"
Research
in the Teaching of English 27 (1993): 222-51.
The Public Work of Rhetoric_nodrm
The latter has been portrayed as practical but unforgiving; the former, as inauthentic but thoughtful.
Part of this has been purposeful: to make sure that those of us excited about the public turn guard against academic self-hatred.
But I acknowledge that the exaggeration is potentially problematic.
My hope, after all, is that we avoid all forms of binary thinking about school and society, regardless of which term we privilege.
In making the public turn that this col- lection celebrates, in other words, I propose that we adopt a more Janus-faced attitude to school and society, focused on what each does best educationally.
But I have dwelled here mostly on problems associated with the denigra- tion of school. And I have tried to suggest that in our embarrassment about the bad things that school sometimes does, we should not blind ourselves to the good things that also happen there. Some types of traditional classroom activ- ity can serve the progressive purposes many of us have for rhetorical education.
What I hope to have done, then, is remind us that school need not be, in Jane Tompkins's words, the enemy of what we want to learn and teach. 53 In turning our gaze outward, in other words, we should not lose sight of what, as teachers, we do well and can do better. Because as much as we would like our classrooms to be more like our best publics, there are publics out there that we should wish were more like our best classrooms.
Notes
1. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 1-5.
2. Woods, "Teaching"; Woods, "Among Men," 18.
226 David Fleming
3. Woods, "Among Men," 18.
4. Ibid.
5. Emig, Composing Processes, 99. 6. Ibid. , 70.
7. Ibid. , 98.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. , 97, 93.
10. Ibid. , 93.
11. Wells, "Rogue Cops," 328.
12. Petraglia, "Spinning Like a Kite. " 13. Barthes, "Old Rhetoric," 14.
14. Ibid. , 17.
15. See Anyon, "Social Class"; Bloom, "Freshman Composition"; Heath, Ways with Words.
16. Smit, End of Composition. 17. MacIntyre, After Virtue.
18. Scho? n, Reflective Practitioner. 19. Petrovic, "Praxis," 435.
20. Galston, "Political Knowledge. " 21. Coogan, "Service Learning. "
22. Ibid. , 669-70.
23. Ibid. , 687.
24. Perhaps the best-known recent attempt to integrate traditional and praxis-ori-
ented pedagogies in literacy education is the 1996 proposal of the New London Group, which argues for a pedagogy comprised of four parts: situated practice, overt instruc- tion, critical framing, and transformed practice. See Cazden et al. , "Pedagogy of Multi- literacies. "
25. Anderson, Reder, and Simon, "Situated Learning. "
26. Ibid. , 8.
27. See Freedman, "Show and Tell? "
28. Hayes et al. , Reading Empirical Research, 355. See also Wallace and Hayes, "Redefin-
ing Revision. "
29. Anderson, Reder, and Simon, "Situated Learning," 8. 30. Herzberg, "Community Service. "
31. Geisler, Academic Literacy.
32. Delpit, "Silenced Dialogue. "
33. Mathieu, Tactics of Hope.
34. William T. Lenehan, Memo to English Department Teaching Assistants, Novem-
ber 19, 1969. Archived in the files of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madi- son) English Department, Helen C. White Hall. Copies of this and other primary texts cited here are in the author's possession.
35. UW-Madison Oral History Project at http://archives. library. wisc. edu/oral-history/ overview. html.
36. Walter Rideout, interview by Laura Smail (Madison: Oral History Program of the UW-Madison Archives [#88, First Interview], 1976); see http://archives. library. wisc. edu/ oral-history/guide/1-100/81-90. html#rideout.
37. UW-Madison English Department, Minutes of the Departmental Committee, No- vember 4, 1969, 1.
38. Ibid. , 2.
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 227
39. Cronon and Jenkins, University of Wisconsin, 290. 40. Anonymous, "Becoming a Radical Teacher," 51ff.
41. Ira Shor, interview by Mira Shimabukuro, July 13, 2005, transcript in author's pos- session.
42. Fleming, "On the Hinge of History. " 43. Ibid.
44. Duberman, "Experiment in Education. " 45. Ibid. , 321.
46. Muehlenkamp, "Growing Free," 44.
47. Ibid.
48. Anonymous, "Becoming a Radical Teacher. "
49. Thomas, Ednah, with Jeanie Peterson, John Pirri, Mary Richards, Michael Stroud,
and Sharon Wilson, Report on English 101 (Madison: University of Wisconsin English Department, February 5, 1969).
50. Martinez, "Degrading System. " 51. DeKoven, Utopia Limited.
52. Ohmann, English in America, 160. 53. Tompkins, Life in School.
Works Cited
Anderson, John R. , Lynne M. Reder, and Herbert A. Simon. "Situated Learning and Edu- cation. " Educational Researcher 25, no. 4 (1996): 5-11.
Anonymous [Sea Unido]. "Becoming a Radical Teacher. " Critical Teaching 2 (1969): 51ff. Anyon, Jean. "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. " Journal of Education
162 (1980): 67-92.
Barthes, Roland. "The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Me? moire. " In The Semiotic Challenge. Trans-
lated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
Bloom, Lynn Z. "Freshman Composition as a Middle Class Enterprise. " College English
58 (1996): 654-75.
