Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Conversation With a Student

I realize I haven't posted to the blog in over a week. I'm preoccupied at the moment with some writing deadlines and with summer teaching, and in any case Amurrica's bloody-minded boy-king and his killer clown college has me in something of an enraged despair over this latest absolutely disgusting proxy war with Iran, taking place among the catastrophically terrorized civilians of Lebanon (and, as it happens, many civilians in Israel as well).

Anyway, I thought it would be more, er, soothing to post a transcript of an exchange I just had with a former Rhetoric student of mine to help him fulfill a course requirement elsewhere. His interview gave me a chance to pause and think a bit about teaching and it was actually quite clarifying and enjoyable for me.


Eugene: What is your job title?

d: I am a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Visiting Faculty in the Humanities at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Eugene: How do you describe what you do to others? I’ve had a hard time explaining what it is I do to others, and I was wondering what you tell people.

d: The Rhetoric Department at Berkeley is a diverse and interdisciplinary place, and so people tend to do very different sorts of things when they “do rhetoric” there. What most of our work has in common, though, is its indebtedness to critical theory as a way of understanding the work that discourses do in the world. My training has been in twentieth century philosophy, literary criticism, and critical theory. My own work has tended to focus on digital and biomedical networks and what get called "emerging technologies," and their impacts on democratic politics.

Eugene: How is communication important in your profession?

d: Well, I’m a teacher and a writer. Communication is literally all that I do.

Eugene: In your line of work, is there a specific type of communication that is more important than another (i.e email, oral, etc.).

d: Every teaching situation is different, as every student is different. For me the key thing is to use every possible tool, every avenue of communication available to me, to determine how best to connect a student to the material I am trying to illuminate, how best to excite the student to connect that material to their own personal concerns, experiences, and hopes.

In a smaller class, teaching can be like trying to facilitate a conversation, while in a lecture hall teaching is much more like a performance. Office hours can be like therapy sessions. Every assignment, every in-class exercise, every test is an effort to solicit responsiveness in the student, to elicit the student’s participation as a peer in a conversation.

So much of teaching isn’t a matter of the transmission of knowledge from “the teacher” who is full of knowledge to “the student” who is empty of it, but an ongoing improvisation through which the teacher struggles to enlist the student in conversation with the materials and with the community of the classroom struggling along with her in that conversation.

It is in that conversation itself that the student takes up on her own terms, in the time and texture of her everyday life, the habits, the perceptions, the general coloration of novelty and knowledge. That, I think, is really what teaching amounts to for me.

Eugene: Of all the rhetoric professors I have encountered so far, all of them are extremely eloquent and have an exceptional command of vocabulary. Does this stem from reading vast tracts of books, practice, or is it just a natural ability? In other words, have you always been able to speak so eloquently or was it something you picked up and worked on? If so, what did you do to sharpen your speaking, writing, and communication skills?

d: I think most people who are attracted to rhetoric have already fallen in love with language, with discourse, with the costly knowledges that empower and disempower the ones who own up to them. If rhetoricians have a way with words, it is usually because words have already had their way with them.

As for your more practical question, I think the key is not only to read widely and carefully, but to be sure that you read very different things. Read arguments that bedevil you, that threaten your sense of yourself, that enrage you. Read the texts that you want to dismiss as immoral, as frivolous, as nonsense, and find a way to inhabit them instead. You may still dismiss them then, but you will come out of the other side of such encounters with greater intelligence and individual insight.

As far as “natural ability” goes, I don’t believe there is such a thing. I think the very idea is damaging and distracting, to tell you the truth. People’s abilities reflect their interests and their histories, that is all.

Eugene: Do you have any advice or tips for me as a rhetoric major for developing my communication skills?

d: Find people who are excited about ideas, who are driven to testify to their experiences and hopes in order to change the world, who want to put arguments to use in the world. It is infinitely better to spend time in the company of people who find ideas compelling than it is to spend time in the company of people who agree with your ideas. Find people who challenge you, who respect differences of opinion, who listen as much as they talk, and who can offer up reasons in support of their convictions.

