finkelstein loses tenure track job, and the wheels come off in this interview.

5. We are all screwed.

A New Semester, A New Conceptualization of "The Student"

I start teaching again in 3 days. My mind is percolating as usual at the coming confrontation with a brand new semester. This great article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed echoes exactly the way I have felt for a long time about my own design on classroom management and approaching students.  Here’s a quote:

Back when students held us in awe, sat willingly for lectures, and assigned us the work of deciding what knowledge was worth knowing, we organized our classes around our disciplines. We chose what knowledge needed to be conveyed to students in what order. Now that our students assign us no more authority than anyone else, show no patience for lectures, and decide what’s worth knowing themselves, we need to reorganize our classes. We need to teach as if our students were colleagues from another department. That means determining what our colleagues may already know, building from that shared knowledge, adapting pre-existing analytic skills, then connecting those fledgling skills and knowledge to a deeper understanding of the discipline we love. In other words, we need to approach our classrooms as public intellectuals eager to share our insights graciously with a wide audience of fellow citizens.

Some of the assumptions I like: Instructor and students equalized for the responsibility and productive value of the course, the idea of a joint project (building together) suggests an investigation with a “lead investigator” who suggests the proper courses to take to get more information, and the idea that students already come with knowledge and desire to know more.  Some might seem like simple assumptions, but with some of the teaching I’ve seen and heard about going on, I don’t think they are such simple ideas after all.

The initial insight I’m taking from this essay is that the role of rhetoric has a chance to PR itself into a more essential role at the University. At a time when lots of departments are questioning the value of performance-based courses such as debate, public speaking, group discussion and that all but extinct oral interpretation course, it seems to me that these courses are best suited to serve this particular generation of students and the University as a whole. How? Because these are the courses that teach you that presentation and information are not that distinct, that very often people judge the quality of your thought based upon it’s aesthetic, and that good information and good reasons are audience dependent.

Debate specifically, with it’s demand for judgment by the audience as to who “Won the debate” is an excellent laboratory exercise for any classroom under the model the article suggests.  Part of the revealing of the intellectual journey is for the instructor to offer up his or her own doubts, dissatisfaction with a position, and alternatives as real struggles, not power point slides.

Debate training, usually reserved for a club team, now has central importance in this model to help prepare the students for classrooms that function this way.  Students must become comfortable with careful examination of ideas and learn how to rhetorically convey respect, appreciation and understanding. These things are not alien to the students by any means, but the appropriate methods of expression might be, given that most of their evaluation is occurring in a disembodied state (computer/internet, like this expression).

Conceiving of a class as a group of public intellectuals also throws up in the air the concept of evaluation and measurement of learning. Doesn’t a group such as this have an ethical responsibility to better the community through their investigations? The U.S. public intellectuals of pre-World War Two felt that publishing (emphasis on the public part of that) was essential to their projects. What would a final examination look like if the responsibility to the community were forwarded as an essential outcome from the semester’s joint investigation?

Since I’ll probably be busy on the Inauguration

Well the past few days have been awesome. I’ve been putting together a very difficult syllabus on Feminist rhetoric for a small independent study with three students. Fun and challenging at the same time and also with a large sense of dread about leaving something out. However, I think that a syllabus is like a map of a larger argument. Courses are like arguments, with the claim “This is what you need to know” twisted and altered to fit the conditions of the instructor and students and the time. So there’s no perfect coverage, just the instructor’s perspective as an expert in the field.

Everyone is way too excited about the inauguration. I didn’t think it was very interesting until I started looking at the cultural response to it instead of the political/news-cycle response. Here’s a great music video about the inauguration:

Now if you watched that three things should come to mind. First, you should want one of those hoodies. Secondly, where can one purchase a blue Lamborghini? Finally, you might notice the visual quotes in that video from this one:

The differences are stark – people protesting versus people protesting. But both look like parties. And the names and geographical locations that are celebrated on signs are a bit different – not just because of the time, but perhaps other reasons? And both have a contradiction with the push to work within the political system forwarded, as well as some direct and subtle claims that one should be a subversive.