Cazden, Courtney, Bill Cope, Norman Fairclough, James Gee, Mary Kalantzis, Gunther
Kress, Allan Luke, Carmen Luke, Sarah Michaels, and Martin Nakata (The New Lon- don Group). "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. " Harvard Edu- cational Review 66 (1996): 60-93.
Coogan, David. "Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhet- oric. " College Composition and Communication 57 (2006): 667-93.
Cronon, E. David, and John W. Jenkins. The University of Wisconsin: A History. Vol. 4, 1945-1971: Renewal to Revolution. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham, N. C. : Duke University Press, 2004.
Delpit, Lisa. "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children. " Harvard Educational Review 58 (1988): 280-98.
Duberman, Martin. "An Experiment in Education. " Daedalus 97 (1968): 318-41.
Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana, Ill. : National Council
of Teachers of English, 1971.
Fleming, David, with Rasha Diab and Mira Shimabukuro. "On the Hinge of History:
Freshman Composition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1967-1970. " Unpub-
lished manuscript.
Freedman, Aviva. "Show and Tell? The Role of Explicit Teaching in the Learning of New
Genres.
" Research in the Teaching of English 27 (1993): 222-51.
228 David Fleming
Galston, William A. "Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Civic Education. " Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 217-34.
Geisler, Cheryl. Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise: Reading, Writing, and Know- ing in Academic Philosophy. Hillsdale, N. J. : Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994.
Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1986.
Hayes, John R. , Richard E. Young, Michele L. Matchett, Maggie McCaffrey, Cynthia Cochran, and Thomas Hajduk, eds. Reading Empirical Research Studies: The Rhetoric of Research. Hillsdale, N. J. : Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992
Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Herzberg, Bruce. "Community Service and Critical Thinking. " College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 307-19.
Kennedy, George A. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Traditions. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Ind. : Univer- sity of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
Martinez, Inez. "The Degrading System. " Critical Teaching 1 (1968): 4-6.
Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Portsmouth, N. J. :
Boynton/Cook, 2005.
Muehlenkamp, Bob. "Growing Free. " Critical Teaching 1 (1968): 44-50.
Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. 1976. Reprint,
Hanover, N. H. : University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1996. Petraglia, Joseph. "Introduction: General Writing Skills Instruction and Its Discontents. " In Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, edited by Joseph Petraglia,
xi-xvii. Mahwah, N. J. : Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995.
------. "Spinning Like a Kite: A Closer Look at the Pseudotransactional Function of
Writing. " Journal of Advanced Composition 15 (1995): 19-33.
Petrovic, Gajo. "Praxis. " In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 435-40. 2nd ed. Edited by
Tom Bottomore. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Scho? n, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York:
Basic Books, 1983.
Smit, David W. The End of Composition Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2004.
Tompkins, Jane. A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned. Reading, Mass. : Addison-
Wesley, 1996.
Wallace, David, and John R. Hayes. "Redefining Revision for Freshmen. " In Reading Em-
pirical Research Studies: The Rhetoric of Research, edited by John R. Hayes, Richard E. Young, Michele L. Matchett, Maggie McCaffrey, Cynthia Cochran, and Thomas Hajduk, 349-69. Hillsdale, N. J. : Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992.
Wells, Susan. "Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from Public Writing? " College Composition and Communication 47 (1996): 325-41.
Woods, Marjorie C. "Among Men--Not Boys: Histories of Rhetoric and the Exclusion of Pedagogy. " Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22 (1992): 18-26.
------. "The Teaching of Writing in Medieval Europe. " In A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America, edited by James J. Mur- phy, 77-94. Davis, Calif. : Hermagoras Press, 1990.
? Mediating Differences
Erik Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller
Like many developing cities, Tucson, Arizona, has experienced growing pains. Unfortunately, increased growth has brought increased conflict and compli- cations in a region already struggling to cope with its contentious geographic positioning. Located just fifty miles north of the southern border with Mex- ico, Tucson experiences its share of border town issues, while struggling to adapt its own cultural identity. An increasingly large amount of the conflict revolves around the swelling populations confined within the physical bor- ders of the city, so much conflict that the Northwest Police District--one of five in the city--struggles to handle even simple neighborhood disputes. According to Sergeant Ron Thompson, the district receives a call reporting a dispute between neighbors almost every other day. Not only were these calls burdening the district's resources, but after a fatal dispute in June 2006, all calls were approached with the utmost caution and treated as potentially dan- gerous. On June 22 Wayne Poppin was shot to death in front of his central Tucson apartment by a neighbor who was upset with the amount of noise Poppin was making in the mornings while loading his truck for work. Com- munity members remembered Poppin as an energetic man and good neigh- bor who was sincerely interested in his community. According to Poppin's widow, "All those people had to do was go and ask him to be quiet and he would have. "1 This unfortunate incident illuminates the desperate need for increased conflict resolution skills within the community.
