“Second Line to Bury White Supremacy”: Take 'Em Down Nola,monument removal,and residual memory

ABSTRACT

As Lost Cause statues come down across the country, communities are forced to reckon with monumental absences. While the rhetorical significance of monuments is well-established in scholarly literature, the rhetoric of monumental absence is not as thoroughly covered. To better understand the role that monumental absence plays in both public space and civic life, this essay theorizes residual memory as the remaining rhetorical potency that clings to a commemorative site after the focal object or structure of memorialization is removed. To demonstrate the theoretical utility of residual memory and contribute to ongoing public debates about Lost Cause monuments, this essay uses rhetorical field methods to conduct a rhetorical analysis of Take 'Em Down NOLA's “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy.” The secretive night time removal of the Liberty Place Monument in New Orleans on April 24, 2017 and the activist celebration that followed two weeks later provide an exemplary case for exploring how residual memories can be used to resist and revise regressive practices of public memory.     

Research and Learning Information Resources

Identification of the factors that contribute to the fear of success in women's career development is important for community college educators and counselors wanting to assist women in their professional goals. In this article the factors associated with fear of success in women are categorized as follows: familial socialization, psychological influences, and cultural norms. It is generally conceded that any one or combination of these factors can precipitate a fear of success which becomes manifest in the woman's defeatist behaviors, and in turn, undermines her career development. It is imperative that professionals recognize the factors causing the fear of success orientation in women so that they may develop coping strategies with the client.     

Where there are no rules or systems to guide us: argument from example in a hermeneutic rhetoric

Many rhetoricians treat argument from example as a kind of induction, an illustration of a general principle. Although this is one function of example, consistent with Aristotle's statements about the paradeigma and The New Rhetoric's “argumentation by example,” it camouflages the practice of exemplary proof that has contributed to our richest sense of rhetorical understanding. Inductive example allies itself with the principles of theoretical science and contradicts Aristotle's insight that rhetoric functions where rules or systems are wanting. A properly rhetorical understanding of the exemplum does not work through a universal, implicit or otherwise, but follows a sideways movement from particular to particular. This essay traces the alliance of the paradeigma with inductive science to an unstable fault-line in our Aristotelian heritage, then retraces the path of the prudential tradition by following the long and distinguished career of the rhetorical example in the West in order to reclaim this heritage and to challenge the pre-eminence of inductive subsumption.     

Political pornification gone global: Teresa Rodríguez as fungible object in the 2015 Spanish regional elections

In this article, the authors examine the political pornification of Spanish politician Teresa Rodríguez and assess the rhetorical strategies she and her supporters used to respond to the controversy. The authors theorize a “fungibility frame” within which women candidates and citizens are treated as interchangeable, violable, and devalued. Rodríguez and her supporters resisted this frame, asserting women's individuality, agency, and inherent value. This case underscores the ways in which political pornification impacts not just candidates and public figures, but also private citizens. When pornified, women are presented not as individuals with political agency but as objects which may be manipulated for political and commercial gain. Additionally, this analysis reveals the ways in which the conditions that produce political pornification may be endemic to democratic culture.     

Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association

This essay argues that Audre Lorde's 1981 keynote speech, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” has much to contribute to communication scholars’ understanding of human biases and rhetorical artistry. The significance of Lorde's subject is one reason for devoting critical attention to her speech, because, in contemporary public life in the United States, anger has abiding relevance in an extraordinary range of rhetoric and public address. Another reason for contemplating Lorde's speech is the fact that anger was a major theme throughout the internationally acclaimed poet-activist's advocacy. The essay suggests that Lorde's speech illustrates a communication technique, shifting subjectivities, which recurs in her rhetorical artistry.     

A teacher's use of digital video with urban middle school students: Expanding definitions of representational literacy

Abstract

The role of educational technology as media is rapidly expanding. When placed directly into the hands of students, digital video, in particular, has the potential to transform schooling. In this case study, members of the Naptown Prodigy, an after school club, produced music videos and iMovies of streetball performances. The club's advisor, an urban middle school English teacher, participated in the PT3 Vanguard program, a university—public school staff development collaboration. The teacher's access to technology through the Vanguard program enabled her students to use digital video as both a construction and expression medium. This project provides a unique and promising example of the ways in which teachers can use digital video to foster representational literacy among inner‐city youth.     

Sound Bites,Spin and Social Change

Abstract

The news media is an essential player in the policy making process. Social work students learning how to scrutinize, and influence, the complex world of social policy can benefit from an educational model that incorporates the media. This article first examines the theoretical framework for understanding the media's role in public policy formation. This framework is then used to construct a classroom exercise for analyzing the public discourse using basic content analysis of media texts. A case example drawn from a study of welfare reform and the media is described. By exploring how social problems are translated into public conversations, students can enrich their knowledge of social problem formation, and learn more effective rhetorical techniques and strategies for influencing the public debate.     

