Week Three: Activism, Advocacy, Civic Participation

Last week we spent a significant portion of the class discussing rhetorical concepts like exigency, purpose, audience, context, genre, media and multimodality. Reflecting on those conversations as an instructor, I notice at least two specific goals as to why those discussions are so important.

First, I think a background in rhetoric is helpful tool for improving the quality of daily communicative acts. We don't necessarily need to be aware of all the rhetorical aspects that operate when we communicate in order to communicate--indeed, we often communicate without thinking about aspects of the rhetorical situation like who our audience is and what their needs as decoders/listeners may be--but it is useful and it does help improve the quality of our communications. We even go so far as to suggest that miscommunications, confusion, and misunderstanding often arise because folks have not engaged in or properly understood one or more aspects of a rhetorical situation.

Second, as we work through the design and creation of content that will take the shape of an "activist blog," it is useful for us to realize that "writing" means making effective and proper rhetorical choices. Writing isn't simply picking up a pen or a keyboard. Nope: writing means working to understand the exigency that is calling us to respond to the world. It means knowing why we are writing in the first place. It means trying to figure out who does and doesn't care about specific issues, as well as why and how they care about issues in unique ways. It also means discovering the appropriate ways we can meet our goals by making choices about what media we communicate with, and how we invent elements of texts that are related to the genre we are composing.

Most importantly, however, it means understanding the ethos we are cultivating and how that is associated with our material and digital identity. For Project 1, you have been asked to assume the identity of a citizen--not just any citizen, though. You are someone who wants to improve the conditions associated with an issue that has a consequence for a community that you are part of and that you care about--and, you're going to do that citizenship in a digital way. That in other words is the assignment exigency. But more importantly, there is broader exigency that surrounds this assignment. That exigency is the one that is associated with the larger goal of a liberal arts education--namely, to prepare students to act as responsible social agents, and to prepare them to participate as leaders and citizens of the world. I believe that too often that aim is lost. I believe that aim is not fully expressed to students.

Consider what Henry Rollins has to say on the matter:

Now consider what John Dewey famously stated:

The problem of education in it's relation to the direction of social change is all one with the problem of finding out what democracy means in its total range of concrete applications: domestic, international, religious, cultural, economic, and political.... The trouble...is that we have taken democracy for granted; we have thought and acted as if our forefathers have founded it once and for all. We have forgotten that it has to be enacted anew in every generation, in every year, in the living relations of person to person, in all social forms and institutions. Forgetting this...we have been negligent in creating a school that should be the constant nurse of democracy.

The question then becomes, however, how do we create such a school? How do we prepare students to engage in the democratic process? What do we ask of such courses? What would they look like? How would the assignments be constructed? Well, for me at least, that means helping students better understand a tool that helps them respond to the situations they face and to accomplish their aims. Rhetoric helps us do that because it enables us to know what is asked of us by whom, it also helps us make our own intentions clear to others.