"Truth Floats: Reflexivity in the
Shifting
Public and Epistemological Terrain.
The Public Work of Rhetoric_nodrm
And I was just one of many who did so.
One project that has been persuaded of the media center's value is the Information Technology Empowerment Center (iTec) in Lansing.
17 We hope that this becomes the center's home.
It is possible to see in the vision and mission of iTec some of the same arguments made in support of the Media Center, in part because the projects have some people in common.
They are different assemblies composed of some like elements.
The process of assembly that I have just described is abstract only in that we were assembling an idea, and as that idea took shape, necessarily the mate- rial, cultural, institutional, and human agencies that are part of any idea that becomes a thing. Accordingly, the second thread that I want to follow is more pragmatic and concrete and entails assembling elements of the media center's infrastructure. The methodology of engagement that I have been developing here is rooted in activity. That is, if there is no activity, there is no engage- ment, no thing (this is also a principle of actor network theory, a fact that is coincidental in this case). Therefore, if we wanted to assemble a community media center, then we needed to act like a community media center. To do this, we took a portion of the infrastructure of the writing program at Michi- gan State University and turned it into the community media center.
The WIDE Research Center is a basic research center that examines what it means to write (and learn to write) in digital environments. 18 I direct this center with Bill Hart-Davidson, and since its beginning, we have always understood WIDE as a community-based research center, by which we mean that WIDE is open and responsive to the needs of community partners and tries to solve problems with those partners. To generate the activity of a media center, we devoted resources to infrastructure (servers, networks, phones, offices, desks, chairs, mailboxes, and so on), human beings, and programming.
We conducted a number of workshops at various locations in the area on top- ics ranging from basic tool use to podcasting (we also utilized computers from the Writing Center). And we marketed this activity under the name of the Capital Area Community Media Center, not WIDE or Michigan State Univer- sity. Therefore, we have been able to make the argument that we have a com- munity media center that is effective, that is engaged, and that needs to grow. In other words, when I write of the requirement to assemble as part of any methodology of engagement, I also mean this quite literally. Rhetoric is al- ways material, and it is most powerful when it makes things that enable oth- ers to perform persuasively. The two examples used here actually demonstrate three methods of assembly: research to assemble a group in order to discern patterns of activity and their possible agencies; rhetorical assembly of ideas toward the making of a Thing; and the related and always material assembly that must be gathered into any thing. All of this assembly work is required in order to be useful to others. In the next section, I turn to more fine-grained examples of supporting the knowledge work of others and to my related claim that this is a proper goal for public rhetoric and community-based research.
Supporting the Knowledge Work of Others
In chapter 4 of Writing Community Change, I write about the inventional activities of a citizen environmental group at various levels of granularity. Below is a data display from that chapter that represents the finest level of analysis, that of the infrastructure supporting the writing of a woman named Barbara (a pseudonym). Barbara and her group routinely produce four-page documents for distribution to others in Harbor. In that fourth chapter, I call the reader's attention to a few features in the figure: the elements of infra- structure that support the work of writing a document, such as computers, computer networks, interfaces, databases, phones, chairs, desks, paper, pens, people; the elements of infrastructure that connect to larger, more distributed infrastructures, particularly data and other computer networks; and elements of more local infrastructures, such as the resources of a local public library or city government and, in this case, a local repository of documents related to the current environmental project. I argue that even at the level of a relatively simple four-page document, the activity required to write it is complex and that the writing done in Harbor to enact community change is impossible without the infrastructure to support it.
I believe in that analysis, but there is too much missing from it, namely the deeper rhetorical value of this situation. Here, therefore, I want to under- stand the work of this organization as the making of a thing and not precisely in terms of writing a document.
To do this, I need to zoom out from our view from the writing of a docu- ment to the situation in Harbor that I detailed earlier. Barbara is a key mem- ber of CEC. It is the work of individuals like Barbara, or more properly the
On Being Useful 201
202 Jeffrey T. Grabill
? Distributed work and infrastructure supporting the writing of a document
various groupings that she is a part of and that enable her work, that are worth supporting. Before I get to this, however, let me take the time to revisit my own understanding of the activity represented in illustration above. As a writing researcher, I understand Barbara (and CEC's) activity in terms of writing, and so not surprisingly, the public rhetorical activities of CEC that consumed my attention were written practices and literacies. As a researcher, I attach significant value to the analytical power that comes from drilling deeply into composing practices, but as an analytical matter, I have always struggled to place these ways of understanding writing into a larger chain of agencies that might clearly be called "public rhetorical work. " In other words, as an analytical matter, it has long been difficult for me to trace with preci- sion a chain of activity that connects the writing of an issue summary to a given public action or impact. The ability to do so seems terribly important as a matter of research and in terms of our ability to be convincing when we say that writing and rhetoric matter to public life.
In all of the work that my colleagues and I have done to understand our work in Harbor, we have not focused on the primary rhetorical problem of this situation for community organizations, and therefore one of the key goals of a mundane document like an issue summary. The primary problem, and thus the focus of public work for citizen environmental groups in a situation like Har- bor's, is to make the dredging project a matter of concern. The primary rhetori- cal work involved is the assembling of the participants necessary to make a thing. This is work that Barbara and her colleagues are good at and have been doing in Harbor for some time. Let me unpack this situation a bit more fully.
It may seem obvious that dumping polluted sediments in a heavily urban- ized area is "concerning" if not a full-blown matter of concern. But let me describe this situation somewhat differently by assembling another set of actors in this public who seek closure (it is their job, their work, to seek clo- sure, and they do so for reasons that are reasonable and understandable). The scene I describe here is constructed from real situations I observed in Harbor. In this scene, we assemble a government board room--intended as a public meeting room--with a particular design that enables some participants to sit in certain places that command attention and other participants to sit in places where attention is not forthcoming. Some participants stand, and oth- ers occupy spaces outside the room. Participants include human actors such as scientists, engineers, government officials, concerned citizens, each dressed (as well as positioned) in ways consistent with their status or role. The scien- tists, who are the heroes of this assembly, bring with them their disciplines, professions, data, and tools. Most visible in this scene are a computer, a pro- jector, and a set of slides that show the economic costs of a canal not acces- sible to certain kinds of barges and an aerial photo of contaminated sediments (brown) flowing into the lake (blue). The story told here is that the canal needs to be dredged: jobs are at stake, money is being lost, and the situation is environmentally intolerable. The weight of authority insists on it, as does the cold rationality of science. A massive array of participants are here assem- bled to make the following argument: dredge this canal. And there is no rea- son not to, is there?
What does it take to make a thing here, to open up a matter of concern and resist the closure of fact, of a decision, of silence? That is, what must Bar- bara and others do to assemble a matter of concern? The irony is that they must break their backs to make something as delicate as a thing. The illustra- tion on p. 202 is, for me, a tiny fragment of the work of that assembly, and the issue summaries a key participant. It is the mediating activity of the issue summaries that Stuart and I were able to see. We were able to see how these texts made others act. They were referenced by other community groups, were used in meetings, and were one of the trusted sources for "science" in this community. Aside from this particular genre of writing, we were also able to see the related elements of infrastructure assembled to facilitate the work of Barbara and her organization, and, just as important, we were able to see how they assembled participants--how they invented--in order to maintain the dredging project as a matter of concern. 19 "The dredging methodology is safe! " claims the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in deploying its massive assem- bly, and so let us now move on to our implementation plan. "It is not safe! " claims the citizens' group, deploying a ragtag assembly of people, machines, voices, bodies, and simple little texts. So far, the dredging has been delayed. And so the dredging project is not closed down, fixed, and decided. Closure has been refused as Barbara and her group reveal to the world as best they can
On Being Useful 203
204 Jeffrey T. Grabill
the particular assemblages of environmental toxicology, civic engineering, politics, and other such things. The public work of rhetoric is therefore visi- ble. Rhetoric makes things.
All of that is well and good and makes for a nice story. It might also be ana- lytically productive and serve as a useful metaphor for connecting some elu- sive dots for me from the writing of mundane documents to the making of public arguments. 20 In terms of the methodology of engagement that I am starting to build with this essay, however, a key problem is how best to sup- port Barbara's work. If part one of this emerging methodology is the impera- tive to assemble, part two is the imperative to support the assembling of others. In many ways, the second part is something we do very well as a field. We research and teach performances like writing, speaking, making new media, and other such material rhetorical objects. When we teach or other- wise build capacity with others to act effectively in these ways, then we are certainly supporting the rhetorical activity of others. I want to underline, in other words, our own work as teachers in particular. We are good at it, and the work that we do matters and should matter as an issue of methodology for community engagement. But there are ways that we are not effective as well. We tend to orient more toward individuals than groups, and so as a field we would focus on Barbara's skills and performances and not necessarily on Barbara as a member of a group and that group as the writer or rhetor. As a field we tend to orient more toward the great speech, text, or the known and bounded public sphere--the rhetorical situation, the known forums of pub- lic media, the visible public conversations among our visible public intellec- tuals (including ourselves). We tend to miss, therefore, the mundane, the technical, the routine, the Barbaras, and the CECs of the world. We miss the issue summaries, the research required to understand what a PCB is and how many parts per million is dangerous (and how to even imagine that metaphor in a useful way), and the endless meetings that must be attended and attended to in these less visible public moments. Transformative rhetorical work takes place in these scenes as well.