Conformity always signifies thoughtlessness, so whenever you find yourself in the death grip of conformists and comformity be sure to seek out difference, provocation, the shock of the new elsewhere or you will risk the drift into dullness. That will be just as true on the last day of your life as it is today.

Eugene: Rhetoric clearly has a lot to do with communication in one form or another, so how can individuals turn those skills into a career or use them in business? In other words, how can a rhetor use their skills and apply them in the business world? What jobs are out there that really suit rhetoric majors and let them apply their skills?

d: Good communication skills, good critical thinking skills, good analytic skills are indispensable in any number of careers, in business, in media, in politics, in social service, and so on. Whether you find yourself in an administrative position, in a public relations career, in a mediating role, you’ll find that you call upon the skills you acquired in your rhetoric courses time and time again –- even if it is unlikely that “rhetoric” is the word most people would use to describe that skillset you have mastered. Students in Rhetoric often go on to pursue jobs in law, in advertising, in public relations, in journalism, and so on. Frankly, I think rhetoric should be a crucial part of every single democratic citizen’s proper education in a world of deep differences and unending dynamism.

Eugene: As a follow up, is it rhetor or rhetorician? I recall in 10, [another instructor in the Department] said that it was rhetor and not rhetorician, but my memory is fuzzy and since then I’ve never heard anyone use the term.

d: Rhetor is a term of art, an acadmic designation for one who is skilled in the arts of rhetoric, especially as they were conceived in antiquity. I doubt that either “rhetor” or “rhetorician” will ever become a commonplace term -– even though everybody does rhetoric in some form or other all the time, and everyone would benefit from a clearer understanding of rhetoric.

Eugene: How important is it to be able to speak in front of others? (odd question, sorry, but I have to ask this for my assignment).

d: Well, for me, as a teacher, it is key, of course. I often teach a workshop in public speaking in the Rhetoric Department, and it seems to me that it is almost universally an incredibly positive experience for my students. Very elementary skills, practice with posture, breathing, pacing, memorization and such, provide an occasion for extraordinary transformation in many students. Shy, even painfully awkward students, find sources of inner strength, discover individual voices, overcome long-felt limitations. I’m a big believer in public speaking courses, actually!

Eugene: How have you dealt with a difficult communication situation in the workplace? What was the result? What would you have done differently?

d: Constantly. As I said, every classroom situation is different. A text that provokes great enthusiasm in one classroom may generate boredom or ridicule in another. An in-class exercise that produces excellent results in one community will be a waste of time in another. There is sometimes no way to know in advance what will work at all.

I try to ensure that I am always teaching new material and trying new methods so that my teaching toolbox is as full as may be, so that I have more and more resources at my command to confront new situations, and so that I don’t become complacent or stale.

There have been countless times that I wish I would have done things differently in the aftermath of some particularly brutal teaching session! Almost every time the thing I should have done differently was to pay closer attention to my students, to listen more intelligently to their signals. That is an ongoing struggle for me, to listen more intelligently.

Eugene: Rhetoric often involves explaining complicated or abstract theses. What is an effective way to communicate these concepts to others who may not have rhetorical training?

d: Make the abstract as concrete as possible by translating it into narrative terms, or by providing a diversity of clear everyday illustrative examples.

Also, sometimes a teacher has to be able to seduce students into their own excitement about difficult ideas so that they will do the ideiosyncratic and time-consuming work of clarification on their own terms and in their own time.

Everybody has ample experience in rhetoric, you know, even if they lack the terminology and hence the clarity of a rhetoric student’s training in the subject. It should always be possible to activate any student’s intelligence and critical thinking skills, although sometimes this requires a more personal and protracted engagement with a student than the limitations of a particular situation of instruction will bear.

But it never fails to astonish me just how much real teaching can happen even when circumstances are conspicuously limited, so long as everybody involved is truly open to the risky, costly, empowering changes that teaching inevitably brings about for everyone involved, including the teacher.

Eugene: Thank you again, I really appreciate all your time and effort.

d: I was happy to do it.

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