I wonder what other cultural products will be produced by this inauguration and administration?

Reflections on Cork 2 – “Persuasiveness”

One of the more baffling moments for me at my first Worlds was the reasons many chairs gave for their decisions. It’s not to say that I disagreed with every decision or anything like that – I was actually in agreement with most every panel, and right now can’t really think of any exceptions to that. I thought they were all very good judges, and the panelists could have easily been chairs as well. What I am more interested in is the rhetoric used to explain or justify a decision and the word at the center of that whirling discourse – persuasiveness.

Many times a team was praised for really having “the most persuasive argument” or “that argument had persuasiveness.” Many times a team was docked because they “were not persuasive” or their arguments “lacked persuasiveness.”

As a teacher and student of rhetoric I would think I would have no problem with this, but the more I heard it discussed, and the more I asked “what do you mean by that?” The more confused and uncertain I became as to what “persuasiveness” meant in these adjudications. I figured that it must refer to some aesthetic feeling that a team was better than another one, and the term persuasiveness was used to convey that feeling of argumentative superiority that was un-conveyable in a close read of the argumentation.

So I think there are two possible definitions of “persuasiveness” as it was used by judges during decisions:

  1. Persuasiveness is a metaphysical thing a capital-P persuasive, where the arguments, speech, demeanor, and attitude of the speaker meet the criterion of someone who is “persuasive” on a universal level, and this speech on this topic would be considered to be good by anyone, or effective to anyone because it contains these universal, timeless elements of persuasiveness.

     

  2. Persuasiveness is a litmus test: I can imagine an audience interested in this issue, and if this general, intelligent, public audience with no special training heard this speech they would be moved by it, they would find it effective, so therefore it’s a “persuasive” speech. The imagined audience would assent to the arguments from this speaker on this topic so therefore this speaker is being persuasive.

     

  3. Persuasiveness is a code word for something pleasurable, i.e. an aesthetic reaction to seeing an embodied being deliver a speech that resonates with the listener. This is the most visceral sort of reaction, overwhelming and engaging, practically transforming the physiology of the listener – the sort of crowd reactions to Gorgias that Plato and Socrates called “psychagogic” or nearly hypnotic agreement due to cadence, tone and style. Of course, that’s a bit over the top, but there were moments where the “feeling” that the team or speaker engendered was noted as achieving “persuasiveness.”

Of course there might be other nuanced definitions, and there might be some spillover between these definitions and how they were used, but I’m just reporting inductively from my experience. What is most interesting to me to note is how far removed all three definitions are from the general definition of “persuasiveness” that would be forwarded by an American policy debater or judge. That sort of “persuasiveness” is a very technical accomplishment, a closing of the holes or a tightening of the hatches. This sort of “persuasiveness” is much more holistic and much more general audience focused.

In the end, I think that a combination of definitions 1 and 3 was being forwarded more often than not, and definition 2 I really like because it is the Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca definition of audience centered argumentation. It is less active than it appears as they would say any writer or arguer can’t help but imagine a Universal Audience to which all their argumentation is addressed. I’m doing it now in a sense writing this post for imagined you. The effectiveness is probably measured by the gap between my words and their effectiveness on changing your thought or gaining your assent to my claims here.

In the end, there also might be more technical judging going on than I realize. I’m from a format where the technical is hyperbolized into the entire argumentative event. So immersion in any format, style or method where that isn’t the case would appear at first to be atechnical. Perhaps after another few years I’ll reassess the role of technical argumentation in WUDC style. For now, I think it to be focused on the holistic experience, and the technicalities, save when they contribute to that holism, are disposable.

Now I’m left with the question of how to teach the Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca mode of argumentation and how to push that mode of thinking toward those who judge. I feel that this is a very beneficial model for the pedagogical side of debating. I wonder if there are other judges out there who use this model as a way of approaching adjudication?