Why, then, do some assemblies come together, persist over time, and have value? Why do others not? I do not really know, in part because I do not believe it is common to see and understand rhetorical work in the way that I have argued for it here. What rhetorical research does not do very well is detect rhetorical activity as coordinated and distributed, as human and non- human, as performative in the ways that I have suggested it is performative, as a chain of agencies that is not bounded in the ways we have historically bounded rhetorical agencies. Likewise, we do not measure rhetorical outcomes much at all (including an interrogation of indicators that would help us dis- tinguish--or not--between the rhetorical and the arhetorical). Aside from not detecting very well in a way that might provide better evidence, the rea- sons for the success and failure of assemblies--at least as I have been able to
determine from my own work--are due to the ability of groups to form and effectively assemble the infrastructure necessary to do the work of rhetoric. There is a tautology here, I know--to assemble effectively requires one to as- semble effectively. But the requirements for successful assembly are why I root my work in technical and professional writing and have used the notion of "knowledge work" when describing what I see in communities. Rhetoric is work, a type of discursive work that is difficult to do and which is taught, often, in conjunction with what we understand as "professional work"--managing projects, coordinating activity, learning and using information technologies, working well with others, communicating effectively. These are the skills of assembly.
I am not aware of much work that is focused in quite this way on support- ing the work of others and calling it rhetoric. Grace Bernhardt's recent work describes what it takes to build an infrastructure to support the proposal writ- ing and content management of a small nonprofit focused on advocacy for women. 21 In order for members of the organization to advocate effectively and provide the services they promise, they need to write effectively, or more properly, assemble effectively that which they need to be persuasive. To fail at the tasks that Bernhardt was able to see is to fail, eventually, as an organiza- tion. To the extent that Bernhardt's work supported the work of this organi- zation, she was engaged in a type of research and public rhetorical work that I want to value and make visible as methodology. To return to Latour, a me- thodology of engagement asks the researcher/activist/rhetor to attend to and follow the performances of group formation (the ongoing construction of boundaries, of a we); to allow actors to make sense of their social (rhetorical) world; to pay attention to the range of agencies (not precisely to who or what is the agent); to trace, with precision, "the string of actions where each par- ticipant is treated as a full-blown mediator [actor]," actions that can be used to describe rhetorical work; and to interrogate the agencies at play in order to distinguish between matters of fact and matters of concern. 22 The results of such attention are useful to others because they render visible and actionable the scene of rhetoric. More important, the work described by this methodol- ogy is necessary to do public rhetoric.
Notes
1. My reference to material objects is intended to reinforce the fact that most rhetor- ical work results in a material object of some kind, and while I do not have the time to explore a rhetoric of objects here, the role of objects in rhetorical work is important. More important and directly relevant is work on material rhetoric--specifically indige- nous material rhetoric--that has been influential for me. See Driskill, "Yelesalehe Hiwayona"; Haas, "Rhetoric of Alliance. " Sometimes rhetoric produces baskets, wam- pum, and other such objects. Rhetoric theory must account for them.
2. Grabill, Writing Community.
3. Simmons and Grabill, "Toward a Civic Rhetoric. "
On Being Useful 205
206 Jeffrey T. Grabill
4. See Asen, "Imagining"; Asen and Brouwer, Counterpublics; Banning, "Truth Floats"; Dahlgren, "Internet"; Edbauer, "Unframing Models"; Goodnight, "Personal. "
5. Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? ," 246. 6. Latour, Reassembling.
7. Ibid. , 5.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. , 7.
10. Grabill, Writing Community. For the original, see Latour, Aramis.
11. Blythe, Grabill, and Riley, "Supporting Invention"; Grabill, Writing Community. 12. Grabill, Writing Community.
13. Latour, Aramis.
14. The politics around community media in Lansing are long and complicated.
Some community media people associated with schools and government have been trying to argue for a media center for twenty years. Our most recent effort is part of that history. Of late, the media center has been part of a larger conversation about how to transition to a postindustrial economy and about the public value of community media infrastructure. This conversation takes place in a context of declining public revenues for public projects, and so the media center must compete with other good ideas. There are also differing visions of what a community media center might become and how it might best serve the public interest.
15. Latour, Reassembling; Latour, "From Realpolitik"; Heidegger, What Is a Thing?
16. Latour, "From Realpolitik. "
17. Information Technology Empowerment Center, http://www. iteclansing. org/ (ac-
cessed (March 22, 2009).
18. I use the term "basic" research center to identify WIDE as an organization that
seeks to identify and solve fundamental research problems associated with writing in digital environments. We identify explicitly with the notion of "basic" research and with research centers in the sciences, which is useful to us inside our university and with outside funders. We also use this language to distinguish WIDE from similar cen- ters in rhetoric and composition that have a teaching, service, or combined mission more than a research mission.
19. In this regard, the meeting itself should not remain invisible as both technology and rhetorical performance. In some ways, this is obvious. What else do meetings do other than "assemble"? While potentially true, this is not necessarily true. But more to the point, there are genres of meetings, and when done well, they serve an ongoing function as ways of assembling, as spaces and practices for invention, and serve other communicative functions--reporting, for instance. The meeting as material rhetorical performance is completely invisible in work on public rhetoric, and this is an indicator of a problem in how we understand what it means to do the actual work of rhetoric.
20. Connecting the dots remains a serious concern of mine. Reviewers of this essay asked me about impacts and audience response to some of the documents, like the issue summaries, that we saw produced in Harbor. As I have mentioned here, we did find other groups and individuals who referenced the issue summaries produced by CEC, but in this particular project, we did a poor job of connecting the dots in this way (in part because it was not our focus). Most writing researchers concern themselves with production, not reception. To pay attention to reception and outcomes requires atten- tion over time, and it also requires serious thought about indicators--and indicators are difficult to work with. Indicators--what we can actually see and how we understand them to mean--entail questions of politics and power, questions like what should we
look for and at when trying to research rhetoric? What are we actually seeing when we notice what we think is rhetorical activity? Whose interests are served by measuring (or not) rhetorical activity? For some types of rhetorical analysis, this is a relatively easy problem. Judgments are made all the time based on an interpretation of an artifact like a text or a speech. With such an interpretation, we can determine what techniques and strategies are used, the likely audiences, and, based on this, it is not uncommon to make a judgment on effectiveness. Of course, these are, at best, indirect measures of rhetori- cal agency. They are also limited in terms of the number of agencies accounted for. I am not opposed to the use of indirect indicators--they are often all that we have--but I am suggesting that we have poor indicators to account for the rhetorical work that people do in their lives, and that we have paid scant attention to the impacts of that work. Tra- ditional textual/rhetorical analysis does not help us much with this problem, as we need a different set of indicators and methods to render them visible to us. I am inter- ested in more robust indirect indicators, and this is a project that currently occupies my time.
21. Bernhardt, Moving Beyond. 22. Latour, Reassembling, 129.
Works Cited
Asen, Robert. "Imagining in the Public Sphere. " Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 345-67.
Asen, Robert, and Daniel C. Brouwer, eds. Counterpublics and the State. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.
Banning, Marla.
"Truth Floats: Reflexivity in the Shifting Public and Epistemological Terrain. " Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005): 75-99.
Bernhardt, Grace. "Moving Beyond Single Sourcing to Single Organizations: Under- standing Content Management in Small Nonprofits. " Master's thesis, Michigan State University, 2007.
Blythe, Stuart, Jeffrey T. Grabill, and Kirk Riley. "Invention: Action Research and Profes- sional Communication as Public Discourse. " Journal of Business and Technical Com- munication 22 (2008): 272-98.
Dahlgren, Peter. "The Internet and the Democratization of Civic Culture. " Political Communication 17 (2000): 335-40.
Driskill, Qwo-Li. "Yelesalehe Hiwayona Dikanohogida Naiwodusv/God Taught Me This Song, It Is Beautiful: Cherokee Performance Rhetorics as Decolonization, Healing, and Continuance. " Ph. D. diss. , Michigan State University, 2008.
Edbauer, Jenny. "Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies. " Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 5-24.
Goodnight, Thomas G. "The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument. " In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, edited by John L. Lucaites, Celeste M. Con- dit, and Sally Caudill, 251-64. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
Grabill, Jeffrey T. Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.
------. Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action. Cresskill, N. J. : Hampton Press, New Directions in Computers and Composition, 2007.
Haas, Angela. "A Rhetoric of Alliance: What American Indians Can Tell Us About Digi- tal and Visual Rhetoric. " Ph. D. diss. , Michigan State University, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin. What Is a Thing? Translated by W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch. Chicago: H. Regnery, 1968.
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Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cam- bridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1996.
------. "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public. " In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 14-41. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2005.
------. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
------. "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? " Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 238-39. Simmons, W. Michele, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. "Toward a Civic Rhetoric for Technologi- cally and Scientifically Complex Places: Invention, Performance, and Participation. "
College Composition and Communication 58 (2007): 419-48.
[ part3 ]
Remaking Rhetoric in Universities and Publics
? Finding a Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn
David Fleming
George Kennedy may have coined the term "secondary rhetoric," but the belief that the extended language produced by children and young adults in school--prototypically written, narrative, and personal--is inferior to and sep- arate from the "primary rhetoric" of the public world outside--paradigmati- cally oral, persuasive, and civic--is widely held and of long standing, and it is nowhere more firmly entrenched than among professors of rhetoric and composition, most of whom make their living, of course, from the language of school.
Kennedy's main reason for distinguishing primary and secondary rhetoric was to trace the historical drift from the former to the latter, a process he termed letteraturizzazione and which he always figured as a loss. 1 From this point of view, the story of rhetoric is the story of how the virile practice of Greek public discourse in the direct democracies of the classical era became the literary simulations of public discourse in the classrooms of the Hellenistic period and beyond. At almost every juncture, the villain in this story is school.
