Responsible Pedagogy

Responsible Pedagogy PDF Author: Eric Detweiler
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027109379X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In recent decades, public higher education has faced perpetual crises. As states slash investment in postsecondary education and for-profit entities seek to supplant public colleges and universities, these public institutions have tried to compete by maximizing efficiency, namely, by downplaying and outsourcing the labor of teachers. Responsible Pedagogy makes a fresh case for the importance and value of public higher education and the work of teaching. In making this case, Eric Detweiler surveys the history of rhetoric and writing in postsecondary education, looking in particular at the teacher-student relationship. He finds that from the Socratic method to medieval exercises, from MOOCs to remote, asynchronous learning, the balance of authority and agency in the classroom is often precarious. But the problem goes deeper. Underlying both authority and agency is the value of mastery, which the teacher is to impart to the student. It is this emphasis on mastery, Detweiler argues, that distorts the proper relation between the student and teacher, a relationship in which they are responsible for and vulnerable to each other. Drawing on contemporary ethics, rhetorical theory, and critiques of practices in the online classroom, Detweiler develops a pedagogy of responsibility and shows how it can be applied in writing and communication curricula, assignments, and teacher-student interactions. Rehabilitating the proper role of the teacher, Responsible Pedagogy calls into question our newfound trust in educational technology and points the way to a better, more effective pedagogy.

Responsible Pedagogy

Responsible Pedagogy PDF Author: Eric Detweiler
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027109379X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
In recent decades, public higher education has faced perpetual crises. As states slash investment in postsecondary education and for-profit entities seek to supplant public colleges and universities, these public institutions have tried to compete by maximizing efficiency, namely, by downplaying and outsourcing the labor of teachers. Responsible Pedagogy makes a fresh case for the importance and value of public higher education and the work of teaching. In making this case, Eric Detweiler surveys the history of rhetoric and writing in postsecondary education, looking in particular at the teacher-student relationship. He finds that from the Socratic method to medieval exercises, from MOOCs to remote, asynchronous learning, the balance of authority and agency in the classroom is often precarious. But the problem goes deeper. Underlying both authority and agency is the value of mastery, which the teacher is to impart to the student. It is this emphasis on mastery, Detweiler argues, that distorts the proper relation between the student and teacher, a relationship in which they are responsible for and vulnerable to each other. Drawing on contemporary ethics, rhetorical theory, and critiques of practices in the online classroom, Detweiler develops a pedagogy of responsibility and shows how it can be applied in writing and communication curricula, assignments, and teacher-student interactions. Rehabilitating the proper role of the teacher, Responsible Pedagogy calls into question our newfound trust in educational technology and points the way to a better, more effective pedagogy.

Occupying Memory

Occupying Memory PDF Author: Trevor Hoag
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498556574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Occupying Memory investigates the forces of trauma and mourning as deeply rhetorical in order to account for their capacity to seize one’s life. Rather than viewing memory as granting direct access to the past and being readily accessible or pliant to human will, Trevor Hoag exposes how the past is a rhetorical production and that trauma and mourning shatter delusions of sovereignty. By granting memory the posthuman power to persuade without an accompanying rhetorician, and contending the past cannot become a reality without being written, this book highlights rhetoric’s indispensability while transforming its relationship to memorialization, trauma, narrative, death, mourning, haunting, and survival. Analyzing and deploying the rhetorical trope of occupatio, Occupying Memory inhabits the conceptual place of memory by reinscribing it in ways that challenge hegemonic power while holding open that same space to keep memory “in question” and receptive to alternative futures to come. Hoag likewise demonstrates how one might occupy memory through insights gleaned from analyzing artifacts, media, events, and tropes from the Occupy Movement, a contemporary national and international movement for socioeconomic justice.

