The Gap Between Rhetorical Education and Civic Discourse

Citation
Rood, Craig. "The Gap Between Rhetorical Education and Civic Discourse." Review of Communication, vol. 16, no. 2-3, 2016, pp. 135-150.

Summary
The author, Craig Rood, was also a participant at the 2013 RSA Summer Institute seminar that led to the creation of The Mt. Oread Manifesto. Similarly, he takes rhetoric to be first and foremost a teaching tradition (following the work of Jeffrey Walker), but notes that speech communication in particular has neglected this tradition. The early section of the essay compares the status of pedagogy in English/composition studies vs. how it appears in Speech Communication.

Rood questions "What, precisely, do we mean when we claim that rhetorical education, and, in turn, rhetorical engagement is essential to the functioning of a free and democratic society?" (138). The connection is taken as granted for many people working on rhetorical education or justifying the teaching of rhetoric, but in what specific ways does rhetorical education contribute to and influence civic discourse?

Focusing on pedagogical initiatives that take on this question, Rood points to public speaking textbooks that take as their aim "putting 'the public back in public speaking'" (139). These textbooks include real world examples of public speech, such as town hall meetings. Another pedagogical initiative is integrated speech and writing courses, which "take seriously the art of rhetoric by unifying several modes of communication (including written, oral, visual, and electronic)" (140). This format seems to emphasize genre - the affordances, limits, and formal expectations that accompany the rhetorical choice of communicative medium. Integrated courses are limited by the amount of time they have with students, but in some cases (such as "Rhetoric and Civic Life" at Penn State) are year-long rather than semester-long, and allow for more explicit instruction beyond the basics of Aristotle and the rhetorical situation.

Questioning the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse, Rood cites David Zarefsky, who argues for "two faces" for democratic rhetoric - a threatening face that manipulates to engineer consent, and a benign face that is deliberative. Democracy and rhetoric share these two faces, and the tension between them is a source of anxiety when it comes to either contemporary democracy, contemporary rhetoric, or both. To restore balance between the two faces, leaders should be more sensitive to their role as rhetorical leaders and rhetorical education must be cultivated in classrooms that address significant public issues (142).

Rood questions "whether Zarefesky - and others committed to the civic mission of rhetorical education - are offering education solutions to non-education problems. Such a mismatch can elide structural and collective problems and solutions while wrongly placing responsibility on education and individual effort." (143). Zarefsky sees the impoverishment of civic discourse as being the fault of individuals who do not take advantage of the channels, technologies, and opportunities available for deliberative communication. But again, thinking about matching problems to solutions, can a course in rhetorical education offer amelioration to present conditions?

Shift to model of rhetorical education as civic discourse, rather than preliminary to civic discourse - see Jenny Edbauer who "encourages a rethinking of the 'in order to later' model, where students learn methods, skills, and research in order to later produce at other sites'" (144). (Imagine a classroom in which deliberation is taken as the central goal or purpose - similar to a graduate seminar, maybe? Emphasizing that the students are the ones most responsible for the creation of discourse in an ecology of discourse)

We can't expect American society to reproduce Athenian society, and our rhetorical education may not necessarily resemble the ancient rhetorical education. Emphasis on effect and transfer are needed to theorize the current moment and the pedagogy required to prepare students to participate in this moment. Emphasis on rhetoric's effects and how it impacts the world in real ways... not just presidential rhetorics and not just looking for transformational effects. Transfer also important here - how knowledge in one context can be moved to another context.