Marjorie Curry Woods, for one, has questioned Kennedy's influential deni- gration of school and claimed that our willingness to accept so readily his account of the relationship between the "real world" and the classroom is evi- dence of our "academic self-hatred," our tendency to belittle those parts of our work that take place in school and involve children and young adults. 2 The problem with Kennedy's position, writes Woods, is that it employs a "post- romantic 'unteachability' topos, which assumes that what is most important about education is what least resembles the classroom. "3 But it can also be faulted for perpetuating traditional rhetoric's sexism and ageism, since, as Woods shows, stories of disciplinary decline in our field privilege the civic rhet- oric of men and demean the school-bound rhetorics of women and children. 4
I follow Woods here in asking us to resist such easy denigrations of school. And, like her, I argue that, in some respects, it should be the classroom that is
212 David Fleming
primary, prior, and superior in our understanding, and the "real world" that is secondary, subsequent, and inferior. But I also acknowledge that there are good reasons for our usual ordering of affairs. Let me begin, then, by exam- ining two of the more devastating critiques of traditional schooling.
The Problems with School
The most prevalent critique of school from the point of view of rhetoric's public turn is that it is inauthentic, a place set apart from society and given over to mind-numbing busy work, useless trivia, impractical abstractions, and empty formalisms. In school, students learn not to be better thinkers, citizens, workers, or human beings, but only to be better students. They learn, that is, to "do" school. According to this interpretation, the most important charac- teristics of school are a function of the institution itself--namely, its appetite for order--rather than the needs of society or the dreams of individuals. Large numbers of age-segregated children and young adults sit in ordered desks inside boxlike classrooms reading bland textbooks, writing insipid essays, and doing endless problems under the direction of solitary authority figures--not because any of this prepares them for meaningful, fulfilling, engaged future lives but because that is the cheapest and most efficient way in a (post)indus- trial society to process the young masses through their immaturity.
In the context of contemporary composition studies, unease about the inauthenticity of school can be seen in our field's continuing embarrassment about "current-traditional rhetoric," the small-minded writing pedagogy that most of the public still associates with what we do. The classic account of such pedagogy remains Janet Emig's 1971 study of twelfth-grade writers in Chicago- area public schools, which portrays school writing in this country as a thor- oughly stultifying, even "neurotic," activity. 5 In the book, no one discerns more acutely the shortcomings of current-traditional rhetoric than the students themselves, one of whom says of her teachers, "They seem to have this thing about spelling. "6
The problem with school writing from Emig's point of view was not the students--it was their teachers, who were "interested chiefly in a product [they] can criticize rather than in a process [they] can help initiate through imagi- nation and sustain through empathy and support. "7 Emig complained, in fact, of widespread "teacher illiteracy" in U. S. high schools and described edu- cators who did not themselves write and who thus "underconceptualize and oversimplify" the process of composing so that "planning degenerates into out- lining, reformulating becomes the correction of minor infelicities. "8 Through such devices as the five-paragraph theme--"so indigenously American," Emig writes, "that it might be called the Fifty-Star Theme"--teachers set rigid parameters for writing that "students find difficult to make more supple. "9 The result? "Outward conformity but inward cynicism and hostility. "10 It is no wonder that, in devising a more authentic educational experience in writing
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 213
and rhetoric, one that can help our students develop into more self-actualized, engaged citizens and individuals, school is often the last place we look.
Of course, in many contemporary writing classrooms, students are allowed to pick topics about which they care and write papers that seem at least to reflect genuine purposes, genres, and audiences--a letter to one's representa- tive about gun control, for example. But even this attempt to make school writing more like "real world" public discourse ultimately fails, according to Susan Wells: "in such assignments, students inscribe their positions in a vac- uum since there is no place within the culture where student writing on gun control is held to be of general interest, no matter how persuasive the student or how intimate their acquaintance with guns. 'Public writing' in such a con- text means 'writing for no audience at all. '"11
In a penetrating essay published a few years ago, Joseph Petraglia called this kind of writing "pseudotransactional," discourse that, rather than actu- ally transacting business with the world--informing, persuading, instructing others--only appears to do so, discourse in which any authentic purpose is an illusion. 12 According to Petraglia, pseudotransactionality is a function of school itself and has its origins in the teacher's role as evaluator rather than reader. The purpose of rhetoric in school, according to this argument, is not, and cannot be, to actually get something done, make things happen, alter an attitude. It is to get a grade.
A second, equally devastating problem with traditional school from the point of view of its critics is that it reproduces the unequal socioeconomic structure of the surrounding society and is thus both symptom and cause of economic and cultural hegemony. What students learn in school from this point of view is their place in the stratified order of the "real world," which thus does not change through education but is instead perpetuated by it. Emig saw forty years ago that school's obsession with trivialities like spelling did not prevent it from having enormous social power. She does not dwell on this in her critique, but she clearly shows that schools reward students who are willing to play by the schools' inane rules.
Of course, the connection between the language of school and the levers of power is not just a modern phenomenon. Roland Barthes, in fact, defined rhetoric in general as "that privileged technique (since one must pay in order to acquire it) which permits the ruling classes to gain ownership of speech" and noted how, as a metalanguage and thus an object of schooling, rhetoric was born in legal conflicts surrounding property. 13 It emerged "from the baldest sociality, affirmed in its fundamental brutality, that of earthly possession: we began to reflect upon language in order to defend our own. "14
Today, ideological analyses of schooling are common, and they have shown us how our classrooms perpetuate the status quo by teaching children and young adults to assume their predetermined subject positions. 15 But, accord- ing to this critique, the curriculum not only stratifies young speakers and
214 David Fleming
writers socioeconomically; it obscures that that is what it does, disempower- ing critique of unequal education, mystifying and distracting students and their guardians from the "real" power of language to effect change in the world.
In a sense the two critiques just summarized contradict one another: the first portrays school as essentially "busy work," a simulation of real activity that is a waste of resources for all concerned; the second, by contrast, depicts school as extraordinarily effective at what it does, reproducing the social order "outside" without making it at all obvious that that is what it is doing, training students to take on their preassigned roles with astonishing efficiency. But the two critiques are actually closely related, different interpretations of the same phenomenon: school's failure to promote students' self-actualization and improve the world in any appreciable way. It is just that one sees that situ- ation as a case of ineptness; the other, as the design of the ruling classes.
Given these problems with traditional schooling--pseudotransactionality, on the one hand; reproduction, on the other--any turn from the traditional classroom would seem to be a welcome development for rhetorical education. But in which direction should we turn? After all, nearly everyone acknowl- edges the continuing need for education of the young in speaking and writ- ing, especially given the complexity of such practices, the important role they play in our communities, and the long immaturity of our offspring. The ques- tion is, what should such education look like?
At a theoretical level, if the problem of traditional composition pedagogy has been its reliance on what Petraglia has termed "General Writing Skills Instruction," which involves explicit instruction in decontextualized reading and writing skills, the solution would seem therefore to involve the educa- tional dispersal, particularization, and implicitization of writing. 16 From this point of view, "real world" written discourse is irreducibly diverse, inextrica- bly situated, and always already interested; the way to effectively, and ethi- cally, develop fluency in a given writing practice is thus to immerse oneself in a world where that practice makes sense.
A pedagogy based on such a belief would involve a literal (and not just a conceptual or metaphoric) move away from school and toward society, away from the classroom and toward the community, away from solitary, imprac- tical exercise in decontextualized skills and toward situated, collaborative, concrete, human action. It would involve, that is, a new dedication to prac- tice, whether that is seen as culturally embedded, inescapably ethical action;17 insistently reflective engagement with the materials of the world;18 or "free, universal, creative and self-creative activity through which man creates (makes, produces) and changes (shapes) his historical, human world and himself. "19
The public turn in rhetoric and composition studies is clearly aligned with such a recasting of education. Recent work in service learning, activist research, community literacy, and public discourse studies has helped the field reclaim
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 215
an outward-looking profile, making learning both more authentic--because it is oriented to the particular, local, and embedded--and more radical--be- cause it encourages students to question and change the world rather than merely reproduce it.
But I worry that in turning so definitively toward "society" and away from "school," we may be neglecting aspects of classroom education that are not necessarily antithetical to a genuinely practical mission for rhetoric and com- position, aspects of schooling that, in fact, could contribute in important ways to a public turn in the field. The problems of school are many and obvi- ous. But there are virtues as well, virtues that might be especially pertinent for rhetoricians of public life.
The Virtues of School
Let us take two prototypical features of traditional schooling--its emphasis on factual knowledge and its preference for theoretical abstraction--and ask whether they might harbor learning opportunities for a praxis-oriented rhet- orical education. My goal here is not to mount a comprehensive defense of school but to suggest that we reconsider the easy denigration of the class- room that has sometimes accompanied rhetoric's public turn.
In Defense of Facts
We are accustomed now to malign traditional schooling's emphasis on--or obsession with--the transmission of "inert" facts, and with good reason. But even a writing pedagogy focused on "real world" activity, on authentic, socially embedded, potentially transgressive practices, needs to reserve a place for the development of substantive knowledge in its students. In fact, it could be argued that a truly civic rhetorical education in a complex society like ours can- not work without some kind of common schooling in the shared histories, beliefs, and values of the various worlds to which its students will graduate.
