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Kurlinkus The Ohio State University Teaching Philosophy Rhetorical Design My cardinal ambition in any course I teach (whether digital composition, introductory writing, professional writing, or rhetorical theory) is helping students become rhetorical-designers, composers who know that texts will not just be passively received by a static audience but actively used in specific literacy ecologies. Rhetorical-designers see that texts always benefit from tackling the diverse assets and challenges of user networks. Given that communicative designs increasingly span geopolitical, socioeconomic, and linguistic borders, the skill of yoking community-defining rhetorical logics is key. Thus, I encourage students to analyze user-audiences pre-existing writing culture and invite audiences to argue with, collaborate in, or refuse textual designs. In teaching rhetorical design, I start from three concepts: democratic design, the cybernetics of writing, and tactical resistance. I. Democratic Design: Working with Multiple Discourse Communities One of the primary theoretical engines driving my writing courses is democratic design, the concept that the audience of any text already critically negotiates communication and has in-depth user know-how that writers must learn to harness (see Aristotles audience-centered enthymeme). As an instructor, this concept means that I continually try to capitalize on students expertise, asking them to teach one another specific composing strategies theyre skilled at. For instance, in a new media composition course I might ask students familiar with Photoshop to plan an activity, honing their skills at technical presentation while aiding the rest of the class. But its vital to me that all students be positioned as experts in literacy. So, if students feel they are not familiar with any cutting-edge techno-composing skill, they might teach an array of techno-social skills: the best places to find free Wi-Fi around campus, how knitting is like coding, etc. Broadening definitions of relevant multimodal composing experiences is central to this task. I want all students to link to the communicative cultures that inform their writing identities because, as multiliteracy scholars Cope and Kalantzis (2012, n.p.) summarize, education succeeds or fails to the extent that it engages the varied subjectivities of learners. Engagement produces opportunity, equity, and participation. Not engaging produces failure, disadvantage and inequality. Similarly, I ask students to seek out, mediate, and harness the diverse composing resources of pre-existing useraudiences that they might not encounter every day. For instance, I currently ask students (whether college writers or English language learners at the Columbus Literacy Council) to explore the composing resources of the different neighborhoods of Columbus, Ohio, where our class is located. Students catalog the resources they find in different communitieslibraries, rec centers, low-cost photocopiers, etc.and then compose using only those assets. Such an activity prompts students to think about how writing is always bound in the politics of access to time, technology, money, literacy, and humans. Im careful, however, to position writing with specific communities not as hampering but rather, like writing in a sonnet or haiku poetry form, as a chance to engage a new set of resources that changes the way students think about writing. In this way composing becomes not only about a student posing her unique authorial identity but also about understanding that texts always are dialogic constructions of a composing self (identity) against an audience distinct from oneself (alterity). Students, thus, become expert novices who can adapt and compose successfully in any situation, not just the safe space of our composition classroom. II. The Cybernetics of Writing: Fostering Dissent and Mediating Conflicts The effective rhetorical-designer never composes in isolation but constantly responds to the changing needs of her user-audience, writing in a cybernetic feedback loop of designuser feedbackredesign. Another of my goals as a teacher of writing, then, is encouraging students to examine where and how to seek and respond to feedback. Such a view necessarily involves the oft-neglected rhetorical canon of delivery, teaching students that design doesnt end after the last word is typed on the page. For instance, I encourage writers to deploy usability testing to generate a context of informed dissent around their compositions. The ethical rhetorical-designer, I believe, shouldnt assume that users will automatically come to her with concerns and contributions. Indeed, lack of feedback is rarely a sign of good design. Rather, a tactful rhetorical-designer must know the ideologies of an audience and suggest how her proposed design could alter that audiences current way of life and communication values. I call this process informed dissent because its incitement of critical debate might be likened to informed consent in human research studies. Medical researchers, for instance, dont just offer the possible benefits of their procedures but are obliged
to inform participants of the possible risks of their treatment design. Such a process also illustrates reciprocal education, wherein the composer educates his audience about design options and the audience educates the composer about what would work for or fail their community. Again, this type of feedback is at the heart of emancipatory compositions that seek to work with rather than for an audience (Freire, 1968). Part of the process of informed dissent, then, involves welcoming and mediating conflictsharnessing the resources of cultural contact zones. Because different user-audiences want different results from texts, the rhetorical-designer needs to learn to reconcile multiple audience interests rather than assuming uniformity. For instance, in a web design project in my Business Writing course, students design sites for client teams who have a diverse set of business goals. One client-member may demand a beautiful image-based website whereas another desires a text-heavy site with long narratives about the company. The student-design team, like all composers creating products for a varied audience, must learn to reconcile these needs, coming back multiple times to the client for feedback. In such design diplomacy, I also encourage students to foster productive agonism (Mouffe, 2000), aiding conflicting audiences in becoming direct collaborators who see one another not as enemies to be defeated but as sparring partners whose jabs and hooks will make designs stronger. Indeed, in my own grading and commenting I try to act as this type of agonistic partner, always offering alternative views, which I welcome students to critically incorporate, alter, or refuse. III. Tactical Resistance: Refusing and Changing Pre-Existing Standards Though one of my primary goals as a writing educator is to teach audience analysis and adaptation, the flipside of rhetorical adaptation is critical instruction on ways students might resist audiences, ideologies, and other restrictive systems in order to more fully participate in democracy. Students need to be aware that, like all designers, their unique experiences might lead to rejecting some audience opinions. Indeed, to always ask students to accede to the teachers, institutions, workplaces, or audiences communicative logic misses the point. Better texts and designs dont always stem from deferring to audience values. In practice, my instruction of rhetorical resistance focuses on a brand of de Certeauean tactic in which I try to teach defiance from within pre-existing institutions, revealing the values of an audience and then using resources at hand to change/subvert that audience. For instance, in freshmen composition classes I offer my students the opportunity to remix one of their previous essays into a feasible protest in which they can only use resources to which they have access (they cant say I will get a million people to show up at a protest, but they can say I will get all my Facebook friends to come). In response to this assignment students have created objects from remixed cereal boxes critiquing sugary foods by adding images of rotting teeth to rap videos commenting on the risks of winning the lottery. But, what makes this assignment really shine, I think, is that students have to create delivery plans for their designsthinking about how their audience will encounter their text and in what way that context of delivery will affect their argument. For instance, the student who created the cereal project planned on buying the cereal, changing the box, and placing it back in the store for the unsuspecting consumer to find (a method known as shopdropping). Essentially, then, she took the power and resources of the cereal manufacturer and turned them against that institution. Because the goal of the rhetorical refusal (Schilb, 2007) is to capture an audiences attention through refusing its standards (warping the genre standards of the cereal box, for instance), this assignment also highlights the need to teach multimodal, interactive, and popular forms of composing beyond the alphabetic essay. In the end, the goal of teaching rhetorical design as a commitment to equity and the unearthing of diversity in the rhetoric, composition, and literacy classroom is critical engagement with diverse user-audiences; not unreceptive tolerance; not passive moral relativism which automatically defers to an its their culture, let them do what they want justification; and not a multiculturalist flanneury, which thoughtlessly appropriates the cultural signifiers of the other rather than engaging with theorizing subjects. I strongly believe that having students actively and critically engage the diverse critical resources of a wide array of audiences, who have a wide array of critical composing assets, will lead to better (more functional, profitable, and equitable) compositions and designs in the future.