Inessential Solidarity

Inessential Solidarity PDF Author: Diane Davis
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822977648
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
In Inessential Solidarity, Diane Davis examines critical intersections of rhetoric and sociality in order to revise some of rhetorical theory's basic presumptions. Rather than focus on the arguments and symbolic exchanges through which social relations are defined, Davis exposes an underivable rhetorical imperative, an obligation to respond that is as undeniable as the obligation to age. Situating this response-ability as the condition for, rather than the effect of, symbolic interaction, Davis both dissolves contemporary concerns about linguistic overdetermination and calls into question long-held presumptions about rhetoric's relationship with identification, figuration, hermeneutics, agency, and judgment. Spotlighting a rhetorical "situation" irreducible to symbolic relations, Davis proposes quite provocatively that rhetoric—rather than ontology (Aristotle/Heidegger), epistemology (Descartes), or ethics (Levinas)—is "first philosophy." The subject or "symbol-using animal" comes into being, Davis argues both with and against Emmanuel Levinas, only inasmuch as it responds to the other; the priority of the other is not a matter of the subject's choice, then, but of its inescapable predicament. Directing the reader's attention to this inessential solidarity without which no meaning-making or determinate social relation would be possible, Davis aims to nudge rhetorical studies beyond the epistemological concerns that typically circumscribe theories of persuasion toward the examination of a more fundamental affectability, persuadability, responsivity.

Every Living Thing

Every Living Thing PDF Author: Jenell Johnson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271096284
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This book examines the question of what we mean when we talk about life, revealing new insights into what life is, what it does, and why it matters. Jenell Johnson studies arguments on behalf of life—not just of the human or animal variety, but all life. She considers, for example, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s fight for water, deep ecologists’ Earth First! activism, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and astrophysicists’ positions on Martian microbes. What she reveals is that this advocacy—vital advocacy—expands our view of what counts as life and shows us what it would mean for the moral standing of human life to be extended to life itself. Including short interviews with celebrated ecological writer Dorion Sagan, former NASA Planetary Protection Officer Catharine Conley, and leading figure in Indigenous and environmental studies Kyle Whyte, Every Living Thing provides a capacious view of life in the natural world. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in biodiversity, bioethics, and the environment.

The Rhetoricity of Philosophy

The Rhetoricity of Philosophy PDF Author: Blake D. Scott
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040102409
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This book aims to recast the way that philosophers understand rhetoric. Rather than follow most philosophers in conceiving rhetoric as a specific way of speaking or writing, it shows that rhetoric is better understood as a dimension of all human discourse and action—what the author calls “rhetoricity”. This book provides the first philosophical treatment of rhetoricity. It is motivated by two ongoing developments. The first is the debate between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin about philosophy’s relation to rhetoric. Both Badiou and Cassin are critical of rhetoric, albeit for different reasons. Second, there has been a growing resurgence of interest in rhetoric considering the recent rise in authoritarian politics as well as new forms of propaganda driven by “persuasive technologies”. This book identifies the common target of Badiou’s and Cassin’s otherwise incompatible critiques: rhetoric’s conception of audience. It offers a fresh take on the “new rhetoric” project of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, putting their work into conversation with the Badiou-Cassin debate. The book then turns to the hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricoeur in search of an expanded conception of audience. It shows that Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy allows us to extend Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s psychological notion of audience to texts themselves and to argue that human beings have a rhetorical capacity to reflect on audiences in search of what is potentially persuasive. The Rhetoricity of Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in contemporary European philosophy, rhetoric, argumentation studies, and social theory.

Communicating Mobility and Technology

Communicating Mobility and Technology PDF Author: Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317163621
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Winner of the 2018 CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award in the category of Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication Responding to the effects of human mobility and crises such as depleting oil supplies, Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder turns specifically to automobility, a term used to describe the kinds of mobility afforded by autonomous, automobile-based movement technologies and their ramifications. Thus far, few studies in technical communication have explored the development of mobility technologies, the immense power that highly structured, environmentally significant systems have in the world, or the human-machine interactions that take place in such activities. Applying kinaesthetic rhetoric, a rhetoric that is sensitive to and developed from the mobile, material context of these technologies, Pflugfelder looks at transportation projects such as electric taxi cabs from the turn of the century to modern day, open-source vehicle projects, and a large case study of an autonomous, electric pod car network that ultimately failed. Kinaesthetic rhetoric illuminates how mobility technologies have always been persuasive wherever and whenever linguistic symbol systems and material interactions enroll us, often unconsciously, into regimes of movement and ways of experiencing the world. As Pflugfelder shows, mobility technologies involve networks of sustained arguments that are as durable as the bonds between the actors in their networks.