Since the late 1960s, of course, conventional wisdom has held that formal education plays an insignificant role in the development of good citizens. But political scientist William Galston has summarized a compelling body of recent research that supports an important role for traditional, classroom- based education in fostering democratic attitudes and habits in young peo- ple. 20 These studies, writes Galston, have shown surprisingly positive effects for coursework in political life and classroom-based discussion about politics; political scientists now increasingly acknowledge that, though citizens do not need to be policy experts to be engaged in their community's affairs, they do need basic political knowledge to be effective in and fulfilled by public life, knowledge that is perhaps best transmitted in school. The evidence shows, according to Galston, that substantive political knowledge affects acceptance of democratic principles, attitudes about politics, and political participation rates. Controlling for race, class, and other variables, he argues, citizens with
216 David Fleming
more knowledge have less fear of immigrants, are less likely to feel mistrust and alienation, more likely to participate in politics, less likely to vote on the basis of their own circumstances and interests, and more likely to express tol- erance for unpopular groups. There appears to be, in other words, a link be- tween years of formal education and prodemocracy attitudes. Though Galston also admits that the results of other kinds of civic education--service learn- ing, for example--remain mixed, he does not conclude from his summary that we should simply return to a political pedagogy based on rote learning of facts and principles. The evidence shows instead that traditional formal education in politics needs to be combined with regular discussion by stu- dents of current events, opportunities to practice democratic skills in school governance, exposure to social science methods and findings about political life, training in such practical skills as the decoding of charts and tables, and treatment of non-American political structures.
A recent essay in CCC by David Coogan would seem to support just such an integration of classroom- and community-based methods in writing and rhetoric education. 21 Coogan recounts a two-semester service-learning course he taught in 2002 at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, in which a dozen undergraduate students worked with a Bronzeville-area nonprofit organization called Urban Matters to increase parent involvement in the lo- cal school councils (LSCs), which help govern neighborhood schools in the Chicago public school system. Unfortunately, despite the effort and resources put into the yearlong course, the students' work had limited impact: they were unable to significantly increase attendance at the parent meetings they organized, the brochures they painstakingly produced went largely unread, and the advocacy they tried to sponsor among their clients was practically ineffective.
Coogan uses this "rhetorical failure" to argue for a new approach to ser- vice learning that pays as much attention to "rhetorical scholarship" as to "rhetorical activism. "22 "What really went wrong in the project," he writes, "was that the students and staff were thrust into rhetorical production . . . before they had done any rhetorical analysis. "23 They did not know enough about the history of the school reform movement in Chicago, were unfamil- iar with the "style and substance" of parent involvement in schools, and mis- read the dominant "ideographs" of the rhetorical environment around them, failing to understand, for example, the historical shift in local discourses about education that now privileged "local responsibility" and "accountabil- ity" over "local control. "
Coogan advocates here a greater role for relatively formal, even classroom- based instruction and analysis within service-learning projects, an integra- tion of school and society, an oscillation between classroom and community, that may well turn out to be a pronounced feature of the next generation of community literacy initiatives. And he proposes an educational sequence that
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 217
would move students from discovery to analysis to production to assessment, in which really only the third step--admittedly the heart of any such proj- ect--would be nontraditional in the terms I have been using here. 24
In Praise of the Abstract
Another feature of traditional schooling that deserves reconsideration is the focus on abstract, theoretical knowledge. Since at least the rise of the "situ- ated learning" movement of the 1980s, there has been a concerted move in educational circles away from the teaching of general, abstract knowledge and toward contextualized, embodied, concrete learning, especially apprentice- ship-style projects in which explicit instruction in general knowledge is re- placed by immersion in particular communities of practice.
But in turning toward such informal education, is it possible that we have overlooked the continuing practical possibilities of theoretical abstraction? In a persuasive defense of such knowledge, and the relatively traditional peda- gogies by which it is usually transmitted, John R. Anderson, Lynn M. Reder, and Herbert A. Simon concede that "much of what is learned is specific to the situation in which it is learned" and that there is often a "mismatch" between school situations and "real world" situations such as the workplace. 25 They cite such well-known studies as the one that portrays Orange County home- makers doing poorly at schoollike mathematics problems but well at super- market "best-buy" calculations. They dispute, however, the conclusions usually reached on the basis of this research: that all learning is context-bound and that the abstract knowledge that school often emphasizes is largely useless. They suggest instead that knowledge gained in school can transfer across con- texts in powerful ways if the learning situation is well designed. For example, knowledge taught in multiple contexts turns out to be less context-bound than knowledge not so taught.
The authors also contest the claim of the situated learning movement that "training by abstraction" is of little use, an argument that has been used to support projects like apprenticeship programs that turn their back completely on the classroom. 26 The alleged irrelevance of school-based "theory" is sup- ported by stories like that of Los Angeles police officers who are told, upon leaving the police academy, to "now forget everything you learned. " Though there is obviously some justification for this advice, the real problem, accord- ing to Anderson, Reder, and Simon, is not school but our tendency--on both the Left and Right--to belittle what school in fact does well. What police recruits learn in the classroom about not violating subjects' civil rights, for example--education that is hard to imagine outside of a classroom context-- needs to be not "forgotten" but constantly reinforced. In this case, the better advice would be "now remember everything you learned! "
Research on writing acquisition has sometimes found similarly large effects for explicit instruction, despite the manifest superiority in many cases
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of practice over theory and implicit over explicit instruction. 27 Students have been shown to revise better, for example, when explicitly instructed to do so. In one study, young writers improved their performance significantly when told "Add five things to your essay to improve it," rather than simply "revise your essay to improve it. "28 Though they do not deal specifically with writing instruction, it is for reasons such as these that Anderson, Reder, and Simon argue for a more nuanced approach to the relative role of situated and abstract knowledge in pedagogical design. "Numerous experiments show combining abstract instruction with specific concrete examples is better than either one alone. "29
Finally, the authors deal with the claim of situated learning advocates that learning should always take place in complex, social environments, those that mimic the "real world," rather than the simplified, often solitary contexts of school. Again, there is often good reason for reforming school to make it more like society in these ways. But Anderson, Reder, and Simon find ample evi- dence for the usefulness of solitary learning methods and the decomposition of tasks into parts. A student learning to play violin in an orchestra, for exam- ple, requires training both inside and outside of that context.
But what does any of this have to do with the kind of political or civic goals associated with the public turn in rhetorical education? Well, one of those goals is usually to help develop in students a more critical sensibility about their society, an oppositional stance toward socioeconomic inequality, for example. While it is true, as I argued above, that school is often a place where the status quo is naturalized and reinforced, and while "extracurricu- lar" organizations and activities can be fruitful sites for learning and prac- ticing counterhegemonic discourses, it is also true, as scholars of service learning like Bruce Herzberg have shown, that classroom work--reading, writing, analysis, discussion, and so forth--can edify practical action by help- ing students question the theories with which they operate in their daily lives and which can distort their interpretations of what they see and hear outside of school. 30 Coursework in women's studies programs has demonstrated for more than thirty years now the transformative power of relatively traditional classroom work.
It may be, in fact, that counterintuitive knowledge, that which goes against students' prior beliefs, can only reliably be acquired through overt instruc- tion, the way effective textbooks often teach new concepts by first explicitly refuting students' misconceptions. In fact, one of the hallmarks of expertise is the prominence of abstract knowledge that is not readily accessible in "everyday" life. Cheryl Geisler describes how novices studying physics tend to rely on concepts close to everyday, literal understanding; experts, on the other hand, use discipline-specific understandings that are more abstract, non- literal, specialized, and learned. Clearly, expert knowledge comes, in part, from long immersion in a community of practice; but it also comes from study,
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 219
often of a fairly traditional kind. The very power of that kind of expertise-- its practical effectivity in the world--is further reason to reappraise our ten- dency to denigrate classroom-based education. 31
We might see in both of these features of traditional schooling--the em- phasis on factual knowledge and the preference for theoretical abstraction-- a defensible role for explicitness in progressive education. In fact, though we often associate explicitness with legalism, authoritarianism, even repression, compelling arguments have been raised in recent years about the liberatory potential of some kinds of explicit instruction. In writing studies, this reap- praisal has been most persuasively advanced by Lisa Delpit, who has argued that there are rules for participating in power, and "if you're not already a par- ticipant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier. "32
I have focused so far on the potential role of traditional educational content--facts and theories--in authentic, even counterhegemonic, learning. But what about the structure of traditional education, the prototypical organi- zation of classroom life itself? Is there something there that a public turn in rhetoric might take advantage of? By structure, I mean the way school is usu- ally so dramatically set off from the rest of society: the way it segregates and isolates aged cohorts of children and young adults in institutional settings, often under compulsion of some kind; the way it organizes their time to- gether into artificial chunks, like the "courses" of postsecondary education; the way such chunks are conceived on a narrative basis, each with a begin- ning, middle, and end through which students move and, ideally, become transformed; the way participants--teachers and students alike--are asked constantly to reflect on that movement, to imagine, represent, contemplate, and assess their progress, or lack thereof, in the story of learning. If education can take many forms, school itself is hard to imagine, even in the early twenty- first century, without calling up such specific spatial and temporal images.
These images also point, of course, to what makes traditional schooling so susceptible to the critiques I summarized at the beginning of this essay. The segregation of students by age, class, "ability," and so forth deprives young learners of the "real world" diversity they need to grow as thinkers and citi- zens; the physical arrangement of the typical classroom encourages docility among students and authoritarianism among teachers; the isolation of school from everyday life makes student learning so often irrelevant and ineffective; the division of educational time into units like the semester, as Mathieu has shown, gives students an artificial and solipsistic view of the phenomena they are studying; and so forth. 33
But the classroom, as a classroom, can also be a site of genuine discovery and enlightenment, with transformative potential not readily or reliably avail- able anywhere else.
