Tag: rhetoric
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Who Gets to Determine the Available Arguments on an Issue?
The ancient question of what topics are appropriate for students to speak about, debate about, or write about is evergreen. I think about this at the end and start of every teaching term. I see several approaches to this question that are well-warranted. It doesn’t mean that I agree with any of them though! The…
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What is Missed in Calls to Return to In-Person Teaching
We are told continuously through the pandemic that students are demanding an “in person” experience for their education. The university is not a remote workplace, and online education is not and never will replace the in person teaching experience. This demand is often couched in the terms of market economics. Education is easily considered a…
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What’s in a Debate Name?
Debate Coach makes me cringe for so many reasons. I’m not sure I can list them all here. The first concern with this term I share with William Hawley Davis, Professor of Speech at Case Western in 1916, who worried that teaching debate for competition made his role “adjunct to sport.” If there is a…
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We’re Hiring Someone who Does Debate, What do you Think?
The title of this post is a note I often get. I thought I’d make my common response public. Don’t hire a debate coach to run your debate program. Don’t hire someone who has a record of tournament success. Instead, hire someone who is a radical teacher, someone who is a critical pedagogue. You want…
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Rhetoric, Kairos, Metallica, and PBS
It’s 202o, so of course PBS is airing the San Francisco Symphony and Metallica’s second live concert together. Such a strange combination might just be evidence of getting older, nothing else. Probably not going to get over that this is on PBS. But PBS is where I discovered Doctor Who, so perhaps this is on…
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Favorite American History Documents and The Pedagogy of Argument and Debate
Two days ago, someone asked me what my favorite American historical text was. It wasn’t that weird of a question: This is the time of year where I start to plan out my next semester’s courses and figure out the themes I want to teach. Something that has been on my mind since the Amy…
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Is There Anything to say about Yesterday’s Speeches?
A return to the standard formulation of political speech at the highest levels of government seems to be the message I got from yesterday’s event. Was this a victory speech? It didn’t feel like it. It felt more like a return to the familiar and comfortable structure and cadence of professional political speech. From my…
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Wading into the Relationship between Professor and Teacher
For some reason I have been reflecting on my career and work a lot lately, probably because I’m starting to feel strange about how the days are not broken up by wandering from room to room at the university. Those walks are so essential for clearing the head as you are preparing to teach, or…
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How to Watch National Political Debates, such as the U.S. Presidential Debates
Here’s a video I made as a first attempt at teaching the rubric I’ve designed for evaluating and making Presidential (or national party leader) debates tolerable and perhaps useful. The goal of these debates, and the Commission on Presidential Debates, is to create a forum to inform voters on the issues. What they leave out…
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Three Movements in the Teaching of Uncertainty Rhetoric
I’ve been talking a lot about writing process with a friend, from the start of composition and generation of ideas to the way that a thesis gets mapped out, or at least how I do it. So through these conversations about something totally unrelated to this post, I’ve been thinking that most ideas for an…
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