Warning: Messy Thinking Ahead
When we met for SI orientation, I was a little lost on what I wanted to inquire into before we met for our summer sessions. I was hung up on phrases like multimodal writing and international and/or multilingual students without really putting thought into what I wanted to know, learn, and explore about either. Since then, I’ve been immersed in a lot of social media through my blogging and my personal profiles (Twitter/Facebook), and my interest in the ways in which we all “go public” with our perspectives, experiences, and causes has continued to grow. If you look at my last post, I was still thinking about something that happened in my classes this past semester during a focus on civic literacies/engagement, so I decided to pick up that thread and go with it.
I read a few articles, and I will focus on two of them here, mostly chronicling my thoughts and questions. I know I’m late to publishing, but I hope to hear from lots of you too! :)
I decided to revisit a scholar that was pretty influential for me in graduate school, Nancy Welch. When I first read her works, I was compelled by her term “rhetoric from below”. Welch defined the term as “‘rhetoric...not from official policy makers but from and to those who feel the daily effects of official policy”. At first I was troubled with the “below” aspect, as if that negated the importance of their communication, but then I realized that she was using terminology that allowed for distinction of power, shaping how their writing/speaking took place, was heard, was circulated, affected others, laws, perceptions, and so on. Her focus on every day people and how they come together or work individually on various issues resonated with me (and when I say focus, I mean her argument for the necessity to study and teach the practices and texts of “rhetoric from below”), so I looked at her text “Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Post-Publicity Era” for SI. Side note, I’ve noticed a few texts call this “extracurricular” rhetoric/writing. I guess I can add that to my keywords.
I. Why “rhetoric from below”?
“By focusing on the "extracurricular" rhetoric that takes shape around kitchen tables and in rented rooms (Gere) and also in city streets and public parks, on picket lines and graffitied walls, I want to add to the growing body of work that has the potential to reorient us from regarding rhetoric as a specialized techne-the property of a small economic and political elite-to understanding and teaching rhetoric as a mass, popular art-the practice of ordinary people who make up our country's multiethnic, working-class majority, in their press for relief, reform, and radical change...However, by extending the common understanding of public rhetoric to include such examples of "rhetoric from below" I'm not simply creating a more inclusive sense of what constitutes rhetorical action. We don't just add such argumentative forms to the usual examples of "rhetoric from above" as a presidential address or newspaper editorials. What we do instead is create palpable tension between individual and mass, legislative and extra legislative, and ruling-class and working-class argumentative forums and forms.” - Welch (emphasis mine)
TL;DR: Welch wants to reorient our ideas of rhetoric from the powerful few to the many. She’s not looking to only create an inclusive collection of public texts; instead she wants us to see how rhetoric from different positions lie in tension with one another.
One of the points that branched from her distinction above that I found interesting was the idea that all people who would like to involve themselves in public conversations must construct a “responsive public”. However, not all speakers face the same challenges and stakes as one another. I thought about this with my students and our conversations last year. They definitely had a sense of being listened to by some (peers, mostly) and not listened to by others (ex. parents), and they had a hard time even imagining other publics, let alone recognizing the work in building that audience. Another concern of Welch’s was an assumption on her students’ part that one must go public alone -- that it is a single speaker/actor making social change. Just thinking about the texts I often provide in class, I can understand how this assumption comes to be. One of Welch’s students asked, “but how do things evolve and how do we forge any sort of revolution if people don't come together?" Exactly- there needs to be a more situated understanding of these texts. A look at how various texts work together and against one another, and how do we do that in a classroom?
Welch’s piece is very complex, and I’m only hitting the surface of it. I’m sure some of the above is confusing, but it led me to the following ideas and questions:
1. I wonder how students will position examples of “rhetoric from above” and “rhetoric from below”. Students often come into the class with notions of valuable and not-valuable types of writing; these values are often ingrained in them from schooling, home life, and social practices. How will these values of genres transfer to their interpretation of these texts? How will privilege and their positions in life affect the readings of these texts? How can I incorporate reflection on the lenses we use to view texts?
2. Can I “handle” it? A classroom talking about topics that might be better held by someone who has actually taken a sociology class. Is there a need to “handle” it? What does tension look like in the classroom? At what point is tension counter-productive? How can we learn from these tensions rather than walking out of a class shaking our heads?
3. To what extent can we “go public” in a writing class in school? Some texts discussed room for “safe zones” to practice this writing. Welch herself expressed concerns over knowing her students rights when one of them gets pulled over for posting a flyer illegally. I’m thinking about the need to discuss “that exercising our public voices could be heady, daunting, and consequential.” I’m thinking about how the internet allows us to see the connected efforts in social movements that otherwise might not be available in a classroom.
Phew - Okay. I’m getting long-winded. The second piece was a lighter read. I read “The Politics of Persuasion versus the Construction of Alternative Communities: Zines in the Writing Classroom” by Aneil Rallin and Ian Barnard. I found this piece a little odd because even though the students are studying zines the entire semester, 2 out of their 3 big assignments were thesis-driven research papers, with the 3rd assignment being a zine. The authors seemed to really rage against the expectations of a first year writing class while also continuing to uphold those expectations -- perhaps there’s a lesson here in power, publication, and the ability (or lack thereof) to act on theory/values in the classroom.
I was first introduced to zines through social media. I am part of feminist / body-politics communities with blogging and Facebook, and a few of the UK and Australian bloggers I know were creating zines that would be sold at local events. While I know that not every blogger in the UK lives close to one another, many are able to see more of each other in person and they have more large-scale events annually than the US. I don’t hear about zines at all in the US community, and perhaps it’s because zines are often part of more localized communities.
“Zines are noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves… Zines are an individualist medium, but as a medium their primary function is communication. As such, zines are as much about the communities that arise out of their circulation as they are artifacts of personal expression.”
--Stephen Duncombe
“...producing a zine becomes the means of forging community, usually a dissident community or network of like-minded people who feel alienated by mainstream culture. Zines thus enable the development of underground subcultures and nonconformist communities/networks.”
I find it interesting that zines both emerge from communities of thought and establish communities through writing and consumption. For me, zines open up a discussion of what writing does, both in the written act and in its circulation and consumption. "Undoubtedly material community engagements matter, but the production and consumption of zines too may constitute community engagement, may constitute political and public engagement.” So here.. we can think about what the materials do. Producing a zine can potentially be a political act, and yet there is often social activities around these material things, since zines are often sold in person or will have personal engagement with the creator(s). A lot of students assume that political writing is only pointed toward an opposing audience, but zines are often geared toward local, interested, and perhaps empathetic/sympathetic/celebratory audiences.
Last note about zines: “Zines often use so-called unprofessional discursive styles that more accurately reflect language uses among people. Zines frequently acknowledge that professionalism reflects certain race and class biases. In addition, zine writers often make typos and grammatical “errors” a distinguishing characteristic of their work. Zines give our students the opportunity to make “inappropriate” and/or risky linguistic choices without being penalized. The material form is also significant: zines are sometimes handwritten, often illegible in parts, and usually photocopied and stapled.” I think this aspect of zines could open up a great discussion about language and power, as well as stylistic choices and how that aligns to belief systems and communities and rejects/reacts to those same things.
I also read “Networking, Storytelling and Knowledge Production in First-Year
Writing” by Octavia Davis and Bill Marsh. It was my favorite piece to read, but it felt like I needed to talk about the two above before I got to this last piece. I am going to save it for another post, because this one even feels too long for me to re-read :-p. If you’re still with me, thanks for listening to my messy thinking.
