Taking Sides
It's been tough going in my Rhetoric course for the last couple of weeks as I try to help my students understand that parties to an issue do more than support or oppose it, and that at any one moment there are various arguments in circulation with regard to issues about which people disagree. Right now, they're working on a conjecture assignment--an assignment that asks them to determine what the available arguments are for a particular issue and then to "map" those arguments and the parties that hold them.
Despite my best efforts, though, I can't seem to break them out of binary thinking--pro/con; right/wrong; good/bad. Even when they engage in various sorts of invention in which they begin to discover some of the available arguments currently in circulation about, let's say, the war on terror, they inevitably reduce those arguments to support for or opposition to the war on terror. I understand they've been asked to write about, say, gun control and "to present both sides," and that the culture continues to inscribe this sort of thinking with "Crossfire," and all the so-called political discussions that pit someone on the left against someone on the right no matter what the issue. I understand that the talking heads (Blitzer, Russert, Matthews) then characterize these disputants as engaging in a debate, even though, more often than not, these so-called debates devolve into partisan screeds. And I understand we have a president who reduces everything and everyone to being either with us or against us. But that's not rhetoric, and it's this sort of thinking (or lack of understanding) that's eradicated diplomacy from our government's repertoire.
I've tried everything I can think of to demonstrate the limitations of this sort of thinking. We've read articles and editorials and discussed the various arguments presented therein; we listened to some of the debates among Senators with regard to Alberto Gonzales's confirmation and mapped those arguments; and we've worked together to determine the available arguments on issues such as increasing tuition and developing a light rail system. I've even gone so far as writing AIDS on the board and then asking my students how many of them are in favor of AIDS. All these things work at the time, but once they're on their own, a majority of my students fall back into binary thinking. This isn't the first time I've taught this assignment, and it's not the first time I've had students fail to grasp the concept, but it's never been quite this difficult. And perhaps as a result, I've never been more determined to reach them.
If we want to maintain our democracy, we must be willing to enage in productive arguments about issues, and we must have a citizenry that understands how to do so.
Despite my best efforts, though, I can't seem to break them out of binary thinking--pro/con; right/wrong; good/bad. Even when they engage in various sorts of invention in which they begin to discover some of the available arguments currently in circulation about, let's say, the war on terror, they inevitably reduce those arguments to support for or opposition to the war on terror. I understand they've been asked to write about, say, gun control and "to present both sides," and that the culture continues to inscribe this sort of thinking with "Crossfire," and all the so-called political discussions that pit someone on the left against someone on the right no matter what the issue. I understand that the talking heads (Blitzer, Russert, Matthews) then characterize these disputants as engaging in a debate, even though, more often than not, these so-called debates devolve into partisan screeds. And I understand we have a president who reduces everything and everyone to being either with us or against us. But that's not rhetoric, and it's this sort of thinking (or lack of understanding) that's eradicated diplomacy from our government's repertoire.
I've tried everything I can think of to demonstrate the limitations of this sort of thinking. We've read articles and editorials and discussed the various arguments presented therein; we listened to some of the debates among Senators with regard to Alberto Gonzales's confirmation and mapped those arguments; and we've worked together to determine the available arguments on issues such as increasing tuition and developing a light rail system. I've even gone so far as writing AIDS on the board and then asking my students how many of them are in favor of AIDS. All these things work at the time, but once they're on their own, a majority of my students fall back into binary thinking. This isn't the first time I've taught this assignment, and it's not the first time I've had students fail to grasp the concept, but it's never been quite this difficult. And perhaps as a result, I've never been more determined to reach them.
If we want to maintain our democracy, we must be willing to enage in productive arguments about issues, and we must have a citizenry that understands how to do so.
posted by Katherine at 4:34 PM
2 Comments:
Interesting. I've done a similar assignment in the past, where I asked students in one essay to turn an annotated bibliography into a rhetorical analysis of the range of discourse on a certain (necessarily narrow: they can't possibly encompass everthing that's been said on, say, abortion, so we typically spend a week just talking about how to focus one's research) topic. Not just a research report, but looking at what's being said, where it's being said, who's saying it, what their motives and interests are, what's not being said, and so on, and then (and this is always the tough part) to draw some conclusions about the rhetoric surrounding their topic.
Then, and only then, the next essay assignment is to use some of their sources to argue a position on that topic, acknowledging the counterarguments, with the old caveat that they'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (it takes most students a long time to understand that ruthlessly demolishing someone's opposing arguments is much less persuasive than getting them to see their points of productive agreement with you). Essentially, the first essay is pre-writing for the second.
In some ways, it sounds like the task you're struggling with your students on, and part of what I'm trying to get my students to do with the assignments above, is what Wayne Booth in his recent book calls "Listening-Rhetoric". Don't know if you saw Collin's and Clancy's original posts, but a few of us are reading the book together and cross-blogging about it.
Mike
Thanks for the book tip, Mike. I haven't read Booth's The Rhetoric of Rhetoric--another book to add to my reading list.
In many ways your assignments are similar to mine, especially in terms of the first essay really being a draft of the second. In my course, the first two essay projects are preliminary research and invention for the third. I've described the first; the second essay they're to determine the values that structure the various arguments about an issue--as a way of getting at the ideologies shaping the conjectures--and then in the last essay, they present their argument for resolving the dispute.
The second project is even tougher for them (and me) because they've not been asked to talk about values in such a way as to see, for example, that while there is disagreement about what constitutes a patriotic act--are anti-war demonstrations patriotic? is serving in the military? do we have to support war to be patriotic?--the value of patriotism circulates in American discourse to such an extent that affects lives and actions. So, it's a conjecture, value, policy sequence.
After struggling to get this second assignment to work, in the past, I've instead asked them to to argue a position on the issue based on common values, but this semester I'm determined to get the values assignment to work. I guess all the post election discussion of "values" has me fired up!
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