One site where that need is being met is Our Family Services (OF), a joint venture of Our Town Mediation Services and the Family Counseling Agency. Active in Pima County for over seventy-five years, OF serves more than 35,000 people a year. 2 Providing services ranging from counseling to education to mediation, OF has shaped itself around the needs of Tucson residents. Cur- rently, OF offers fifteen programs in areas such as elder care, crisis manage- ment, transitional living, disability services, reunification services, parenting
230 Erik Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller
education, community mediation, and school mediation education. 3 Whereas all of these programs contribute valuable services, the mediation program has been especially effective at improving social conditions. Staffed by three full- time employees as well as ten to fifteen volunteers at any given time, the community mediation program provides "safe, neutral and voluntary medi- ations, in English or Spanish, for a variety of neighbor and family disputes. "4 OF offers comprehensive methods for improving conflict resolution skills using transformative mediation principles. Mediations last approximately two hours, are facilitated by two mediators, and use the "living room" configura- tion (a spatial organization conducive to community interaction) in order to create an amiable space where community members can comfortably discuss their differences. OF mediations construct important spaces for members of the same community to create productive discussions and preserve relationships.
OF has collaborated with Pima County to establish a transformative medi- ation program that provides free or low-cost mediation services for property and noise complaints. The most popular collaborative program is with Pima County Animal Care Center and involves individuals who file animal noise complaints toward neighbors. This program creates a great opportunity for neighbors to collaborate on more than just their immediate needs. As the Community Mediation Program director, Andrea Stuart, explains, "Most often it's not about the dogs. There are usually other things that have escalated. "5 Those who file complaints (plaintiffs) can pursue their issues through free, vol- untary mediation sessions. If plaintiffs agree to mediation, they contact OF mediation staff, who then contact the animal owners and arrange a media- tion session that offers an opportunity for parties to discuss their issues with each other instead of following through with the formal complaint process. The ensuing mediations follow a process conducive to successful collabora- tion--a process that attempts to transform what Tucson city prosecutor Alan Merritt describes as "the lines of communication [that] are not open between the dog owner and the complainant. "6 An important aspect of the process is that mediators often change parties' attitudes by shifting the frame of refer- ence away from securing agreement, a shift that encourages disputants to feel more in control and begin to listen and learn from each other in new ways.
While the democratic applications of rhetoric continue to provide popular justifications for its teaching, applications to public discourse often end up being reduced to writing letters to the editor, criticizing political propaganda, or critiquing popular ideologies. Our continuing concentration on academic discourse positions our work at a critical distance from rhetoric's professed concern for collective action. Our increased involvement with service learn- ing and community literacy work has been complemented by work with action research and social movement studies. This renewed concern for col- lective agency has been pivotal to the civic turn in rhetoric and composition
that is the subject of this collection of essays. As scholars and teachers, we need to build on these opportunities to consider new ways of thinking about how rhetoric relates to civic participation. We will contribute to this line of discussion by exploring a deliberative domain where we may be able to develop more broadly based engagements with the conflicts that people work with every day. Conflict mediation is one such mode of deliberation in which we may be able to rearticulate a civic vision of rhetoric that makes productive use of the differences that we have come to see as integral to public deliberations.
Conflict mediation provides a purposeful but open-ended mode of engag- ing with practical deliberations on issues ranging from barking dogs to toxic waste dumps. In "Rhetoric and Conflict Resolution," Richard Lloyd-Jones called for rhetoricians to consider how conflict mediation might help us be- come more broadly engaged with how people "contextualize conflict so that its energies can be directed toward positive ends. "7 A mediator is a third-party facilitator who does not have the authority to judge opposing arguments and pronounce a verdict. The judicial model of an expert judge overseeing the making of pro and con arguments before an impartial jury has continued to shape our thinking about deliberative inquiries even as we have come to question the foundations of disinterested objectivity. Such questions have prompted the development of models of conflict mediation that are less con- cerned with preserving impartiality than with investigating the heuristic potentials of differences in assumptions. These developments parallel recent trends in rhetoric and composition, and those parallels can help us to see these continuing trends in a different context, as often proves to be the case when community-based inquiries challenge the presumptions of academic researchers. Such moments have a heuristic potential that conflict mediators have learned to value.
The inventive capacities of conflicted situations are one of the points where trends in rhetoric and composition parallel those in conflict media- tion. For example, specific resolution practices like principled negotiation rely on rhetorical strategies to explore the dynamic relations among speakers, audiences, and contested situations. The inventive capacities of such strategies become apparent in places like Tucson, where people are pressed to resolve their differences. Much of the power of classical heuristics arises from their ability to make use of contested situations. As we will discuss, such heuristics have been configured in quite complementary ways by various schools of conflict resolution--most usefully by theories of transformative mediation. This school of conflict mediation challenges people who are enmeshed in conflicts to reflect upon how they can mediate their differences in ways that expand their sense of what can be achieved in the situation. Sites of conflict are central to the civic tradition in rhetorical studies, and those of us who are versed in that tradition have much to offer, and to learn, from those engaged in mediating conflicts in community centers, large organizations, and other
Mediating Differences 231
232 Erik Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller
sites beyond the academy. Rhetoric's traditional concern for the art of discov- ering the possibilities of contested situations can be reinvigorated by engag- ing in work with conflict mediation, especially those approaches that look not simply to resolve differences but to open up their broader possibilities.