The process of assembly that I have just described is abstract only in that we were assembling an idea, and as that idea took shape, necessarily the mate- rial, cultural, institutional, and human agencies that are part of any idea that becomes a thing. Accordingly, the second thread that I want to follow is more pragmatic and concrete and entails assembling elements of the media center's infrastructure. The methodology of engagement that I have been developing here is rooted in activity. That is, if there is no activity, there is no engage- ment, no thing (this is also a principle of actor network theory, a fact that is coincidental in this case). Therefore, if we wanted to assemble a community media center, then we needed to act like a community media center. To do this, we took a portion of the infrastructure of the writing program at Michi- gan State University and turned it into the community media center.
The WIDE Research Center is a basic research center that examines what it means to write (and learn to write) in digital environments. 18 I direct this center with Bill Hart-Davidson, and since its beginning, we have always understood WIDE as a community-based research center, by which we mean that WIDE is open and responsive to the needs of community partners and tries to solve problems with those partners. To generate the activity of a media center, we devoted resources to infrastructure (servers, networks, phones, offices, desks, chairs, mailboxes, and so on), human beings, and programming.
We conducted a number of workshops at various locations in the area on top- ics ranging from basic tool use to podcasting (we also utilized computers from the Writing Center). And we marketed this activity under the name of the Capital Area Community Media Center, not WIDE or Michigan State Univer- sity. Therefore, we have been able to make the argument that we have a com- munity media center that is effective, that is engaged, and that needs to grow. In other words, when I write of the requirement to assemble as part of any methodology of engagement, I also mean this quite literally. Rhetoric is al- ways material, and it is most powerful when it makes things that enable oth- ers to perform persuasively. The two examples used here actually demonstrate three methods of assembly: research to assemble a group in order to discern patterns of activity and their possible agencies; rhetorical assembly of ideas toward the making of a Thing; and the related and always material assembly that must be gathered into any thing. All of this assembly work is required in order to be useful to others. In the next section, I turn to more fine-grained examples of supporting the knowledge work of others and to my related claim that this is a proper goal for public rhetoric and community-based research.
Supporting the Knowledge Work of Others
In chapter 4 of Writing Community Change, I write about the inventional activities of a citizen environmental group at various levels of granularity. Below is a data display from that chapter that represents the finest level of analysis, that of the infrastructure supporting the writing of a woman named Barbara (a pseudonym). Barbara and her group routinely produce four-page documents for distribution to others in Harbor. In that fourth chapter, I call the reader's attention to a few features in the figure: the elements of infra- structure that support the work of writing a document, such as computers, computer networks, interfaces, databases, phones, chairs, desks, paper, pens, people; the elements of infrastructure that connect to larger, more distributed infrastructures, particularly data and other computer networks; and elements of more local infrastructures, such as the resources of a local public library or city government and, in this case, a local repository of documents related to the current environmental project. I argue that even at the level of a relatively simple four-page document, the activity required to write it is complex and that the writing done in Harbor to enact community change is impossible without the infrastructure to support it.
I believe in that analysis, but there is too much missing from it, namely the deeper rhetorical value of this situation. Here, therefore, I want to under- stand the work of this organization as the making of a thing and not precisely in terms of writing a document.
To do this, I need to zoom out from our view from the writing of a docu- ment to the situation in Harbor that I detailed earlier. Barbara is a key mem- ber of CEC. It is the work of individuals like Barbara, or more properly the
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202 Jeffrey T. Grabill
? Distributed work and infrastructure supporting the writing of a document
various groupings that she is a part of and that enable her work, that are worth supporting. Before I get to this, however, let me take the time to revisit my own understanding of the activity represented in illustration above. As a writing researcher, I understand Barbara (and CEC's) activity in terms of writing, and so not surprisingly, the public rhetorical activities of CEC that consumed my attention were written practices and literacies. As a researcher, I attach significant value to the analytical power that comes from drilling deeply into composing practices, but as an analytical matter, I have always struggled to place these ways of understanding writing into a larger chain of agencies that might clearly be called "public rhetorical work. " In other words, as an analytical matter, it has long been difficult for me to trace with preci- sion a chain of activity that connects the writing of an issue summary to a given public action or impact. The ability to do so seems terribly important as a matter of research and in terms of our ability to be convincing when we say that writing and rhetoric matter to public life.
In all of the work that my colleagues and I have done to understand our work in Harbor, we have not focused on the primary rhetorical problem of this situation for community organizations, and therefore one of the key goals of a mundane document like an issue summary. The primary problem, and thus the focus of public work for citizen environmental groups in a situation like Har- bor's, is to make the dredging project a matter of concern. The primary rhetori- cal work involved is the assembling of the participants necessary to make a thing. This is work that Barbara and her colleagues are good at and have been doing in Harbor for some time. Let me unpack this situation a bit more fully.
It may seem obvious that dumping polluted sediments in a heavily urban- ized area is "concerning" if not a full-blown matter of concern. But let me describe this situation somewhat differently by assembling another set of actors in this public who seek closure (it is their job, their work, to seek clo- sure, and they do so for reasons that are reasonable and understandable). The scene I describe here is constructed from real situations I observed in Harbor. In this scene, we assemble a government board room--intended as a public meeting room--with a particular design that enables some participants to sit in certain places that command attention and other participants to sit in places where attention is not forthcoming. Some participants stand, and oth- ers occupy spaces outside the room. Participants include human actors such as scientists, engineers, government officials, concerned citizens, each dressed (as well as positioned) in ways consistent with their status or role. The scien- tists, who are the heroes of this assembly, bring with them their disciplines, professions, data, and tools. Most visible in this scene are a computer, a pro- jector, and a set of slides that show the economic costs of a canal not acces- sible to certain kinds of barges and an aerial photo of contaminated sediments (brown) flowing into the lake (blue). The story told here is that the canal needs to be dredged: jobs are at stake, money is being lost, and the situation is environmentally intolerable. The weight of authority insists on it, as does the cold rationality of science. A massive array of participants are here assem- bled to make the following argument: dredge this canal. And there is no rea- son not to, is there?
What does it take to make a thing here, to open up a matter of concern and resist the closure of fact, of a decision, of silence? That is, what must Bar- bara and others do to assemble a matter of concern? The irony is that they must break their backs to make something as delicate as a thing. The illustra- tion on p. 202 is, for me, a tiny fragment of the work of that assembly, and the issue summaries a key participant. It is the mediating activity of the issue summaries that Stuart and I were able to see. We were able to see how these texts made others act. They were referenced by other community groups, were used in meetings, and were one of the trusted sources for "science" in this community. Aside from this particular genre of writing, we were also able to see the related elements of infrastructure assembled to facilitate the work of Barbara and her organization, and, just as important, we were able to see how they assembled participants--how they invented--in order to maintain the dredging project as a matter of concern. 19 "The dredging methodology is safe! " claims the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in deploying its massive assem- bly, and so let us now move on to our implementation plan. "It is not safe! " claims the citizens' group, deploying a ragtag assembly of people, machines, voices, bodies, and simple little texts. So far, the dredging has been delayed. And so the dredging project is not closed down, fixed, and decided. Closure has been refused as Barbara and her group reveal to the world as best they can
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the particular assemblages of environmental toxicology, civic engineering, politics, and other such things. The public work of rhetoric is therefore visi- ble. Rhetoric makes things.
All of that is well and good and makes for a nice story. It might also be ana- lytically productive and serve as a useful metaphor for connecting some elu- sive dots for me from the writing of mundane documents to the making of public arguments. 20 In terms of the methodology of engagement that I am starting to build with this essay, however, a key problem is how best to sup- port Barbara's work. If part one of this emerging methodology is the impera- tive to assemble, part two is the imperative to support the assembling of others. In many ways, the second part is something we do very well as a field. We research and teach performances like writing, speaking, making new media, and other such material rhetorical objects. When we teach or other- wise build capacity with others to act effectively in these ways, then we are certainly supporting the rhetorical activity of others. I want to underline, in other words, our own work as teachers in particular. We are good at it, and the work that we do matters and should matter as an issue of methodology for community engagement. But there are ways that we are not effective as well. We tend to orient more toward individuals than groups, and so as a field we would focus on Barbara's skills and performances and not necessarily on Barbara as a member of a group and that group as the writer or rhetor. As a field we tend to orient more toward the great speech, text, or the known and bounded public sphere--the rhetorical situation, the known forums of pub- lic media, the visible public conversations among our visible public intellec- tuals (including ourselves). We tend to miss, therefore, the mundane, the technical, the routine, the Barbaras, and the CECs of the world. We miss the issue summaries, the research required to understand what a PCB is and how many parts per million is dangerous (and how to even imagine that metaphor in a useful way), and the endless meetings that must be attended and attended to in these less visible public moments. Transformative rhetorical work takes place in these scenes as well.
