On the Right (and Responsibility) to Learn

So I was at a lecture this past Monday. Bill Talbott (a University of Washington philosophy professor) was addressing the question “Which Rights Should Be Universal?” (his title was “The Discovery of Universal Human Rights: How to believe in universal human rights without being a moral imperialist”). While Talbott was only indirectly concerned with citizens and active learners, he spoke rather directly to what I’m blogging about here these days. He noted that the topic of human rights is a topic “made for under-grad education.” At the center of his talk was an argument about how humans arrive at an understanding of moral issues. He senses, rightly I think, that in his tradition (one that finds its roots in Greek and Roman thinking), people have attempted to start from universal principles. The problem with this approach is that it is almost always possible to find exceptions to moral principles (he offered some spiffy examples), and so the tradition finds itself in a bind: I might want to argue that genocide is wrong, but I may not be able to defend that principle from all challenges, so I am left unable to defend my moral belief, I find myself at risk of holding a contradictory position or deciding that I can’t hold moral positions. Talbott argues that the problem isn’t that we have identified the wrong principles but that we are using the wrong method: we don’t start from principles; instead, we make moral judgments and then try to discover the principles that explain our judgements.

What does this have to do with facilitating the growth of citizens? A lot. If we take Talbott at his word, then citizens are obligated to develop and exercise their own judgment. They have to engage in conversations about what is good for them without resorting to some sort of “paternalistic justification” (you just have to do this because it’s for your own good). Every human has a right to this kind of development and, I would add, an obligation to engage in and protect this kind of development. Learners who are fully human can’t enter a class and say, “Just tell me what I need to know for my own good” or “Entertain me!!” Rather, they have to enter a class and wonder, “how do I need to develop in order to be more able to make judgments.” If a teacher isn’t ready to help learners understand what development is on offer and how to go about developing, it’s a bad class. But the teacher cannot do the development for the learner.

I’d like to live in these sorts of classrooms.

Winter Term, 2007: Introductory Thoughts

So I’m going to use this tool to keep a sort of running response to class, but I’ll keep it here out in the open. I’m teaching a 101 (college composition) and a 102 (writing from research) this term, but I think I’ll invite students from both classes to read and respond. On one level, my goal is some sort of meta-commentary about what is going down in class. But at a deeper level, I am trying to do some writing about how school (especially college English at a community college) can or might facilitate the growth of citizens. As I was reflecting on my experience in fall 2006, I came to see the act of teaching rhetoric as closely related to the act of creating spaces wherein folks get to practice being citizens and to become better at being citizens. In coming weeks, I’ll try to tease out what I might mean by “citizen” (I’m reading an interesting book on that topic just now).

I’ll start here by thinking a bit about the first day. I’m typically impressed the first time I meet students by how aware they are and by how they are trying to negotiate a productive space in the classroom. I think that too many teachers (myself included) forget that for many students, being a student is not a primary role or interest. Teachers put a great deal of effort into preparing classes and see the work of their classes as serious. Students see the classroom from . . ., well lots of other perspectives. I almost always like the vibe that develops the first day, as I try to convince students to take over the classroom and find their place. Still, there are always a few students who, for reasons as diverse as they are, find ridiculous the notion of making the classroom their own space. I am particularly interested this term in allowing and enabling learners to be “active” (my College’s word). We’ll see how this evolves.

The Educational Project

I was just this past week at a retreat with other community college faculty and administrators. We were talking about “assessment,” that is about how we might discover what is going on in our classrooms and how we might use what we discover to achieve more perfectly our goals for those classrooms (whatever those goals are). The day or so of conversation was useful for me. My participation in these conversations focused the new term, at least in part, on learning rather than on classes and reports about teaching. It’s interesting to me that this focus on learning came from talking with a bunch of teachers and researchers rather than from learners more traditionally defined. What refreshed me, perhaps, was our unabashed interest in sustaining institutions that see learning as their focus. We want to create and maintain spaces where in learners add value to their lives and we, in collaboration with these learners, add value to communities, local and global.

At several points we realized what a strikingly counter-cultural urge this one we have is. We did not, I think, name why this is so, and I want to try to do this here. Education involves a simultaneous release and pursuit of a learner’s interest. To lead oneself (or to be lead) out from one state to another entails desiring a new state but also relinquishing control over the state one is in and the state one is moving toward and both to desire and to relinquish in a serious way. To learn, one has to allow new networks and connections and relations to form; one must meet the other and become other than one was.