Rhetorical Animals

Rhetorical Animals PDF Author: Kristian Bjørkdahl
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498558461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
For this edited volume, the editors solicited chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our "brute roots." In other words, this book investigates themes that enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. The present book is unique in its focus on the call for nonanthropocentrism in rhetorical studies. Although there have been many hints in recent years that rhetoric is beginning to consider the implications of the animal turn, as yet no other anthology makes this its explicit starting point and sustained objective. Thus, the various contributions to this book promise to further the ongoing debate about what rhetoric might be after it sheds its long-standing humanistic bias.

Persuasions of God

Persuasions of God PDF Author: Paul Lynch
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271098287
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
The nations of the global north find themselves in a post-secular or post-Christian period, one in which the practice, expression, and effects of religion are undergoing massive shifts. In Persuasions of God, Paul Lynch pursues a project of “theorhetoric,” a radical new approach to speaking about the divine. Searching for new religious forms amid the lingering influence of Christianity, Lynch turns to René Girard, the most important twentieth-century thinker on the sacred and its expression within the Christian tradition. Lynch repurposes Girard’s mimetic theory to invent a post-Christian way of speaking to, for, and especially about God. Girard theorized the sacred as the nexus of violence, order, and sacralization that lies at the heart of religion. What Lynch advocates in our current moment of religious kairos is a paradoxically meek rhetoric that conscientiously refuses rivalry, actively exploits tradition through complicit invention, and boldly seeks a holiness free of exclusionary violence. The project of theorhetoric is to reinvent God through the reimagined themes of meekness, sacrifice, atonement, and holiness. From these, Persuasions of God offers religion reimagined for our post-secular age. An interdisciplinary mix of philosophy, sociology, rhetorical studies, and theology, this book draws on mimetic theory to answer the question of where religion goes next. It will be valued by religious studies and communications scholars as well as anyone interested in the future of Christianity in our modern world.

Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States

Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States PDF Author: Seth Perry
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691179131
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Early Americans claimed that they looked to "the Bible alone" for authority, but the Bible was never, ever alone. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States is a wide-ranging exploration of the place of the Christian Bible in America in the decades after the Revolution. Attending to both theoretical concerns about the nature of scriptures and to the precise historical circumstances of a formative period in American history, Seth Perry argues that the Bible was not a "source" of authority in early America, as is often said, but rather a site of authority: a cultural space for editors, commentators, publishers, preachers, and readers to cultivate authoritative relationships. While paying careful attention to early national bibles as material objects, Perry shows that "the Bible" is both a text and a set of relationships sustained by a universe of cultural practices and assumptions. Moreover, he demonstrates that Bible culture underwent rapid and fundamental changes in the early nineteenth century as a result of developments in technology, politics, and religious life. At the heart of the book are typical Bible readers, otherwise unknown today, and better-known figures such as Zilpha Elaw, Joseph Smith, Denmark Vesey, and Ellen White, a group that includes men and women, enslaved and free, Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, and Quakers. What they shared were practices of biblical citation in writing, speech, and the performance of their daily lives. While such citation contributed to the Bible's authority, it also meant that the meaning of the Bible constantly evolved as Americans applied it to new circumstances and identities.

Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities

Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities PDF Author: Matthew Newcomb
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000800954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities provides a fresh look at rhetoric, religion, and environmental humanities through narratives of evangelical culture, analyses of evangelical writing, and their connection to environmental topics. This volume aims to present a cultural understanding between evangelical and non-evangelical communities, exploring how environmental priorities and differences fit within the thinking and felt experiences of American evangelicalism. Offering a variety of theological topics, chapters include discussion of key themes such as eschatology, scriptural authority, or stewardship, and their relationship to evangelical thinking and conceptualization within climate change rhetoric. To help readers better access evangelicalism and translate these ideas, each chapter utilizes individual narratives located within evangelicalism to set an affective or experiential base for readers. In addition, this volume includes textual analysis of key documents within each section to further explore the environmental issues, values, and elements within the subculture of American evangelicalism. This volume will be essential for all scholars interested in bridging the gap of cultural translation and exploring the deep rhetorical roots of evangelical attitudes toward environmental issues.