Refiguring Rhetorical Education

Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911 examines the work of five female teachers who challenged gendered and cultural expectations to create teaching practices that met the civic and cultural needs of their students. The volume analyzes Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book, a post–Civil War educational textbook for newly freed slaves; Zitkala Ša’s autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 that questioned the work of off-reservation boarding schools for Native American students; and Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, and Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s contributions to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica in 1910 and 1911—contributions that offered language and cultural instruction their readers could not receive in Texas public schools. Author Jessica Enoch explores the possibilities and limitations of rhetorical education by focusing on the challenges that Child, Zitkala Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas made to dominant educational practices. Each of these teachers transformed their seemingly apolitical occupation into a site of resistance, revising debilitating educational methods to advance culture-based and politicized teachings that empowered their students to rise above their subjugated positions. Refiguring Rhetorical Education considers how race, culture, power, and language are both implicit and explicit in discussions of rhetorical education for marginalized students and includes six major tenets to guide present-day pedagogies for civic engagement.

Examining the rhetorical and pedagogical work of three turn-of-the-century newspaperwomen At the end of the nineteenth century, newspapers powerfully shaped the U.S. reading public, fostering widespread literacy development and facilitating rhetorical education. With new opportunities to engage audiences, female journalists repurposed the masculine tradition of journalistic writing by bringing together intimate forms of rhetoric and pedagogy to create innovative new dialogues. Rhetorical Education in Turn-of-the-Century U.S. Women’s Journalism illuminates the pedagogical contributions of three newspaperwomen to show how the field became a dynamic site of public participation, relationship building, education, and activism in the 1880s and 1890s. Grace Wetzel introduces us to the work of Omaha correspondent Susette La Flesche Tibbles (Inshta Theamba), African American newspaper columnist Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and white middle-class reporter Winifred Black (“Annie Laurie”). Journalists by trade, these three writers made the mass-circulating newspaper their site of teaching and social action, inviting their audiences and communities—especially systematically marginalized voices—to speak, write, and teach alongside them. Situating these journalists within their own specific writing contexts and personas, Wetzel reveals how Mossell promoted literacy learning and community investment among African American women through a reader-centered pedagogy; La Flesche modeled relational news research and reporting as a survivance practice while reporting for the Omaha Morning World-Herald at the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre; and Black inspired public writing and activism among children from different socioeconomic classes through her “Little Jim” story. The teachings of these figures serve as enduring examples of how we can engage in meaningful public literacy and ethical journalism.

Historians of rhetoric have long worked to recover women's education in reading and writing, but have only recently begun to explore women's speaking practices, from the parlor to the platform to the varied types of institutions where women learned elocutionary and oratorical skills in preparation for professional and public life. This book fills an important gap in the history of rhetoric and suggests new paths for the way histories may be told in the future, tracing the shifting arc of women's oratorical training as it develops from forms of eighteenth-century rhetoric into institutional and extrainstitutional settings at the end of the nineteenth century and diverges into several distinct streams of community-embodied theory and practice in the twentieth. Treating key rhetors, genres, settings, and movements from the early republic to the present, these essays collectively challenge and complicate many previous claims made about the stability and development of gendered public and private spheres, the decline of oratorical culture and the limits of women's oratorical forms such as elocution and parlor rhetorics, and women's responses to rhetorical constraints on their public speaking. Enriching our understanding of women's oratorical education and practice, this cutting-edge work makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetoric and communication.

This book studies the role of rhetoric in the expansive movement for global higher education in U.S. colleges and universities. Drawing on an analysis of how discourses of security, economy, and ethics shape the rhetoric of global higher education, as well as that of its populist and nationalist critics, the author argues for an understanding of global higher education as a site of rhetorical conflict over visions of students as citizens. In doing so, the work advances the project of transnational rhetorical education, a theoretical and pedagogical project that can foster forms of rhetorical inquiry, performance, and ethics that equip students to pursue transnational forms of civic engagement, belonging, and resistance. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of rhetoric and composition studies, communication, and education, as well as to faculty and administrators working in global higher education or internationalization programs.

In nineteen essays illustrating its many aspects, this book offers an argument for what it takes to construct a complete rhetorical education. The editors take an approach that is pragmatic and pluralistic, based as it is on the assumptions that a rhetorical education is not limited to teaching freshman composition (or any specific writing course) and that the contexts in which such an education occurs are not limited to classrooms. This thought-provoking volume stresses that while a rhetorical education results in the growth of writing skills, its larger goal is to foster critical thinking.

"This book offers a complex theoretical intervention into rhetorical education and its unrealized potential in regard to engagement with social justice"--

A timely collection of essays by prominent scholars in the field—on the past, present, and future of rhetoric instruction. From Isocrates and Aristotle to the present, rhetorical education has consistently been regarded as the linchpin of a participatory democracy, a tool to foster civic action and social responsibility. Yet, questions of who should receive rhetorical education, in what form, and for what purpose, continue to vex teachers and scholars. The essays in this volume converge to explore the purposes, problems, and possibilities of rhetorical education in America on both the undergraduate and graduate levels and inside and outside the academy. William Denman examines the ancient model of the "citizen-orator" and its value to democratic life. Thomas Miller argues that English departments have embraced a literary-research paradigm and sacrificed the teaching of rhetorical skills for public participation. Susan Kates explores how rhetoric is taught at nontraditional institutions, such as Berea College in Kentucky, where Appalachian dialect is espoused. Nan Johnson looks outside the academy at the parlor movement among women in antebellum America. Michael Halloran examines the rhetorical education provided by historical landmarks, where visitors are encouraged to share a common public discourse. Laura Gurak presents the challenges posed to traditional notions of literacy by the computer, the promises and dangers of internet technology, and the necessity of a critical cyber-literacy for future rhetorical curricula. Collectively, the essays coalesce around timely political and cross-disciplinary issues. Rhetorical Education in America serves to orient scholars and teachers in rhetoric, regardless of their disciplinary home, and help to set an agenda for future classroom practice and curriculum design.

From two leading scholars in the field comes this landmark assessment of the shifting terrain of feminist rhetorical practices in recent decades. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch contend the field of rhetorical studies is being transformed through the work of feminist rhetoricians who have brought about notable changes in who the subjects of rhetorical study can be, how their practices can be critiqued, and how the effectiveness and value of the inquiry frameworks can be articulated. To contextualize a new and changed landscape for narratives in the history of rhetoric, Royster and Kirsch present four critical terms of engagement—critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization—as the foundation for a new analytical model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical inquiry and the study and teaching of rhetoric in general. This model draws directly on the wealth of knowledge and understanding gained from feminist rhetorical practices, especially sensitivity toward meaningfully and respectfully rendering the work, lives, cultures, and traditions of historical and contemporary women in rhetorical scholarship. Proposing ambitious new standards for viewing and valuing excellence in feminist rhetorical practice, Royster and Kirsch advocate an ethos of respect and humility in the analysis of communities and specific rhetorical performances neglected in rhetorical history, recasting rhetorical studies as a global phenomenon rather than a western one. They also reflect on their own personal and professional development as researchers as they highlight innovative feminist research over the past thirty years to articulate how feminist work is changing the field and pointing to the active participation of women in various discourse arenas and to the practices and genres they use. Valuable to new and established scholars of rhetoric, Feminist Rhetorical Practice: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies is essential for understanding the theoretical, methodological, and ethical impacts of feminist rhetorical studies on the wider field. Winner, 2014 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award