Rediscovering the Inventive Capacities of Conflicted Situations
Recent trends in rhetoric, composition, and a wide range of related fields can be benchmarked by the rediscovery of inventive capacities of conflicted situ- ations. Kenneth Burke challenged rhetoricians to expand the locus of their studies from persuasion to "identification," and his "dramatism" became part of the interpretive frameworks of social movement studies in communica- tions and sociology. 8 Scene-act ratios have also been used by compositionists such as Karen Burke LeFevre; her discussion of "resonance" is congruent with how conflict mediators attempt to help disputants reflect upon how their communities' values frame their decision-making possibilities. 9 Collaborative models of invention have reshaped how we think of writing itself, as can be seen in Jim Corder's writings on "generative ethos" as a means to engage in discovering the possibilities of situations with others. 10 In rhetorical studies, as in conflict mediation, these trends of thought have often been identified with the writings of Carl Rogers. Like Burke, "Rogerian collaborative rheto- ric," as Nathaniel Teich has termed it, has served as a resource for developing heuristics that can be used to investigate the transactional potentials of con- flicted situations in ways that are less tightly scripted than by the traditional emphasis on persuasion in classical theories of invention. 11
These familiar theories of invention provide a more open-ended frame- work for exploring the rhetorical dynamics of conflict mediation. "Conflict resolution" can generally be defined as a variable set of practices concerned with helping disputants reach agreement through noncoercive methods of collaborative inquiry. With clear parallels to our traditional emphasis on argu- ment, the distributive model treats conflict resolution as a "zero-sum" game that entails "a competition over who is going to get the most of a limited resource. "12 Here, the mediation process is envisioned as a competition for position, with participants focusing on what they want to achieve if they win out over their opponents. 13 As in rhetoric and composition, this model of conflict resolution has been replaced with approaches that have a more open- ended sense of the process--integrative theories of mediation, which look to resolve conflicts in ways that can be mutually beneficial. This school of con- flict resolution was popularized in Fisher, Ury, and Patton's Getting to Yes. 14 A best seller that has sold over two million copies in twenty-one languages, it attempts to enable people to reimagine conflict in order to work through their differences. The invention strategies are similar to those identified with Rogerian rhetoric, for disputants are encouraged to listen and brainstorm together in order to identify mutual goals. Conflict mediation becomes an
invention process concerned with discovering the possibilities of differing in- terpretations. Integrative theories of conflict resolution enlist invention strate- gies to help disputants break out of the assumption maintained by distributive negotiations that conflicts inevitably arise over a fixed set of resources to be divided between the disputants. 15 In these and other ways, integrative nego- tiators enlist invention strategies not to help disputants develop opposing arguments but to rethink the situation itself and their purposes in it.
Distributive and integrative approaches to conflict mediation have strik- ing continuities with how theorists such as Burke and Rogers reframed rhet- oric's classical focus on audience, situation, and purpose to develop situated models of purposeful interaction that are more open-ended than traditional conceptions of persuasion. As in composition studies, the counterpoised stances of the critic and the advocate have been replaced within discussions of conflict mediation that have adopted an integrative approach that is less intent on winning and more concerned with listening to others and reaching consensus. However, in both areas the tacitly perpetuated assumption is often that conflicts are to be resolved as quickly as possible so that people can move on to better things. This conception of conflict has lost its standing in both composition and conflict mediation. Rogerian rhetoric and an unproblema- tized faith in collaborative inquiry lost their standing in rhetoric and com position as we became attuned to how liberal models of building consensus often function to make a virtue of the power of persuasion. Consensus lost its authority among many practitioners when critics of collaborative learning called upon teachers and researchers to attend to how prevailing hierarchies are perpetuated by pressing diverging points of view to be reasonable and accept the will of the group. Critics such as John Trimbur argued that oppos- ing views can be better sustained and valued for their inventive capacities when "dissensus" is seen as a productive part of a healthy discussion about conflicted issues. 16 In rhetoric and composition, as in conflict mediation, we have become suspicious of the idea that collaborations should work toward consensus as we have learned to value the generative capacities of our differ- ences. Fortunately, conflict mediation offers such models of collaborative inquiry, which have expanded as we have looked beyond the classroom to community-based research projects. The work of Linda Flower aptly docu- ments these possibilities, as we discuss after we consider another school of conflict mediation that provides a complementary model to the concern for "dissensus" in rhetoric and composition. 17
Transformative Mediation as a Model for Learning from "Dissensus"
Insofar as we have become suspicious of consensus, we are likely to be criti- cal of the collaborative presuppositions of integrative conflict resolution, such as Fisher, Ury, and Patton's advice on audience or reframing as a process of
Mediating Differences 233
234 Erik Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller
invention. Such thinking suggests an unproblematized concern for consen- sus that tends to isolate conflicts from broader contexts that raise complicated issues that may require mediators to confront broader inequities and hierar- chies. For example, Getting to Yes offers four strategies--such as "separate the people from the problem" and "focus on interests, not positions"--to help disputants reconcile differences in order to reach agreement. 18 Even though these suggestions are oriented to mediating differences rather than winning out over others, these collaborative strategies mirror recent attempts to adapt classical rhetoric to a more liberal orientation on learning. They are con- cerned with solving problems, not with changing situations or using the col- laborative process as an opportunity to explore the potentials of collective action among people who may face problems not of their own making. As a result, integrative as well as distributive mediation strategies tend to manage conflicts in ways that do not challenge prevailing assumptions or help groups develop social capital through productive collaborations, and thereby develop coalitions to advance broader changes.