A Teacher's and Researcher's Experiences with Power and Representation within the Practical Argument Process

The purpose of this paper is to explore the tensions that erupted between the two authors during the final stages of their engagement with the practical argument process. These tensions arose when the 'researcher' constructed a representation of 'the teacher's' reality. In this paper, the researcher shares her representation and the teacher responds to her analysis. The teacher's response to the researcher's representation of her and her teaching suggests tensions arose between the teacher and the researcher over how the researcher constructed the teacher's practical argument. As the teacher and the researchers, we analyze our experiences with the practical argument process and our collaborative relationship. The result is an enlarged view of the place of story and practical argument within research collaborations. In addition, we learned the necessity of continuing dialog between researcher and teacher through the writing of the project. This ensures that, regardless of the research method, both collaborators are heard and their tales are told in the public representation.     

Homeless women self-advocates: The quest from liminal to full citizenship

ABSTRACT

This essay explores how homeless women produce advocacy to gain full and substantive citizenship. Homeless women's attempts to gain recognition as full members of the society require them to transform lived experiences of trauma, exclusion, and loss into public arguments. Facing the intersection of civic exclusion by class and gender, homeless women are commonly viewed as welfare-dependent, irrational, and present-oriented, and are, therefore, considered the opposite of “good citizens.” Despite their legal citizenship, homeless women are essentially liminal citizens—their citizenship is lacking substantial political power and is thus barren. This essay explores how liminal citizens attempt to secure full citizenship by looking behind-the-scenes at their self-advocacy production process. Employing rhetorical field methods, the essay offers an interpretive reading of in-depth interviews with homeless women self-advocates and illuminates three aspects of the advocacy production process: recognizing the worth of the story; deciding to tell traumatic stories; and crafting the story. By unpacking the self-advocacy production process this essay animates the discussion about the mechanisms required to foster a deep and inclusive democracy from a rhetorical perspective.     

Recent policy,the numbers game and the schooling of the hearing impaired: a study of one teacher's career

ABSTRACT

This paper describes and analyses the fate of an educational innovation, namely the mainstreaming of hearing impaired children into a primary school. Set in the context of recent State policy, it is a critical case study of a ‘caring’ organization staffed by ‘professionals’ engaged in work upon children with special needs. The data presented are derived from ethnographic interview with a specially qualified teacher of the hearing impaired. Primarily, it explores the teacher's interaction with her male headteacher, from her perspective. Conflict developed between the two around the meaning of integration, and the use of the hearing impaired children as a resource to preserve the school, at a time of threatened closure. Eventually, there was a polarized antipathy between teacher and head; and a consequent teacher career failure and head career success, resulting in the ultimate resignation of the teacher. As such, the paper is a critique of the socially oppressive schooling of those children deemed to have special needs.     

Majors and credits in public speaking

If politics is an art, then matters of style must be crucial to its practice. This essay considers how political actions are shaped by rhetorical practices that depend upon aesthetic perceptions. Modern assumptions of artistic autonomy are replaced by the classical concept of decorum, which offers a model for understanding how political life is styled for rhetorical effect. The role of decorousness in contemporary politics is illustrated by the extreme case of the courtly style, which constitutes power through propriety, is centered on the king's body, displaces speech with gesture, and ends in political paralysis.     

GUIDANCE: SHIFTING THE PARADIGM FROM DISCIPLINE

Abstract

A university child development/early childhood education professor renews her relationship with young children and with current public school teaching by spending 5 weeks in kindergarten. This article describes some highlights of her experience: the children's daily journal writing, an in‐class and take‐home math activity, and teaching the required kindergarten social studies unit on Antarctica. The experience provided renewal for the professor and fresh examples for the professor to share with her university students.     

Putting the child first how one student teacher negotiated the moral landscape of teaching

Abstract

One student teacher's moral development process is uncovered, using a case study approach to capture the participant's internal processes and the constructed social context. The participant was in the first eight‐week placement of her semester‐long student teaching assignment, a kindergarten classroom in a rural public elementary school with a diverse student body. The participant believed that her professional moral responsibility was to “put the child first.” She believed this included protecting the child's dignity and autonomy, creating a close classroom community, establishing trust between teacher and child, fostering productive communication among all adults in the child's life, and safeguarding the child's health and safety. The participant maintained these priorities in her daily teaching practice and used them in her decision‐making process. However, the decisions that she was required to make during her early weeks of student teaching led to a modified understanding of her values. Democratic discourse and professional autonomy were associated with the process of moral development in this case. Theoretical and practical implications are described.     