This is inherently dangerous, education. We can’t control where we will end up even though we must try to shape a path, to take responsibility for steering our own development. If we are unable simultaneously to aspire and relinquish, we may more completely inhabit our entitlements, but we will not add value beyond protecting the capital we already hold. A learner who refuses to aspire or to relinquish may even gain value by interest. As a child of educated small business people, I could have gotten an education by simply attending classes, but that education would largely have been an extension of my parents labor. They had put me in a position to acknowledge authority and carry out tasks on time (that is at least part of my entitlement). But had I not myself desired a new affect and awareness and skill set, I would have finished college as the child of small business people ready to replicate and add to that existence but unable to wonder much about it. And had I been unwilling to plug into a new network of people and ideas, new ecosystems, little that I learned, even had I desired new knowledge and perspective, would have been integrated into who I became. No one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1981 would have predicted that I would be blogging from the Pacific Northwest or that I would have studied English literature and then rhetoric. Such is, I think, the outcome of education.

Is this sort of open-ended journey desirable? That is an open question. I suspect that without such an avenue, societies become reactionary arrangements that protect this or that array of resources. Jefferson and Dewey have argued that this sort of education is essential to meaningful democracy; Putnam (Bowling Alone) and others suggest that the U.S. democracy has largely lost track of this sense of education. I wonder where my students are at, whether they are willing to aspire but also to relinquish. This act seems to involves much more than paying tuition and getting credentials. Is it too much to ask? Can only some students afford this sort of venture?

Here's an alternate question: Can anyone afford not to pursue this sort of education, whether they have access to educational institutions or not? I am deeply aware that I write this question from a very privileged position. I have had access to institutions and am that sort of learner that my culture expects to be able to learn. Still I ask this question in a general way. Can humans afford not to aspire to grow and to be willing to forge new relationships in ways that do not reduce the other to property of some sort?

Some thoughts on rhetoric

What do I mean by the phrase "rhetoric"?

This is itself not a rhetorical question. In their review of what rhetoric might mean for postmodern humans, John Bender and David Wellberry arrive at a fairly neutral definition: rhetoric is “an art of positionality in address” (7). Rhetoric is an art of managing the relationships between audience, speaker/writer, and topic. But rhetoric is not, at least according to Aristotle himself, “persuasion”; rather, rhetoric involves the “the detection of the persuasive aspects of each matter.” Lots to study here. How does one relate to an audience or a topic? How does a specific audience relate to a topic? How is the topic composed and what are the links between data and assertions about the topic? How might those assertions become more compelling for a specific audience?

Bender and Wellberry connect rhetoric not with some school topic (go to class and master some content and skills) but rather as part of all of our “attempts to know,” from biology to art to My Space. The trick for me is grounding rhetoric in material and ethical situations. To grow as a rhetorician (on this definition) is to think about what new knowledge one can build from one’s own position in relationship to a real audience and real data. What’s more, rhetoricians have to take responsibility for the down-stream results of the knowledge that they build.

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On the results of arguing

I think that serious arguing will lead us pretty quickly to talk about discourse, about how we talk and act and even think and how others do and what alternative approaches we are. Arguing with others leads humans to start thinking about how truth is created and passed around (or to insist blindly on the common-sensical obviousness of one's own truth), I suspect, because of the nature of human language and identity. Linguists talk about discourses as more than a language: a discourse involves a set of things, conditions, and states that allow a human to interact with others and with her or himself. As we interact, we rely on words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, gestures, glances, body positions, clothes, and other symbols. The logic, rituals, and habits that integrate these characteristics comprise a discourse. Conceived this way, a discourse is an "identity kit" (Gee); every human works with multiple Discourses. We know how to use the discourse of a teacher or a skateboarder or a citizen of Monroe, Washington because we understand the role that each of these people play in their community. Here is a more detailed definition of discourse developed by linguist and education researcher James Paul Gee:

A Discourse is a sort of “identity kit” which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize. Being “trained” as a linguist meant that I learned to speak, think, and act like a linguist, and to recognize others when they do so. Some other examples of Discourses: (enacting) being an American or a Russian, a man or a woman, a member of a certain socioeconomic class, a factory worker or a boardroom executive, a doctor or a hospital patient, a teacher, an administrator, or a student, a student of physics or a student of literature, a member of a sewing circle, a club, a street gang, a lunchtime social gathering, or a regular at a local bar. We all have many discourses.