Why, then, do some assemblies come together, persist over time, and have value? Why do others not? I do not really know, in part because I do not believe it is common to see and understand rhetorical work in the way that I have argued for it here. What rhetorical research does not do very well is detect rhetorical activity as coordinated and distributed, as human and non- human, as performative in the ways that I have suggested it is performative, as a chain of agencies that is not bounded in the ways we have historically bounded rhetorical agencies. Likewise, we do not measure rhetorical outcomes much at all (including an interrogation of indicators that would help us dis- tinguish--or not--between the rhetorical and the arhetorical). Aside from not detecting very well in a way that might provide better evidence, the rea- sons for the success and failure of assemblies--at least as I have been able to
determine from my own work--are due to the ability of groups to form and effectively assemble the infrastructure necessary to do the work of rhetoric. There is a tautology here, I know--to assemble effectively requires one to as- semble effectively. But the requirements for successful assembly are why I root my work in technical and professional writing and have used the notion of "knowledge work" when describing what I see in communities. Rhetoric is work, a type of discursive work that is difficult to do and which is taught, often, in conjunction with what we understand as "professional work"--managing projects, coordinating activity, learning and using information technologies, working well with others, communicating effectively. These are the skills of assembly.
I am not aware of much work that is focused in quite this way on support- ing the work of others and calling it rhetoric. Grace Bernhardt's recent work describes what it takes to build an infrastructure to support the proposal writ- ing and content management of a small nonprofit focused on advocacy for women. 21 In order for members of the organization to advocate effectively and provide the services they promise, they need to write effectively, or more properly, assemble effectively that which they need to be persuasive. To fail at the tasks that Bernhardt was able to see is to fail, eventually, as an organiza- tion. To the extent that Bernhardt's work supported the work of this organi- zation, she was engaged in a type of research and public rhetorical work that I want to value and make visible as methodology. To return to Latour, a me- thodology of engagement asks the researcher/activist/rhetor to attend to and follow the performances of group formation (the ongoing construction of boundaries, of a we); to allow actors to make sense of their social (rhetorical) world; to pay attention to the range of agencies (not precisely to who or what is the agent); to trace, with precision, "the string of actions where each par- ticipant is treated as a full-blown mediator [actor]," actions that can be used to describe rhetorical work; and to interrogate the agencies at play in order to distinguish between matters of fact and matters of concern. 22 The results of such attention are useful to others because they render visible and actionable the scene of rhetoric. More important, the work described by this methodol- ogy is necessary to do public rhetoric.
Notes
1. My reference to material objects is intended to reinforce the fact that most rhetor- ical work results in a material object of some kind, and while I do not have the time to explore a rhetoric of objects here, the role of objects in rhetorical work is important. More important and directly relevant is work on material rhetoric--specifically indige- nous material rhetoric--that has been influential for me. See Driskill, "Yelesalehe Hiwayona"; Haas, "Rhetoric of Alliance. " Sometimes rhetoric produces baskets, wam- pum, and other such objects. Rhetoric theory must account for them.
2. Grabill, Writing Community.
3. Simmons and Grabill, "Toward a Civic Rhetoric. "
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4. See Asen, "Imagining"; Asen and Brouwer, Counterpublics; Banning, "Truth Floats"; Dahlgren, "Internet"; Edbauer, "Unframing Models"; Goodnight, "Personal. "
5. Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? ," 246. 6. Latour, Reassembling.
7. Ibid. , 5.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. , 7.
10. Grabill, Writing Community. For the original, see Latour, Aramis.
11. Blythe, Grabill, and Riley, "Supporting Invention"; Grabill, Writing Community. 12. Grabill, Writing Community.
13. Latour, Aramis.
14. The politics around community media in Lansing are long and complicated.
Some community media people associated with schools and government have been trying to argue for a media center for twenty years. Our most recent effort is part of that history. Of late, the media center has been part of a larger conversation about how to transition to a postindustrial economy and about the public value of community media infrastructure. This conversation takes place in a context of declining public revenues for public projects, and so the media center must compete with other good ideas. There are also differing visions of what a community media center might become and how it might best serve the public interest.
15. Latour, Reassembling; Latour, "From Realpolitik"; Heidegger, What Is a Thing?
16. Latour, "From Realpolitik. "
17. Information Technology Empowerment Center, http://www. iteclansing. org/ (ac-
cessed (March 22, 2009).
18. I use the term "basic" research center to identify WIDE as an organization that
seeks to identify and solve fundamental research problems associated with writing in digital environments. We identify explicitly with the notion of "basic" research and with research centers in the sciences, which is useful to us inside our university and with outside funders. We also use this language to distinguish WIDE from similar cen- ters in rhetoric and composition that have a teaching, service, or combined mission more than a research mission.
19. In this regard, the meeting itself should not remain invisible as both technology and rhetorical performance. In some ways, this is obvious. What else do meetings do other than "assemble"? While potentially true, this is not necessarily true. But more to the point, there are genres of meetings, and when done well, they serve an ongoing function as ways of assembling, as spaces and practices for invention, and serve other communicative functions--reporting, for instance. The meeting as material rhetorical performance is completely invisible in work on public rhetoric, and this is an indicator of a problem in how we understand what it means to do the actual work of rhetoric.
20. Connecting the dots remains a serious concern of mine. Reviewers of this essay asked me about impacts and audience response to some of the documents, like the issue summaries, that we saw produced in Harbor. As I have mentioned here, we did find other groups and individuals who referenced the issue summaries produced by CEC, but in this particular project, we did a poor job of connecting the dots in this way (in part because it was not our focus). Most writing researchers concern themselves with production, not reception. To pay attention to reception and outcomes requires atten- tion over time, and it also requires serious thought about indicators--and indicators are difficult to work with. Indicators--what we can actually see and how we understand them to mean--entail questions of politics and power, questions like what should we
look for and at when trying to research rhetoric? What are we actually seeing when we notice what we think is rhetorical activity? Whose interests are served by measuring (or not) rhetorical activity? For some types of rhetorical analysis, this is a relatively easy problem. Judgments are made all the time based on an interpretation of an artifact like a text or a speech. With such an interpretation, we can determine what techniques and strategies are used, the likely audiences, and, based on this, it is not uncommon to make a judgment on effectiveness. Of course, these are, at best, indirect measures of rhetori- cal agency. They are also limited in terms of the number of agencies accounted for. I am not opposed to the use of indirect indicators--they are often all that we have--but I am suggesting that we have poor indicators to account for the rhetorical work that people do in their lives, and that we have paid scant attention to the impacts of that work. Tra- ditional textual/rhetorical analysis does not help us much with this problem, as we need a different set of indicators and methods to render them visible to us. I am inter- ested in more robust indirect indicators, and this is a project that currently occupies my time.
21. Bernhardt, Moving Beyond. 22. Latour, Reassembling, 129.
Works Cited
Asen, Robert. "Imagining in the Public Sphere. " Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 345-67.
Asen, Robert, and Daniel C. Brouwer, eds. Counterpublics and the State. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.
Banning, Marla.
"Truth Floats: Reflexivity in the Shifting Public and Epistemological Terrain. " Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005): 75-99.
Bernhardt, Grace. "Moving Beyond Single Sourcing to Single Organizations: Under- standing Content Management in Small Nonprofits. " Master's thesis, Michigan State University, 2007.
Blythe, Stuart, Jeffrey T. Grabill, and Kirk Riley. "Invention: Action Research and Profes- sional Communication as Public Discourse. " Journal of Business and Technical Com- munication 22 (2008): 272-98.
Dahlgren, Peter. "The Internet and the Democratization of Civic Culture. " Political Communication 17 (2000): 335-40.
Driskill, Qwo-Li. "Yelesalehe Hiwayona Dikanohogida Naiwodusv/God Taught Me This Song, It Is Beautiful: Cherokee Performance Rhetorics as Decolonization, Healing, and Continuance. " Ph. D. diss. , Michigan State University, 2008.
Edbauer, Jenny. "Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies. " Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 5-24.
Goodnight, Thomas G. "The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument. " In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, edited by John L. Lucaites, Celeste M. Con- dit, and Sally Caudill, 251-64. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
Grabill, Jeffrey T. Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.
------. Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action. Cresskill, N. J. : Hampton Press, New Directions in Computers and Composition, 2007.
Haas, Angela. "A Rhetoric of Alliance: What American Indians Can Tell Us About Digi- tal and Visual Rhetoric. " Ph. D. diss. , Michigan State University, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin. What Is a Thing? Translated by W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch. Chicago: H. Regnery, 1968.
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208 Jeffrey T. Grabill
Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cam- bridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1996.
------. "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public. " In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 14-41. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2005.
------. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
------. "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? " Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 238-39. Simmons, W. Michele, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. "Toward a Civic Rhetoric for Technologi- cally and Scientifically Complex Places: Invention, Performance, and Participation. "
College Composition and Communication 58 (2007): 419-48.
[ part3 ]
Remaking Rhetoric in Universities and Publics
? Finding a Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn
David Fleming
George Kennedy may have coined the term "secondary rhetoric," but the belief that the extended language produced by children and young adults in school--prototypically written, narrative, and personal--is inferior to and sep- arate from the "primary rhetoric" of the public world outside--paradigmati- cally oral, persuasive, and civic--is widely held and of long standing, and it is nowhere more firmly entrenched than among professors of rhetoric and composition, most of whom make their living, of course, from the language of school.
Kennedy's main reason for distinguishing primary and secondary rhetoric was to trace the historical drift from the former to the latter, a process he termed letteraturizzazione and which he always figured as a loss. 1 From this point of view, the story of rhetoric is the story of how the virile practice of Greek public discourse in the direct democracies of the classical era became the literary simulations of public discourse in the classrooms of the Hellenistic period and beyond. At almost every juncture, the villain in this story is school.