Such mediation practices may help people improve their immediate situations but may not help them understand the conditions that led to the conflicts. In fact, some resolution strategies are specifically intended to help people focus on the immediate problem and ignore broader factors. Concern for solving immediate problems is pushed to the forefront, eliminating chances to learn the broader contributing factors. Because agreement is the main goal, mediators do not focus on developing disputants' abilities to develop a sense of common cause. Some mediation practitioners, however, do attempt to ad- dress underlying inequities by envisioning conflict resolution not as a means to an immediate end but as part of a broader process concerned with enabling communities to discover the inventive capacities of their shared traditions and build up social capital by working through collaborations.
The most popular alternative approach is known as "transformative medi- ation. " It is guided by a vision of collaboration as a means to help people gain more control over their situations and create alternative resolutions. This school of conflict mediation was developed by Robert Bush and Joseph Fol- ger and articulated in their The Promise of Mediation: Responding to Conflict through Empowerment and Recognition and their revised version, The Promise of Mediation: The Transformative Approach to Conflict. These texts redefine the mediation process and mediator roles and provide case studies and commen- taries concerned with helping mediators to serve as collaborative educators by emphasizing relationship building over settlement. Bush, Rains Distinguished Professor of Alternative Dispute Resolution Law at Hofstra University School of Law, and Folger, professor of Adult and Organizational Development at Temple University, offer a vision of mediation that moves beyond contempo- rary mediators' desires to increase satisfaction with dispute resolution or provide collective opportunities for community members. Transformative
mediators treat conflict not as something that must be solved but as an opportunity to change disputants' interpretive schema. This approach opens up opportunities for mediations to position the particular problem in broader contexts and try to provide a constructive atmosphere where disputants can air shared needs.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of transformative mediation is its redefinition of the purposes at issue in conflicted situations. The goal is not resolution, or agreement, but transformation.
But I have dwelled here mostly on problems associated with the denigra- tion of school. And I have tried to suggest that in our embarrassment about the bad things that school sometimes does, we should not blind ourselves to the good things that also happen there. Some types of traditional classroom activ- ity can serve the progressive purposes many of us have for rhetorical education.
What I hope to have done, then, is remind us that school need not be, in Jane Tompkins's words, the enemy of what we want to learn and teach. 53 In turning our gaze outward, in other words, we should not lose sight of what, as teachers, we do well and can do better. Because as much as we would like our classrooms to be more like our best publics, there are publics out there that we should wish were more like our best classrooms.
Notes
1. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 1-5.
2. Woods, "Teaching"; Woods, "Among Men," 18.
226 David Fleming
3. Woods, "Among Men," 18.
4. Ibid.
5. Emig, Composing Processes, 99. 6. Ibid. , 70.
7. Ibid. , 98.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. , 97, 93.
10. Ibid. , 93.
11. Wells, "Rogue Cops," 328.
12. Petraglia, "Spinning Like a Kite. " 13. Barthes, "Old Rhetoric," 14.
14. Ibid. , 17.
15. See Anyon, "Social Class"; Bloom, "Freshman Composition"; Heath, Ways with Words.
16. Smit, End of Composition. 17. MacIntyre, After Virtue.
18. Scho? n, Reflective Practitioner. 19. Petrovic, "Praxis," 435.
20. Galston, "Political Knowledge. " 21. Coogan, "Service Learning. "
22. Ibid. , 669-70.
23. Ibid. , 687.
24. Perhaps the best-known recent attempt to integrate traditional and praxis-ori-
ented pedagogies in literacy education is the 1996 proposal of the New London Group, which argues for a pedagogy comprised of four parts: situated practice, overt instruc- tion, critical framing, and transformed practice. See Cazden et al. , "Pedagogy of Multi- literacies. "
25. Anderson, Reder, and Simon, "Situated Learning. "
26. Ibid. , 8.
27. See Freedman, "Show and Tell? "
28. Hayes et al. , Reading Empirical Research, 355. See also Wallace and Hayes, "Redefin-
ing Revision. "
29. Anderson, Reder, and Simon, "Situated Learning," 8. 30. Herzberg, "Community Service. "
31. Geisler, Academic Literacy.
32. Delpit, "Silenced Dialogue. "
33. Mathieu, Tactics of Hope.
34. William T. Lenehan, Memo to English Department Teaching Assistants, Novem-
ber 19, 1969. Archived in the files of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madi- son) English Department, Helen C. White Hall. Copies of this and other primary texts cited here are in the author's possession.
35. UW-Madison Oral History Project at http://archives. library. wisc. edu/oral-history/ overview. html.
36. Walter Rideout, interview by Laura Smail (Madison: Oral History Program of the UW-Madison Archives [#88, First Interview], 1976); see http://archives. library. wisc. edu/ oral-history/guide/1-100/81-90. html#rideout.
37. UW-Madison English Department, Minutes of the Departmental Committee, No- vember 4, 1969, 1.
38. Ibid. , 2.
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 227
39. Cronon and Jenkins, University of Wisconsin, 290. 40. Anonymous, "Becoming a Radical Teacher," 51ff.
41. Ira Shor, interview by Mira Shimabukuro, July 13, 2005, transcript in author's pos- session.
42. Fleming, "On the Hinge of History. " 43. Ibid.
44. Duberman, "Experiment in Education. " 45. Ibid. , 321.
46. Muehlenkamp, "Growing Free," 44.
47. Ibid.
48. Anonymous, "Becoming a Radical Teacher. "
49. Thomas, Ednah, with Jeanie Peterson, John Pirri, Mary Richards, Michael Stroud,
and Sharon Wilson, Report on English 101 (Madison: University of Wisconsin English Department, February 5, 1969).