State of rhetoric: neoliberal discourses for education in state of the state addresses and gubernatorial press releases

ABSTRACT

Policy elites use rhetoric in speeches and press releases to provide framing that is intended to influence public opinion. These rhetorical events can be treated as instances in which speech usefully promotes particular discourses. Indeed, elected officials are able to influence how individuals think about problems and solutions through speeches and press releases. Two important rhetorical events in which political elites advance frames for social issues are annual state of the state addresses (SoSA) given by U.S. governors and gubernatorial press releases that inform media reporting about state policy. This study employed policy discourse and rhetorical analyses to examine SoSAs and press releases as rhetorical events within the context of educational policy. Our findings show that governors framed the roles of state government, governors, and educational stakeholders within a discourse that perpetuates a neoliberal version of education. In this framing, governors situated education’s purpose as being workforce and economic development, ignoring its role in addressing social issues and preparing informed, engaged participants for democratic society. Given that individuals make decisions about how to address social issues and understand public institutions based on framing provided by political elites, these findings raise implications for state educational policies and the public purposes of education.     

Young black women curate visual arts e-portfolios: negotiating digital disciplined identities,infrastructural inequality and public visibility

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing importance of digital portfolios for justifying creative work and study opportunities, little is known about arts students’ creative appropriation of online portfolios in secondary school. In particular, there is a research gap concerning the challenges that young black women face when curating portfolios as visual arts students. This paper describes the key challenges that three such government school students negotiated when taught to creatively appropriate an online portfolio software for curating showcase visual arts e-portfolios: In formal contexts, art students’ e-portfolios are strongly shaped by assimilatory norms. Visual arts students who want to develop portfolios that follow local or global crafts and fandoms must negotiate their low status in, or complete exclusion from, the national syllabus. Students in under-resourced school and home settings may already be using other online portfolio solutions that suit their purposes better than the particular software prescribed in arts lessons. Online portfolios are public by default and young women negotiated this risk by using pseudonymous self-presentations. Each student's classroom practices were also constrained by a technology selected for its minimalist exhibition aesthetic. Students curated showcase exhibitions, but the prescribed service did not facilitate a wider exploration of contemporary digital practices.     

“A Capital and Novel Argument”: Charles Darwin's Notebooks and the Productivity of Rhetorical Consciousness

With the rise of poststructuralist critiques of the autonomous subject, attention has shifted from the nature of “intentional persuasion” to the constitutive nature of discourse. Although this turn has led to valuable new insights into the nature of rhetoric, it also threatens to discount one of the most vital contributions of the rhetorical tradition—the nature of rhetorical invention. This essay seeks to recover the notion of invention by drawing from John Dewey's naturalistic interpretation of experience. In Dewey's framework, “consciousness” is neither the private contents of thought nor a point of articulation for social discourse, but a practice of manipulating public meanings as a means of responding to problematic situations. I then use Dewey's notion to advance the concept of a “rhetorical consciousness,” which I define in terms of the sophistical principles of imitatio and dissoi logoi. To demonstrate the pragmatic significance of this concept, I then show, through an analysis of Charles Darwin's notebooks, how Darwin employed his own rhetorical consciousness within his struggle to invent the revolutionary arguments that led up to his publication of On the Origin of Species. My hope is that this naturalistic interpretation of rhetorical invention will contribute to the ongoing project of cultivating a more intelligent, critical, and creative citizenry through the application of classical rhetorical principles to contemporary democratic forms of education in both the arts and sciences.     

Rhetorical counteraction in Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words

However esoteric Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives seems at first glance, it remains highly relevant to our contemporary moment. As a philosophy of rhetoric that centers on the nature of human conflict, it helps audiences interpret the vicissitudes of political warfare with greater precision and insight. The value of A Rhetoric of Motives becomes even more apparent in light of its recently discovered second volume, The War of Words. Together, these two volumes offer a novel method of rhetorical counteraction that helps specialist and non-specialist audiences redress the threat of nationalistic war. Burke's approach to rhetorical counteraction is distinguished by the study of rhetorical devices across history. By approaching these devices systematically, Burke believed he could help his audience reframe their attitude toward evolving political events. The purpose of this article is to present a thorough account of Burke's method so that it can enrich how we teach and engage in public deliberation today.     

Another type of diversity: A student teacher with a learning disability

Carrie wanted to be a teacher more than anything else. But Carrie had a learning disability which interfered with the basic literacy skills of reading, writing, and language processing. Although she had entered the university through a special private program designed to identify and support studentswith learning disabilities,Carrie kept her disability a secret when she was admitted to the teacher education program. She did not tell her cooperating teachers or university supervisors about her difficulties until the incident in the high school resource room. Her experiences and the immediate and future dilemmas created for all teacher educators by Carrie's experiences raise larger issues about the balance between individual rights and public interest.