Marjorie Curry Woods, for one, has questioned Kennedy's influential deni- gration of school and claimed that our willingness to accept so readily his account of the relationship between the "real world" and the classroom is evi- dence of our "academic self-hatred," our tendency to belittle those parts of our work that take place in school and involve children and young adults. 2 The problem with Kennedy's position, writes Woods, is that it employs a "post- romantic 'unteachability' topos, which assumes that what is most important about education is what least resembles the classroom. "3 But it can also be faulted for perpetuating traditional rhetoric's sexism and ageism, since, as Woods shows, stories of disciplinary decline in our field privilege the civic rhet- oric of men and demean the school-bound rhetorics of women and children. 4
I follow Woods here in asking us to resist such easy denigrations of school. And, like her, I argue that, in some respects, it should be the classroom that is
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primary, prior, and superior in our understanding, and the "real world" that is secondary, subsequent, and inferior. But I also acknowledge that there are good reasons for our usual ordering of affairs. Let me begin, then, by exam- ining two of the more devastating critiques of traditional schooling.
The Problems with School
The most prevalent critique of school from the point of view of rhetoric's public turn is that it is inauthentic, a place set apart from society and given over to mind-numbing busy work, useless trivia, impractical abstractions, and empty formalisms. In school, students learn not to be better thinkers, citizens, workers, or human beings, but only to be better students. They learn, that is, to "do" school. According to this interpretation, the most important charac- teristics of school are a function of the institution itself--namely, its appetite for order--rather than the needs of society or the dreams of individuals. Large numbers of age-segregated children and young adults sit in ordered desks inside boxlike classrooms reading bland textbooks, writing insipid essays, and doing endless problems under the direction of solitary authority figures--not because any of this prepares them for meaningful, fulfilling, engaged future lives but because that is the cheapest and most efficient way in a (post)indus- trial society to process the young masses through their immaturity.
In the context of contemporary composition studies, unease about the inauthenticity of school can be seen in our field's continuing embarrassment about "current-traditional rhetoric," the small-minded writing pedagogy that most of the public still associates with what we do. The classic account of such pedagogy remains Janet Emig's 1971 study of twelfth-grade writers in Chicago- area public schools, which portrays school writing in this country as a thor- oughly stultifying, even "neurotic," activity. 5 In the book, no one discerns more acutely the shortcomings of current-traditional rhetoric than the students themselves, one of whom says of her teachers, "They seem to have this thing about spelling. "6
The problem with school writing from Emig's point of view was not the students--it was their teachers, who were "interested chiefly in a product [they] can criticize rather than in a process [they] can help initiate through imagi- nation and sustain through empathy and support. "7 Emig complained, in fact, of widespread "teacher illiteracy" in U. S. high schools and described edu- cators who did not themselves write and who thus "underconceptualize and oversimplify" the process of composing so that "planning degenerates into out- lining, reformulating becomes the correction of minor infelicities. "8 Through such devices as the five-paragraph theme--"so indigenously American," Emig writes, "that it might be called the Fifty-Star Theme"--teachers set rigid parameters for writing that "students find difficult to make more supple. "9 The result? "Outward conformity but inward cynicism and hostility. "10 It is no wonder that, in devising a more authentic educational experience in writing
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 213
and rhetoric, one that can help our students develop into more self-actualized, engaged citizens and individuals, school is often the last place we look.
Of course, in many contemporary writing classrooms, students are allowed to pick topics about which they care and write papers that seem at least to reflect genuine purposes, genres, and audiences--a letter to one's representa- tive about gun control, for example. But even this attempt to make school writing more like "real world" public discourse ultimately fails, according to Susan Wells: "in such assignments, students inscribe their positions in a vac- uum since there is no place within the culture where student writing on gun control is held to be of general interest, no matter how persuasive the student or how intimate their acquaintance with guns. 'Public writing' in such a con- text means 'writing for no audience at all. '"11
In a penetrating essay published a few years ago, Joseph Petraglia called this kind of writing "pseudotransactional," discourse that, rather than actu- ally transacting business with the world--informing, persuading, instructing others--only appears to do so, discourse in which any authentic purpose is an illusion. 12 According to Petraglia, pseudotransactionality is a function of school itself and has its origins in the teacher's role as evaluator rather than reader. The purpose of rhetoric in school, according to this argument, is not, and cannot be, to actually get something done, make things happen, alter an attitude. It is to get a grade.
A second, equally devastating problem with traditional school from the point of view of its critics is that it reproduces the unequal socioeconomic structure of the surrounding society and is thus both symptom and cause of economic and cultural hegemony. What students learn in school from this point of view is their place in the stratified order of the "real world," which thus does not change through education but is instead perpetuated by it. Emig saw forty years ago that school's obsession with trivialities like spelling did not prevent it from having enormous social power. She does not dwell on this in her critique, but she clearly shows that schools reward students who are willing to play by the schools' inane rules.
Of course, the connection between the language of school and the levers of power is not just a modern phenomenon. Roland Barthes, in fact, defined rhetoric in general as "that privileged technique (since one must pay in order to acquire it) which permits the ruling classes to gain ownership of speech" and noted how, as a metalanguage and thus an object of schooling, rhetoric was born in legal conflicts surrounding property. 13 It emerged "from the baldest sociality, affirmed in its fundamental brutality, that of earthly possession: we began to reflect upon language in order to defend our own. "14
Today, ideological analyses of schooling are common, and they have shown us how our classrooms perpetuate the status quo by teaching children and young adults to assume their predetermined subject positions. 15 But, accord- ing to this critique, the curriculum not only stratifies young speakers and
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writers socioeconomically; it obscures that that is what it does, disempower- ing critique of unequal education, mystifying and distracting students and their guardians from the "real" power of language to effect change in the world.
In a sense the two critiques just summarized contradict one another: the first portrays school as essentially "busy work," a simulation of real activity that is a waste of resources for all concerned; the second, by contrast, depicts school as extraordinarily effective at what it does, reproducing the social order "outside" without making it at all obvious that that is what it is doing, training students to take on their preassigned roles with astonishing efficiency. But the two critiques are actually closely related, different interpretations of the same phenomenon: school's failure to promote students' self-actualization and improve the world in any appreciable way. It is just that one sees that situ- ation as a case of ineptness; the other, as the design of the ruling classes.
Given these problems with traditional schooling--pseudotransactionality, on the one hand; reproduction, on the other--any turn from the traditional classroom would seem to be a welcome development for rhetorical education. But in which direction should we turn? After all, nearly everyone acknowl- edges the continuing need for education of the young in speaking and writ- ing, especially given the complexity of such practices, the important role they play in our communities, and the long immaturity of our offspring. The ques- tion is, what should such education look like?
At a theoretical level, if the problem of traditional composition pedagogy has been its reliance on what Petraglia has termed "General Writing Skills Instruction," which involves explicit instruction in decontextualized reading and writing skills, the solution would seem therefore to involve the educa- tional dispersal, particularization, and implicitization of writing. 16 From this point of view, "real world" written discourse is irreducibly diverse, inextrica- bly situated, and always already interested; the way to effectively, and ethi- cally, develop fluency in a given writing practice is thus to immerse oneself in a world where that practice makes sense.
A pedagogy based on such a belief would involve a literal (and not just a conceptual or metaphoric) move away from school and toward society, away from the classroom and toward the community, away from solitary, imprac- tical exercise in decontextualized skills and toward situated, collaborative, concrete, human action. It would involve, that is, a new dedication to prac- tice, whether that is seen as culturally embedded, inescapably ethical action;17 insistently reflective engagement with the materials of the world;18 or "free, universal, creative and self-creative activity through which man creates (makes, produces) and changes (shapes) his historical, human world and himself. "19
The public turn in rhetoric and composition studies is clearly aligned with such a recasting of education. Recent work in service learning, activist research, community literacy, and public discourse studies has helped the field reclaim
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 215
an outward-looking profile, making learning both more authentic--because it is oriented to the particular, local, and embedded--and more radical--be- cause it encourages students to question and change the world rather than merely reproduce it.
But I worry that in turning so definitively toward "society" and away from "school," we may be neglecting aspects of classroom education that are not necessarily antithetical to a genuinely practical mission for rhetoric and com- position, aspects of schooling that, in fact, could contribute in important ways to a public turn in the field. The problems of school are many and obvi- ous. But there are virtues as well, virtues that might be especially pertinent for rhetoricians of public life.
The Virtues of School
Let us take two prototypical features of traditional schooling--its emphasis on factual knowledge and its preference for theoretical abstraction--and ask whether they might harbor learning opportunities for a praxis-oriented rhet- orical education. My goal here is not to mount a comprehensive defense of school but to suggest that we reconsider the easy denigration of the class- room that has sometimes accompanied rhetoric's public turn.
In Defense of Facts
We are accustomed now to malign traditional schooling's emphasis on--or obsession with--the transmission of "inert" facts, and with good reason. But even a writing pedagogy focused on "real world" activity, on authentic, socially embedded, potentially transgressive practices, needs to reserve a place for the development of substantive knowledge in its students. In fact, it could be argued that a truly civic rhetorical education in a complex society like ours can- not work without some kind of common schooling in the shared histories, beliefs, and values of the various worlds to which its students will graduate.