50. Martinez, "Degrading System. " 51. DeKoven, Utopia Limited.
52. Ohmann, English in America, 160. 53. Tompkins, Life in School.
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Anderson, John R. , Lynne M. Reder, and Herbert A. Simon. "Situated Learning and Edu- cation. " Educational Researcher 25, no. 4 (1996): 5-11.
Anonymous [Sea Unido]. "Becoming a Radical Teacher. " Critical Teaching 2 (1969): 51ff. Anyon, Jean. "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. " Journal of Education
162 (1980): 67-92.
Barthes, Roland. "The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Me? moire. " In The Semiotic Challenge. Trans-
lated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
Bloom, Lynn Z. "Freshman Composition as a Middle Class Enterprise. " College English
58 (1996): 654-75.
Cazden, Courtney, Bill Cope, Norman Fairclough, James Gee, Mary Kalantzis, Gunther
Kress, Allan Luke, Carmen Luke, Sarah Michaels, and Martin Nakata (The New Lon- don Group). "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. " Harvard Edu- cational Review 66 (1996): 60-93.
Coogan, David. "Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhet- oric. " College Composition and Communication 57 (2006): 667-93.
Cronon, E. David, and John W. Jenkins. The University of Wisconsin: A History. Vol. 4, 1945-1971: Renewal to Revolution. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham, N. C. : Duke University Press, 2004.
Delpit, Lisa. "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children. " Harvard Educational Review 58 (1988): 280-98.
Duberman, Martin. "An Experiment in Education. " Daedalus 97 (1968): 318-41.
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? Mediating Differences
Erik Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller
Like many developing cities, Tucson, Arizona, has experienced growing pains. Unfortunately, increased growth has brought increased conflict and compli- cations in a region already struggling to cope with its contentious geographic positioning. Located just fifty miles north of the southern border with Mex- ico, Tucson experiences its share of border town issues, while struggling to adapt its own cultural identity. An increasingly large amount of the conflict revolves around the swelling populations confined within the physical bor- ders of the city, so much conflict that the Northwest Police District--one of five in the city--struggles to handle even simple neighborhood disputes. According to Sergeant Ron Thompson, the district receives a call reporting a dispute between neighbors almost every other day. Not only were these calls burdening the district's resources, but after a fatal dispute in June 2006, all calls were approached with the utmost caution and treated as potentially dan- gerous. On June 22 Wayne Poppin was shot to death in front of his central Tucson apartment by a neighbor who was upset with the amount of noise Poppin was making in the mornings while loading his truck for work. Com- munity members remembered Poppin as an energetic man and good neigh- bor who was sincerely interested in his community. According to Poppin's widow, "All those people had to do was go and ask him to be quiet and he would have. "1 This unfortunate incident illuminates the desperate need for increased conflict resolution skills within the community.
One site where that need is being met is Our Family Services (OF), a joint venture of Our Town Mediation Services and the Family Counseling Agency. Active in Pima County for over seventy-five years, OF serves more than 35,000 people a year. 2 Providing services ranging from counseling to education to mediation, OF has shaped itself around the needs of Tucson residents. Cur- rently, OF offers fifteen programs in areas such as elder care, crisis manage- ment, transitional living, disability services, reunification services, parenting
230 Erik Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller
education, community mediation, and school mediation education. 3 Whereas all of these programs contribute valuable services, the mediation program has been especially effective at improving social conditions. Staffed by three full- time employees as well as ten to fifteen volunteers at any given time, the community mediation program provides "safe, neutral and voluntary medi- ations, in English or Spanish, for a variety of neighbor and family disputes. "4 OF offers comprehensive methods for improving conflict resolution skills using transformative mediation principles. Mediations last approximately two hours, are facilitated by two mediators, and use the "living room" configura- tion (a spatial organization conducive to community interaction) in order to create an amiable space where community members can comfortably discuss their differences. OF mediations construct important spaces for members of the same community to create productive discussions and preserve relationships.
OF has collaborated with Pima County to establish a transformative medi- ation program that provides free or low-cost mediation services for property and noise complaints. The most popular collaborative program is with Pima County Animal Care Center and involves individuals who file animal noise complaints toward neighbors. This program creates a great opportunity for neighbors to collaborate on more than just their immediate needs. As the Community Mediation Program director, Andrea Stuart, explains, "Most often it's not about the dogs. There are usually other things that have escalated. "5 Those who file complaints (plaintiffs) can pursue their issues through free, vol- untary mediation sessions. If plaintiffs agree to mediation, they contact OF mediation staff, who then contact the animal owners and arrange a media- tion session that offers an opportunity for parties to discuss their issues with each other instead of following through with the formal complaint process. The ensuing mediations follow a process conducive to successful collabora- tion--a process that attempts to transform what Tucson city prosecutor Alan Merritt describes as "the lines of communication [that] are not open between the dog owner and the complainant. "6 An important aspect of the process is that mediators often change parties' attitudes by shifting the frame of refer- ence away from securing agreement, a shift that encourages disputants to feel more in control and begin to listen and learn from each other in new ways.
