Critical Rhetoric and Pedagogy: (Re)Considering Student-Centered Dialogue [8]
论文作者:Cathy B. Glenn 论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-07编辑:刘宝玲点击率:30925
论文字数:6000论文编号:org200904070950182936语种:中文 Chinese地区:中国价格:$ 33
关键词:Critical Rhetoric and PedagogyStudent-Centered Dialoguemaster narrativesdemocratic cultureprinciple aim
at the performance of critical readings can act as a way to establish a critical spirit and begin to open up possibilities for envisioning transformation of social structures. Dr. Wolf's explication and critique of the controversial mediated messages/images serve to open up previously unexamined areas of analysis for her students and foster the kind of critical thinking and reflection necessary for developing a critical consciousness. Her strategies, in this case, offer a way to engage with students at this critical level without having to make student-centered dialogue the focus of her pedagogy.
Personal Experience and Self-Disclosure
Today's lecture (11/10/99) begins a unit on body image and media representations and Dr. Wolf takes a some time to relate her own experiences with body image development. She shares an abbreviated, but emotional narrative of several early life experiences; the first involved an incident of her own painful experience with facial disfigurement as the result of being hit in the face with a baseball bat. The story includes aspects of both her physical and psychological devastation and the sometimes-cruel reactions of her grade-school peers. She goes on to talk about her battles with an eating disorder and the negative self-perception of her own body image as it relates to media representations of the “model” body type and her childhood experiences. The students seem mesmerized; there is not a single student in the room who does not seem completely engaged with Dr. Wolf as she tells these stories.
McKerrow (1989) points out that a critical rhetoric is decidedly, yet self-reflexively, subjective; critique moves to take a stand either for or against something, oftentimes in the context of the critic's lived experiences. In the case of Dr. Wolf's self-disclosure around the concepts of body image and media representation, the performance of critiquing the overwhelming, and sometimes devastating, impacts of represented (and ignored) body types in media serves to model cultural critique as a deeply personal and powerfully political process.
A key aspect of this critique, in Dr. Wolf's classroom, includes an explicit confirmation, through her own admitted and sometimes-demonstrated emotionality, that feelings (as opposed to informal logic or reasoning) are a natural and necessary part of the critical process. McKerrow suggests that this aspect of critical rhetoric reflects a move away from a strictly rational epistemic function for rhetoric “grounded in universal standards of judgment” (p. 104) by including a doxastic sense that expands those standards to include aspects of personal feelings and beliefs. The expansion afforded episteme by an association with a reconceptualized doxa allows the two to inform each other in the process of critical rhetoric and, in so doing, provide “the means by which we determine what we believe, what we know, and what we believe to be true” (p104). Put differently, the focus shifts away from knowledge and knowing based on universal foundations independent of subjectivity and toward recognition of the contingency of both knowledge and its construction/reception by individuals.
Moreover, Dr. Wolf's critical rhetoric, by explicitly demonstrating the power of mediated symbolic representations of body images in her own lived experiences, underscores how those signs come to possess that power. In McKerrow's words, “Doxastic knowledge functions as the grounding of a critical rhetoric” (p
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