Since the late 1960s, of course, conventional wisdom has held that formal education plays an insignificant role in the development of good citizens. But political scientist William Galston has summarized a compelling body of recent research that supports an important role for traditional, classroom- based education in fostering democratic attitudes and habits in young peo- ple. 20 These studies, writes Galston, have shown surprisingly positive effects for coursework in political life and classroom-based discussion about politics; political scientists now increasingly acknowledge that, though citizens do not need to be policy experts to be engaged in their community's affairs, they do need basic political knowledge to be effective in and fulfilled by public life, knowledge that is perhaps best transmitted in school. The evidence shows, according to Galston, that substantive political knowledge affects acceptance of democratic principles, attitudes about politics, and political participation rates. Controlling for race, class, and other variables, he argues, citizens with
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more knowledge have less fear of immigrants, are less likely to feel mistrust and alienation, more likely to participate in politics, less likely to vote on the basis of their own circumstances and interests, and more likely to express tol- erance for unpopular groups. There appears to be, in other words, a link be- tween years of formal education and prodemocracy attitudes. Though Galston also admits that the results of other kinds of civic education--service learn- ing, for example--remain mixed, he does not conclude from his summary that we should simply return to a political pedagogy based on rote learning of facts and principles. The evidence shows instead that traditional formal education in politics needs to be combined with regular discussion by stu- dents of current events, opportunities to practice democratic skills in school governance, exposure to social science methods and findings about political life, training in such practical skills as the decoding of charts and tables, and treatment of non-American political structures.
A recent essay in CCC by David Coogan would seem to support just such an integration of classroom- and community-based methods in writing and rhetoric education. 21 Coogan recounts a two-semester service-learning course he taught in 2002 at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, in which a dozen undergraduate students worked with a Bronzeville-area nonprofit organization called Urban Matters to increase parent involvement in the lo- cal school councils (LSCs), which help govern neighborhood schools in the Chicago public school system. Unfortunately, despite the effort and resources put into the yearlong course, the students' work had limited impact: they were unable to significantly increase attendance at the parent meetings they organized, the brochures they painstakingly produced went largely unread, and the advocacy they tried to sponsor among their clients was practically ineffective.
Coogan uses this "rhetorical failure" to argue for a new approach to ser- vice learning that pays as much attention to "rhetorical scholarship" as to "rhetorical activism. "22 "What really went wrong in the project," he writes, "was that the students and staff were thrust into rhetorical production . . . before they had done any rhetorical analysis. "23 They did not know enough about the history of the school reform movement in Chicago, were unfamil- iar with the "style and substance" of parent involvement in schools, and mis- read the dominant "ideographs" of the rhetorical environment around them, failing to understand, for example, the historical shift in local discourses about education that now privileged "local responsibility" and "accountabil- ity" over "local control. "
Coogan advocates here a greater role for relatively formal, even classroom- based instruction and analysis within service-learning projects, an integra- tion of school and society, an oscillation between classroom and community, that may well turn out to be a pronounced feature of the next generation of community literacy initiatives. And he proposes an educational sequence that
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 217
would move students from discovery to analysis to production to assessment, in which really only the third step--admittedly the heart of any such proj- ect--would be nontraditional in the terms I have been using here. 24
In Praise of the Abstract
Another feature of traditional schooling that deserves reconsideration is the focus on abstract, theoretical knowledge. Since at least the rise of the "situ- ated learning" movement of the 1980s, there has been a concerted move in educational circles away from the teaching of general, abstract knowledge and toward contextualized, embodied, concrete learning, especially apprentice- ship-style projects in which explicit instruction in general knowledge is re- placed by immersion in particular communities of practice.
But in turning toward such informal education, is it possible that we have overlooked the continuing practical possibilities of theoretical abstraction? In a persuasive defense of such knowledge, and the relatively traditional peda- gogies by which it is usually transmitted, John R. Anderson, Lynn M. Reder, and Herbert A. Simon concede that "much of what is learned is specific to the situation in which it is learned" and that there is often a "mismatch" between school situations and "real world" situations such as the workplace. 25 They cite such well-known studies as the one that portrays Orange County home- makers doing poorly at schoollike mathematics problems but well at super- market "best-buy" calculations. They dispute, however, the conclusions usually reached on the basis of this research: that all learning is context-bound and that the abstract knowledge that school often emphasizes is largely useless. They suggest instead that knowledge gained in school can transfer across con- texts in powerful ways if the learning situation is well designed. For example, knowledge taught in multiple contexts turns out to be less context-bound than knowledge not so taught.
The authors also contest the claim of the situated learning movement that "training by abstraction" is of little use, an argument that has been used to support projects like apprenticeship programs that turn their back completely on the classroom. 26 The alleged irrelevance of school-based "theory" is sup- ported by stories like that of Los Angeles police officers who are told, upon leaving the police academy, to "now forget everything you learned. " Though there is obviously some justification for this advice, the real problem, accord- ing to Anderson, Reder, and Simon, is not school but our tendency--on both the Left and Right--to belittle what school in fact does well. What police recruits learn in the classroom about not violating subjects' civil rights, for example--education that is hard to imagine outside of a classroom context-- needs to be not "forgotten" but constantly reinforced. In this case, the better advice would be "now remember everything you learned! "
Research on writing acquisition has sometimes found similarly large effects for explicit instruction, despite the manifest superiority in many cases
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of practice over theory and implicit over explicit instruction. 27 Students have been shown to revise better, for example, when explicitly instructed to do so. In one study, young writers improved their performance significantly when told "Add five things to your essay to improve it," rather than simply "revise your essay to improve it. "28 Though they do not deal specifically with writing instruction, it is for reasons such as these that Anderson, Reder, and Simon argue for a more nuanced approach to the relative role of situated and abstract knowledge in pedagogical design. "Numerous experiments show combining abstract instruction with specific concrete examples is better than either one alone. "29
Finally, the authors deal with the claim of situated learning advocates that learning should always take place in complex, social environments, those that mimic the "real world," rather than the simplified, often solitary contexts of school. Again, there is often good reason for reforming school to make it more like society in these ways. But Anderson, Reder, and Simon find ample evi- dence for the usefulness of solitary learning methods and the decomposition of tasks into parts. A student learning to play violin in an orchestra, for exam- ple, requires training both inside and outside of that context.
But what does any of this have to do with the kind of political or civic goals associated with the public turn in rhetorical education? Well, one of those goals is usually to help develop in students a more critical sensibility about their society, an oppositional stance toward socioeconomic inequality, for example. While it is true, as I argued above, that school is often a place where the status quo is naturalized and reinforced, and while "extracurricu- lar" organizations and activities can be fruitful sites for learning and prac- ticing counterhegemonic discourses, it is also true, as scholars of service learning like Bruce Herzberg have shown, that classroom work--reading, writing, analysis, discussion, and so forth--can edify practical action by help- ing students question the theories with which they operate in their daily lives and which can distort their interpretations of what they see and hear outside of school. 30 Coursework in women's studies programs has demonstrated for more than thirty years now the transformative power of relatively traditional classroom work.
It may be, in fact, that counterintuitive knowledge, that which goes against students' prior beliefs, can only reliably be acquired through overt instruc- tion, the way effective textbooks often teach new concepts by first explicitly refuting students' misconceptions. In fact, one of the hallmarks of expertise is the prominence of abstract knowledge that is not readily accessible in "everyday" life. Cheryl Geisler describes how novices studying physics tend to rely on concepts close to everyday, literal understanding; experts, on the other hand, use discipline-specific understandings that are more abstract, non- literal, specialized, and learned. Clearly, expert knowledge comes, in part, from long immersion in a community of practice; but it also comes from study,
A Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 219
often of a fairly traditional kind. The very power of that kind of expertise-- its practical effectivity in the world--is further reason to reappraise our ten- dency to denigrate classroom-based education. 31
We might see in both of these features of traditional schooling--the em- phasis on factual knowledge and the preference for theoretical abstraction-- a defensible role for explicitness in progressive education. In fact, though we often associate explicitness with legalism, authoritarianism, even repression, compelling arguments have been raised in recent years about the liberatory potential of some kinds of explicit instruction. In writing studies, this reap- praisal has been most persuasively advanced by Lisa Delpit, who has argued that there are rules for participating in power, and "if you're not already a par- ticipant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier. "32
I have focused so far on the potential role of traditional educational content--facts and theories--in authentic, even counterhegemonic, learning. But what about the structure of traditional education, the prototypical organi- zation of classroom life itself? Is there something there that a public turn in rhetoric might take advantage of? By structure, I mean the way school is usu- ally so dramatically set off from the rest of society: the way it segregates and isolates aged cohorts of children and young adults in institutional settings, often under compulsion of some kind; the way it organizes their time to- gether into artificial chunks, like the "courses" of postsecondary education; the way such chunks are conceived on a narrative basis, each with a begin- ning, middle, and end through which students move and, ideally, become transformed; the way participants--teachers and students alike--are asked constantly to reflect on that movement, to imagine, represent, contemplate, and assess their progress, or lack thereof, in the story of learning. If education can take many forms, school itself is hard to imagine, even in the early twenty- first century, without calling up such specific spatial and temporal images.
These images also point, of course, to what makes traditional schooling so susceptible to the critiques I summarized at the beginning of this essay. The segregation of students by age, class, "ability," and so forth deprives young learners of the "real world" diversity they need to grow as thinkers and citi- zens; the physical arrangement of the typical classroom encourages docility among students and authoritarianism among teachers; the isolation of school from everyday life makes student learning so often irrelevant and ineffective; the division of educational time into units like the semester, as Mathieu has shown, gives students an artificial and solipsistic view of the phenomena they are studying; and so forth. 33
But the classroom, as a classroom, can also be a site of genuine discovery and enlightenment, with transformative potential not readily or reliably avail- able anywhere else.