While the democratic applications of rhetoric continue to provide popular justifications for its teaching, applications to public discourse often end up being reduced to writing letters to the editor, criticizing political propaganda, or critiquing popular ideologies. Our continuing concentration on academic discourse positions our work at a critical distance from rhetoric's professed concern for collective action. Our increased involvement with service learn- ing and community literacy work has been complemented by work with action research and social movement studies. This renewed concern for col- lective agency has been pivotal to the civic turn in rhetoric and composition
that is the subject of this collection of essays. As scholars and teachers, we need to build on these opportunities to consider new ways of thinking about how rhetoric relates to civic participation. We will contribute to this line of discussion by exploring a deliberative domain where we may be able to develop more broadly based engagements with the conflicts that people work with every day. Conflict mediation is one such mode of deliberation in which we may be able to rearticulate a civic vision of rhetoric that makes productive use of the differences that we have come to see as integral to public deliberations.
Conflict mediation provides a purposeful but open-ended mode of engag- ing with practical deliberations on issues ranging from barking dogs to toxic waste dumps. In "Rhetoric and Conflict Resolution," Richard Lloyd-Jones called for rhetoricians to consider how conflict mediation might help us be- come more broadly engaged with how people "contextualize conflict so that its energies can be directed toward positive ends. "7 A mediator is a third-party facilitator who does not have the authority to judge opposing arguments and pronounce a verdict. The judicial model of an expert judge overseeing the making of pro and con arguments before an impartial jury has continued to shape our thinking about deliberative inquiries even as we have come to question the foundations of disinterested objectivity. Such questions have prompted the development of models of conflict mediation that are less con- cerned with preserving impartiality than with investigating the heuristic potentials of differences in assumptions. These developments parallel recent trends in rhetoric and composition, and those parallels can help us to see these continuing trends in a different context, as often proves to be the case when community-based inquiries challenge the presumptions of academic researchers. Such moments have a heuristic potential that conflict mediators have learned to value.
The inventive capacities of conflicted situations are one of the points where trends in rhetoric and composition parallel those in conflict media- tion. For example, specific resolution practices like principled negotiation rely on rhetorical strategies to explore the dynamic relations among speakers, audiences, and contested situations. The inventive capacities of such strategies become apparent in places like Tucson, where people are pressed to resolve their differences. Much of the power of classical heuristics arises from their ability to make use of contested situations. As we will discuss, such heuristics have been configured in quite complementary ways by various schools of conflict resolution--most usefully by theories of transformative mediation. This school of conflict mediation challenges people who are enmeshed in conflicts to reflect upon how they can mediate their differences in ways that expand their sense of what can be achieved in the situation. Sites of conflict are central to the civic tradition in rhetorical studies, and those of us who are versed in that tradition have much to offer, and to learn, from those engaged in mediating conflicts in community centers, large organizations, and other
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sites beyond the academy. Rhetoric's traditional concern for the art of discov- ering the possibilities of contested situations can be reinvigorated by engag- ing in work with conflict mediation, especially those approaches that look not simply to resolve differences but to open up their broader possibilities.
Rediscovering the Inventive Capacities of Conflicted Situations
Recent trends in rhetoric, composition, and a wide range of related fields can be benchmarked by the rediscovery of inventive capacities of conflicted situ- ations. Kenneth Burke challenged rhetoricians to expand the locus of their studies from persuasion to "identification," and his "dramatism" became part of the interpretive frameworks of social movement studies in communica- tions and sociology. 8 Scene-act ratios have also been used by compositionists such as Karen Burke LeFevre; her discussion of "resonance" is congruent with how conflict mediators attempt to help disputants reflect upon how their communities' values frame their decision-making possibilities. 9 Collaborative models of invention have reshaped how we think of writing itself, as can be seen in Jim Corder's writings on "generative ethos" as a means to engage in discovering the possibilities of situations with others. 10 In rhetorical studies, as in conflict mediation, these trends of thought have often been identified with the writings of Carl Rogers. Like Burke, "Rogerian collaborative rheto- ric," as Nathaniel Teich has termed it, has served as a resource for developing heuristics that can be used to investigate the transactional potentials of con- flicted situations in ways that are less tightly scripted than by the traditional emphasis on persuasion in classical theories of invention. 11
These familiar theories of invention provide a more open-ended frame- work for exploring the rhetorical dynamics of conflict mediation. "Conflict resolution" can generally be defined as a variable set of practices concerned with helping disputants reach agreement through noncoercive methods of collaborative inquiry. With clear parallels to our traditional emphasis on argu- ment, the distributive model treats conflict resolution as a "zero-sum" game that entails "a competition over who is going to get the most of a limited resource. "12 Here, the mediation process is envisioned as a competition for position, with participants focusing on what they want to achieve if they win out over their opponents. 13 As in rhetoric and composition, this model of conflict resolution has been replaced with approaches that have a more open- ended sense of the process--integrative theories of mediation, which look to resolve conflicts in ways that can be mutually beneficial. This school of con- flict resolution was popularized in Fisher, Ury, and Patton's Getting to Yes. 14 A best seller that has sold over two million copies in twenty-one languages, it attempts to enable people to reimagine conflict in order to work through their differences. The invention strategies are similar to those identified with Rogerian rhetoric, for disputants are encouraged to listen and brainstorm together in order to identify mutual goals. Conflict mediation becomes an
invention process concerned with discovering the possibilities of differing in- terpretations. Integrative theories of conflict resolution enlist invention strate- gies to help disputants break out of the assumption maintained by distributive negotiations that conflicts inevitably arise over a fixed set of resources to be divided between the disputants. 15 In these and other ways, integrative nego- tiators enlist invention strategies not to help disputants develop opposing arguments but to rethink the situation itself and their purposes in it.
