Kairos, Ideology, and The Classroom: Considering Form and Structure

In a Burkean sense, our schema is a deflection of various interpretations of the text in addition to it being a reflection of our own interpretation. What gets crossed out in our construction of kairos-as-tree? What outside texts contributed to our reading of the source material? In terms of what texts guided our reading of this exploratory, which in turn guided our schema, I will emphasize Maxine Hairston’s “Ideology in the Classroom” Michael Quigley’s “Rhetoric, Dialectic, and Ideology in Freshman English,” Stephen Toulmin’s “The Layout of Arguments” and Charles Kneupper’s “Argument: A Social Constructivist Perspective.” The articles that we read for our coursework last week played a tremendous role in our construction of this week’s texts, demonstrating the ways that the kairotic context, specifically timing and order, affect reading comprehension.

Maxine Hairston argues in “Ideology in the Classroom” that the Composition classroom is changing, and that “The new model envisions required writing courses as vehicles for social reform rather than as student-centered workshops designed to build students’ confidence and competence as writers” (180). She accuses composition theorists of “feeling the need to belong and be approved by the power structure” of the English department, and thus we are implementing “currently fashionable critical theories” in the classroom (184). Hairston, then, represented for us a current-traditional ideology and skills-based epistemology of rhetoric similar to that which John Gage criticizes as “a view of language use as independent of the means by which knowledge is generated and validated” and thus rhetoric is “a technical application of linguistic forms with necessary regard for whatever may or may not make the ideas expressed knowable” (“An Adequate Epistemology” 153). Hairston, then, in advocating for building “competence as writers,” adheres to an epistemology that does not consider how “knowledge is generated” or how ideas are knowable. In arguing against ideology in the classroom, Hairston demonstrates an ideology that is against confronting the ideologies attached to language forms in the classroom in favor of tending to form on its own. 

Michael Quigley makes the excellent point that it is not that Quigley and others who confront ideologies in the classroom are against teaching form—or even that they neglect it—but that they are against using it in ways that “limit the rhetorical and civic potential of this activity” (“Rhetoric, Dialectic, & Ideology” 24). To teach forms of rhetoric without paying attention to their rhetorical and civic dimensions is limited; language doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so why teach it in such a way? Quigley advocates teaching form in order to teach students how to test both the available means of making knowledge and the idea of knowledge systems more generally (24). This aligns with what Gage advocates for: “a view of rhetoric itself as a means of discovering and validating knowledge” (153). We can practice using language not as a skill, but as a means to discovering new knowledge; Gage’s separation of two epistemologies of rhetoric align with a similar separation between Current-Traditional pedagogies and Social-Constructivist pedagogies. This is the connection to last week’s readings that I have felt developing but have not been able to articulate. 

I call what Gage and Quigley—and by extension Kinneavy—Social-Constructivist pedagogies because of our readings by Stephen Toulmin and Charles Kneupper. Kneupper suggests that we construct knowledge through practicing argument forms, and thus no argument is constructed independently: “Argument structures are not mere individual creations” (184). If this is so, then why would we teach argument structures without paying attention to the social periphery that surrounds them? In paying attention to the social periphery of argument structures, we can look towards time, change, creation, conflict, fate, and individuality as it pertains to writing and the written text—all of which are values that James Kinneavy emphasizes as kairotic (Kinneavy 89-90). In analyzing language structures as “social products tested and maintained or discarded in social practice,” students can pay attention to the ways in which ideologies shape their own ways of knowing. This is precisely why kairos makes sense for the College Composition classroom—they are in a kairotic moment where their financial, religious, philosophical, emotional, educational, and political values and beliefs are being challenged (Kinneavy 94). So, why not help them challenge these systems of knowing for themselves, so they can come to their own beliefs and values rather than following systems of knowing that are limited and, thus, potentially limiting.

-JB