Activation, Audience, and Kairotic Ecologies: New Composition Curricula

Cindy and I chose to put John Gage and James Kinneavy in conversation to better understand and schematize kairos and its effect on textual production. In my personal interpretation lies at the tensions between their main points. Gage argues that modern perspectives of rhetoric are actually “pseudo-dialectic” (162). He points out that conceptualizing an audience as only a recipient of a text is incorrectly practiced. Though rhetors may be well intentioned, they will always be talking at or writing for an audience rather than working alongside. Gage recommends activating the audience to the role of participant of meaning making, thus reviving true dialog. Meanwhile, Kinneavy asserts bringing in a different classical rhetorical term. He argues that rhetors should pay attention to both kairos as timing and kairos as due measure (80). The latter term is the most often neglected aspect of kairos, which is generally disregarded, according to Kinneavy. Connecting these two authors comes at the crux of activation.

Activation helps to connect these to authors and each call for reviving classical rhetorical terms. Nathan Crick’s “Composition as Experience” similarly moderates the tensions between expressivism and constructivism as represented in Elbow and Bartholomae. Both theoretical camps, Crick argues in "Composition as Experience," present a dualism that constitute unhelpful theories of composition. This article takes up representative work from Elbow and Bartholomae to explain their theories of composition and then critique them. Crick moderates this argument not by taking sides or by camping out in the middle. Instead, he adds a third consideration, mediating the mind-body schism by activating “mind” in a way that opposes treading the mind as a passive receptacle or recipient. In a similar way I argue that Gage’s activation of audience out of the “pseudo-dialectic” allows audience members to participate in the rhetorical situation. (Bitzer in "Rhetorical Situation" claims that audience is one of the three pillars of rhetorical situations.) This participation with the rhetorical situation then places the rhetorical situation into the rhetorical ecology which advocates for meaning over time through a cycle of diverse situations mutually affecting exigencies and constraints on communication (Edbauer "Unframing Models").

If we understand these critiques of modern rhetoric and by extension Rhetoric and Composition curricula, which Gage and Kinneavy do fault, then we need curricular reform that is enlivened by classical rhetoric. The new curriculum should be based on an active, kairotic, and ecologically-informed rhetorical situation and its effect on communication practices. Kinneavy argues that Writing across the Curriculum and vertical writing pedagogies can remedy these critiques. Kevin Brooks and Andrew Mara’s webtext “The Classical Trivium: AHeuristic and Heuretic for New Media and Digital Communication Studies” presents a “Y” axis model that, though intended for new media, is an effective model that can address Gage and Kinneavy’s critiques of modern rhetoric and composition instruction.

By the Hellenistic period the trivium was an educational “schema” with a curriculum that balanced areas of knowing, doing, and theorizing. Brooks and Mara revive conscious attention to the “classical trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic—as a heuristic for interpreting contemporary theories, practices, and curriculums of new media” (n.p.). They outline and then expand each area of the trivium on individual pages of the webtext. As they do so, Brooks and Mara argue that we should revive the relationship of the “Y” axis rather than treating binaries within each unlinked part of the trivium. By treating the relationship as well as delving into each branch of the trivium, we knowers, doers, and theorizers can better see individual aspects of new media and the relationships those artifacts or actions have. As I understand them, these are definitions of the trivium:

• Grammar is the practice of collecting text and connecting the content in those texts with other texts and ideas. Grammarians are closest to literary scholars and function on the level of “encyclopedic content” and are the most at risk population in the trivium (n.p.).
• Rhetoric refers to “political engagement” and “formal techniques” of producing texts (n.p.).
• Dialecticians, the authors note, would likely be misnamed as scholars, philosophers, and, possibly, rhetoricians rather than dialecticians.

While Brooks and Mara’s text aims to address the trivium in digital communication studies, the trivium as a research and curricular process has applicability to composition studies in its broadest form. As I was reading this week’s texts, I was making more connections as I neared the end of the list. However, the concept of the trivium started to make the most connections for me, even though kairos was named in more of the readings. It was the idea of trivium that led to our group’s decision to move towards a Venn diagram model to foster dialog about how kairos functions in relationship with rhetorical dialectic.

As a curriculum, the trivium can tease apart WAC pedagogies. Grammars can help students to understand writing as an area of study and content—as Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle argue in “Writing Misconceptions” and in their Writing about Writing textbook. Students in WAC curricula are asked not only to “look around” at other disciplines’ methods of communication but also to look vertically (i.e. transitioning from WAC to Writing in the Disciplines pedagogies, which are closely linked) to differences between their own writing process as they move from writing in General Education classes to discipline-specific writing. “Looking around” in WAC and “looking up and down” in vertical writing curricula constitutes an understanding of rhetorical ecologies, or the second branch of the trivium. Dialectic, not to intersect with rhetoric at the expense of grammar, is a balance that must be reclaimed to avoid the dualism that I have noted above. Dialectic is situated in the curriculum alongside problem-solving dilemmas, as a true dialog runs the gamut between what we know, what is yet unknown, and how dialog shapes that conversation. Logics (see Toulmin, "The Layout of Argument") can help us uncover and theorize constructions of knowledge, notably through implicit assumptions in warrants and beliefs.

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-BH