Distributive and integrative approaches to conflict mediation have strik- ing continuities with how theorists such as Burke and Rogers reframed rhet- oric's classical focus on audience, situation, and purpose to develop situated models of purposeful interaction that are more open-ended than traditional conceptions of persuasion. As in composition studies, the counterpoised stances of the critic and the advocate have been replaced within discussions of conflict mediation that have adopted an integrative approach that is less intent on winning and more concerned with listening to others and reaching consensus. However, in both areas the tacitly perpetuated assumption is often that conflicts are to be resolved as quickly as possible so that people can move on to better things. This conception of conflict has lost its standing in both composition and conflict mediation. Rogerian rhetoric and an unproblema- tized faith in collaborative inquiry lost their standing in rhetoric and com position as we became attuned to how liberal models of building consensus often function to make a virtue of the power of persuasion. Consensus lost its authority among many practitioners when critics of collaborative learning called upon teachers and researchers to attend to how prevailing hierarchies are perpetuated by pressing diverging points of view to be reasonable and accept the will of the group. Critics such as John Trimbur argued that oppos- ing views can be better sustained and valued for their inventive capacities when "dissensus" is seen as a productive part of a healthy discussion about conflicted issues. 16 In rhetoric and composition, as in conflict mediation, we have become suspicious of the idea that collaborations should work toward consensus as we have learned to value the generative capacities of our differ- ences. Fortunately, conflict mediation offers such models of collaborative inquiry, which have expanded as we have looked beyond the classroom to community-based research projects. The work of Linda Flower aptly docu- ments these possibilities, as we discuss after we consider another school of conflict mediation that provides a complementary model to the concern for "dissensus" in rhetoric and composition. 17
Transformative Mediation as a Model for Learning from "Dissensus"
Insofar as we have become suspicious of consensus, we are likely to be criti- cal of the collaborative presuppositions of integrative conflict resolution, such as Fisher, Ury, and Patton's advice on audience or reframing as a process of
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invention. Such thinking suggests an unproblematized concern for consen- sus that tends to isolate conflicts from broader contexts that raise complicated issues that may require mediators to confront broader inequities and hierar- chies. For example, Getting to Yes offers four strategies--such as "separate the people from the problem" and "focus on interests, not positions"--to help disputants reconcile differences in order to reach agreement. 18 Even though these suggestions are oriented to mediating differences rather than winning out over others, these collaborative strategies mirror recent attempts to adapt classical rhetoric to a more liberal orientation on learning. They are con- cerned with solving problems, not with changing situations or using the col- laborative process as an opportunity to explore the potentials of collective action among people who may face problems not of their own making. As a result, integrative as well as distributive mediation strategies tend to manage conflicts in ways that do not challenge prevailing assumptions or help groups develop social capital through productive collaborations, and thereby develop coalitions to advance broader changes.
Such mediation practices may help people improve their immediate situations but may not help them understand the conditions that led to the conflicts. In fact, some resolution strategies are specifically intended to help people focus on the immediate problem and ignore broader factors. Concern for solving immediate problems is pushed to the forefront, eliminating chances to learn the broader contributing factors. Because agreement is the main goal, mediators do not focus on developing disputants' abilities to develop a sense of common cause. Some mediation practitioners, however, do attempt to ad- dress underlying inequities by envisioning conflict resolution not as a means to an immediate end but as part of a broader process concerned with enabling communities to discover the inventive capacities of their shared traditions and build up social capital by working through collaborations.
The most popular alternative approach is known as "transformative medi- ation. " It is guided by a vision of collaboration as a means to help people gain more control over their situations and create alternative resolutions. This school of conflict mediation was developed by Robert Bush and Joseph Fol- ger and articulated in their The Promise of Mediation: Responding to Conflict through Empowerment and Recognition and their revised version, The Promise of Mediation: The Transformative Approach to Conflict. These texts redefine the mediation process and mediator roles and provide case studies and commen- taries concerned with helping mediators to serve as collaborative educators by emphasizing relationship building over settlement. Bush, Rains Distinguished Professor of Alternative Dispute Resolution Law at Hofstra University School of Law, and Folger, professor of Adult and Organizational Development at Temple University, offer a vision of mediation that moves beyond contempo- rary mediators' desires to increase satisfaction with dispute resolution or provide collective opportunities for community members. Transformative
mediators treat conflict not as something that must be solved but as an opportunity to change disputants' interpretive schema. This approach opens up opportunities for mediations to position the particular problem in broader contexts and try to provide a constructive atmosphere where disputants can air shared needs.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of transformative mediation is its redefinition of the purposes at issue in conflicted situations. The goal is not resolution, or agreement, but transformation.
