Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

Rhetoric's teaching and multi-modal learning.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This paper broadly addresses the concept of multi-modal learning as it may be engaged in teaching rhetoric. It highlights an example drawn from the author's teaching experience--the creation of "vidblinks" with cell phones--as it explains how multi-modal learning is essential to a well-considered engagement of rhetoric's teaching as far as it encompasses artistic and inartistic proof. Further, the paper explains how rhetoric itself is multi-modal as an architectonic practice drawing on, and substantively contributing to, the sum of the liberal arts.

**********

Rhetoric's teaching ceaselessly engages an interest in persuasion as a situated practice addressing particular cases:

Rhetoric has always borne its interests to the site of particular cases--artfully employing its means of persuasion to influence the judgments and actions of intended auditors. Accordingly, rhetoric's effective engagement is always negotiated anew as its aims are constrained by circumstances constituting what are called "rhetorical situations." Rhetorical situations require phronesis or practical wisdom--the apt adaptation of communication to the complex of autonomous people, measured times, and cultural contexts. It is through the strategic adaptation and mediation of symbols that rhetoric coactively induces cooperation without coercion--that rhetoric achieves its persuasive aims ... (Adams, Huling, Simons, 279)

However, persuasion is a tricky term. Many people consider the paradigm case of persuasion to be captured in late night television's advertisements, or political speeches, or Christian evangelical discourses that overtly call upon their audiences to do something--to buy a product, to adopt a policy, to come to Christ. Even more people consider persuasion to be a necessary evil--a sort of symbolic orchestration of interests that subverts rational thought processes and plays to non-discursive sites of emotional entanglement that wrestle people down to cushiony mats made to comfort their reservations and pin them to otherwise untenable commitments. In short, many people believe that persuasion appeals to what is worst in people--the drives and incentives that are not measured by the constraining structures of logic's well-worn forms--as syllogisms With major premises, minor premises and conclusion--or in close analytic bursts of critical insight driven by a commitment to the truth, the facts, and the objective temperate and measured mean-centered life--where the only permissible emotional eruption is righteous indignation hurled at the hoi polloi as it irrationally orchestrates injustice or legislates stupidity-by-majority rule in the trance-dance of democracy.

Well--perhaps the 'paradigm case' I've just displayed is more of a caricature than a description. Nevertheless, it displays the play of meaning-making as a matter of instructive-constructing--as a matter of communicatively conjuring an intelligible symbolic display that matters in some way as far as it provides an orientation toward 'what is & isn't' and consequently predisposes plausible, possible, and even preferable lines of belief and action that are mapped, or suggested, by the shared meanings the display's communal uptake affords--by means of any medium.[1] As Kenneth Burke has taught us, "wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is 'meaning,' there is 'persuasion'" (1974, 172). Among other persuasive aims, rhetoric seeks to induce judgments of the past and the future--two times that are not present but are made to appear present by rhetoric's multi-mediated play. In discourses addressed toward the past and the future it is presence (see Perelman, 35-37 and Lombard and Ditton) or, in Quintilian's terms, "functional hallucination" (Quintilian, 126) that we strive to produce so that we may imagine what does not presently exist and make judgments about it. Among other things, presence inducing discourses are designed to settle questions of guilt and innocence and motivate lines of future action--to determine what to do next. They are addressed to auditors who are empowered to make decisions about the past and the future such as juries and political assemblies. For example, in attempts to persuade the United Nations to...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!