英语论文网

ong with the in-class observations, the students were offered the opportunity to contribute their thoughts/feelings about Dr. Wolf's approach and their own engagement with it by responding to a survey utilizing open-ended questions. The original project also included an oral history conducted with Dr. Wolf and a parallel autoethnographic account. The analysis section following, then, is based in all four methodological sources: my observations, the students' survey responses, Dr. Wolf's oral history account, and autoethnographic material. Analysis This section illustrates three conceptual categories of teaching strategies employed by Dr. Wolf: explicit cultural critique, personal self-disclosure, and spontaneous, provocative participation assignments. Each strategy, I suggest, served to facilitate critical consciousness processes on the part of this large population of students without student-centered dialogue. I offer an exemplar in each of the three categories and analyse them utilizing McKerrow's praxis principles of critical rhetoric. I move to tease out the ways that Dr. Wolf's strategies acted as a critical rhetoric and, at the same time, connect those with her students' processes of critical consciousness development. Cultural Critique Today's class (9/22/99) is the second part in a unit on censorship. In addition to a lively lecture about censorship precedents and implications, we watch part of a cable program featuring a woman applying lotion to her enormous (silicone) breasts, a graphic and emotional clip from a 1970's Vietnam documentary, and a short videotaped modern primitive performance in which a man recites poetry while impaling his scrotum with needles and filling it with saline. In the last few minutes of class, we watch as a man performs oral sex on his well-endowed male partner while masturbating himself. For a class of approximately 100 students, the room seems unusually silent during the last clip. At the end of the class period, the students begin leaving the room; some are very quiet, others giggle as they make their way to the door, while still others are talking to friends in hushed, somewhat frenetic tones. It's just another day in BECA 422. Dr. Wolf's utilization of controversial media in combination with the lectures she performs afterward act as a model or demonstration of cultural critique for her students. As McKerrow (1989) suggests, a critical rhetoric unapologetically takes a stand against something and Dr. Wolf's provocative media choices and analysis of them constitute her perspective via her cultural criticism. The critical rhetorical performances stimulate her students' critical engagement and reflection processes thereby facilitating development of their sense of critical consciousness. In particular, Dr. Wolf's media choices spark the students' critical thinking processes by immediately engaging them on an affective level, seemingly establishing a sense of investment and commitment to the topic (censorship on this day). This direct engagement, then, enables Dr. Wolf to prompt her students to think more deeply and critically about those topics and facilitates an opportunity for them to make connections between seemingly unrelated media images/messages and the power/knowledge constructs embedded. As McKerrow points out, description is always already evaluative and processes of understanding/knowing cannot be separated from processes of evaluation. Although McKerrow explicates this notion in the co