WEEK 3 READING RESPONSE
I chose to read the article, “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change”. After reading the article the author really conveys his main theme of how the community lacks interest in public discourses. He lists solutions of how we can become better and overall increase participation in such communities. One of his solutions was to “bridge” the universities and communities through activism. “Activism is the action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about social change” (Dictionary G., 2017) The paper is trying to present alternative methods to create and influence social change.
Social change to me is the transformation of culture, social institutions, and social structure over time. The reason I chose this image is because it represents the discourse communities within everyone. The social change would combine everyone.
This image to me represents the role of each person can be when it comes to social change. People can play different types of role to seek social change. Going back to the article, this ties back to my engineering major because we as a community can create big differences and come together as a discourse community. Just like social change, engineers work together to create more innovations. The reading helped me understand the community problem report we are doing right now because it helped me make an understanding of activism and social change and how we can tie everyone closer together just like we are trying to do with our topic of gender diversity in engineering. Just like Ellen Cushman said “The roads into the communities aren’t paved with yellow bricks and sometimes may seem unapproachable, but access can generally be gained with observation.” The challenges are there but I really wish I could ask the question of how do we get better relations with people to access communities. The article really opened my eyes to many things. Look forward to next week’s reading!