How does one acquire a Discourse? It turns out that much that is claimed, controversially, to be true of second language acquisition . . . is, in fact, more obviously true of the acquisition of Discourses. Discourses are not mastered by overt instruction (even less so than languages, and hardly anyone ever fluently acquired a second language sitting in a classroom), but by enculturation ("apprenticeship") into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse (Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1983). This is how we all acquired our native languages and our home-based Discourse. It is how we acquire all later, more public-oriented Discourses. If you have no access to the social practice, you don't get in the Discourse, you don't have it. You cannot overtly teach anyone a Discourse, in a classroom or anywhere else. Discourse are not bodies of knowledge like physics or archeology or linguistics. Therefore, ironically, while you can overtly teach someone linguistics, a body of knowledge, you can't teach them to be a linguist, that is, to use a Discourse. The most you can do is to let them practice being a linguist with you. (7)

No arguer, on this line of thinking, learns a new discourse (like the one that this section of English 101 focuses on) by memorizing and using a set of rules. Instead, humans learn to take up new discourses through supported and intentional practice. This means that picking up a discourse involves more work (and more risk) than learning how to place commas correctly. I think this is why we argue. To see better what sorts of ways truths can be related and to add new tools to our personal bags of tricks.

Works Cited

Gee, James Paul. "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics," Journal of Education 171 (1989): 5-25.

Argumentation

My approach to this sort of work is wrapped up in my understanding of practical language use (argumentation) and the nature of language (discourse). Argumentation involves being interested in finding "contested validity claims" and "problematic expression"; it is not about clearly stating what everyone or the writer herself already believes. In "Lost Art of Argument," a chapter in his final book, The Revolt of the Elite, Christopher Lasch tried to flesh out a notion of argument that has less to do with personality and more to do with a collaborative process of inquiry. When he died in 1994, Lasch was celebrated as an important, if prickly, analyst of American culture. Lasch comes to a discussion of argument by considering the role that "debate" plays in a democracy, arguing that we know what our interests are (and what our questions are as thinkers but also as citizens) only as we engage in interested, public debate. As he sums up his thoughts about a mass media that increasingly tries to give us expert information but keeps us from any real debate, Lasch clarifies his own notion of argument:

Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in [a] pejorative sense—half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of "opinions," gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.

The attempt to bring others around to our own point of view carries the risk, of course, that we may adopt their point of view instead. We have to enter imaginatively into our opponents' arguments, if only for the purpose of refuting them, and we may end up being persuaded by those we sought to persuade. Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational. Most of us tend to think of it . . . as a clash of rival dogmas, a shouting match in which neither side gives any ground. But arguments are not won by shouting down opponents. They are won by changing opponents' minds—something that can happen only if we give opposing arguments a respectful hearing and still persuade their advocates that there is something wrong with those arguments. In the course of this activity we may well decide that there is something wrong with our own.

Arguments, as Lasch understands them, are not battles to win or avoid. The issue is not "agreeing" or "disagreeing" but involving oneself in the contest and letting the contest move us, in the company of others, to new conclusions.

Works Cited

Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elite.

The Mission of this Blog

I have two reasons for hosting this blog. The first is a bit ideal, I suppose. I’m holding out for a kind of salon that has its roots in a college class but quickly becomes a public sphere where folk come to build and try out ideas. My second is more practical. I want writing students to come into this space and act like composers (or rhetors) rather than college students. I’m taking my ENG 101 and 102 courses out of school. These classes are composition course, that is, formal situations in which students (and teachers) practice composing. Our topic of study, then, is "college composition" and not English. The second word in the phrase “college composition” is, for me, an interesting one because it describes an activity that many students don’t connect with “English” classes. The English word composition has its roots in the Latin verb componere, “to put with or together.” The first word in the course title, college, is also one I think most of us misunderstand, for we mistake “college” with “degree.” College is, at least etymologically, about relationships (the Latin word here is collegium, association). Relationships with whom? With other members of the immediate learning community, but as importantly, relationships with folks who have thought and composed across time. So, the course will give us practice putting together words and ideas in relationship to what we are reading and what other writers are telling us (these days, the theme I’m engaging is higher education).

I’ll follow this post with I want to offer some additional context for what I hope to happen here by adding discussions of three phrases, argumentation, discourse, and reflective practice.