| Rhetoric Soup |
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A Suggestion for Strategic Pedagogical Framework: Knowing, Doing, Making |
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In Aristotle for Everybody, Mortimer J. Adler outlined some Aristotelean concepts in chapters titled “Man the Knower,” "Man the Doer,” and “Man the Maker.” Adler's thoughts on theoretical, practical, and productive reasoning prompted me to think about how these ideas find place in teaching. While Adler might shudder at my shameless appropriation, I have found a strategy based on these ideas to be helpful in situating course learning.
I see students as knowers, doers, and makers, and try to structure attention to each in planning course engagement. The simple framework is as follows: Knowing: Students need to know material about the topic on which they are working. This usually comes in the form of readings and lectures. Doing: Students should “play” with the ideas they have learned in the Knowing stage, questioning, conjecturing, problematizing, and imagining the application and ramification of ideas in form of proposals, drafts, exemplars, and creative works. Making: Students should produce something that expresses their knowledge of the material, and their process of “playing/working” with the ideas. This production can take the shape of finished papers, projects, and presentations. Not all topics or units in a course will have the same weight placed on each of these areas, but having a view to integrate these three areas opens up opportunities to leverage student interest and provoke thinking in new ways. |
Some Examples of Teaching "Knowers"
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Sample lecture portion from "Storytelling: Narratives Across Media" Online Course
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Mini-lecture on "Hitchcock as Tech Innovator" for Turner Classic Movies & Ball State Summer Course
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Teaching Philosophy Statement
Author G.K. Chesterton tells of a time he went out on a walk to do colored chalk drawings on brown paper, when he realized he forgotten to bring a piece of white chalk.
“Meanwhile I could not find my chalk. I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town near at which it was even remotely probable there would be such a thing as an artist’s colourman. And yet, without any white, my absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again…. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece of the rock I sat on… and I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula…. It is a piece of chalk.” (from The Daily News, 1905)
I believe that good teaching equips the student to reach beyond the bounds of the textbook or lecture, externally out to the worlds around us, and internally into the minds and imaginations of the students themselves.
In the Storytelling: Narratives Across Media course, I provide students with a list of Narratological Terms without definitions. During the course of our class, as students engage lectures, assignments, and discussions, the class collaborates to compile working definitions for the terms. At course end, students have constructed their own “dictionary” of narratalogical terms ranging from tritagonist and mise en scène to epideictic rhetoric and the proairetic code. To complete this dictionary, the class analyzes actual stories in various media, ranging from oral storytelling (e.g. Jesus and Socrates) and written narratives (e.g. O. Henry and Poe) to screen storytelling (e.g. Rod Serling and Steven Spielberg) to storytelling in song (e.g. El Paso and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.) Because the learning is situated in actual storytelling, students report to me long after taking the class that they cannot watch a movie without being aware of the effects of the score, lighting, camera angles, title sequence exposition, etc.
In Digital Communication classes, our early discussions acknowledge that communication has seen a sea change due to its increasingly digital nature. Our students recognize we must develop new models and new methods for engaging, evaluating, and creating in light of these changes. These exigencies also raise important questions for the teacher: How do we teach students to work in new media environments – and how do we evaluate such work? John Paul Gee, in his New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and "Worked Examples" as One Way Forward, draws the conclusion that work in new areas (such as new media studies, in any of its academic identities,) gains traction through the use of exemplars. These exemplars or “worked examples” provide a starting point for cross-disciplinary discussions about modeling, evaluation, SLO’s, and more.
I believe students and faculty must work together to discover and propose new practices by interactive collaboration via remediation, creation, repurposing, and analysis. “New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.” (McLuhan & McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science) The adventure of good teaching in our current age includes helping students discover and articulate these grammars and this syntax. Students in these classes use “play exemplars’ not only to discover grammars and effective practices, but also to discover how to discover such principles, providing them with tools for yet-to-emerge communication platforms.
I have led students in projects involving Digital Aggregation and Curation, Installing a “Smart Layer” of Digital Storytelling in Museum Spaces, and Building Virtually Reality Tours. In each of these projects, student researchers developed a workable approach that proposed grammars, methodologies, heuristics, and suggested best communication practices in the field. In short, students were actively involved in creating new literacies for the new media in which they operate, and wrote reflective papers on their processes and discoveries.
What resources can we use to teach students in our brave new digital world?
I believe that we, like Chesterton, are “sitting on an immense warehouse” of material. Everywhere we look are opportunities for inspiration, instruction, and discovery. I believe teachers should be attentive to all of these emergent opportunities, perhaps reflecting the practice of that great storytelling teacher who once said, “Consider the lilies of the field…”
“Meanwhile I could not find my chalk. I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town near at which it was even remotely probable there would be such a thing as an artist’s colourman. And yet, without any white, my absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again…. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece of the rock I sat on… and I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula…. It is a piece of chalk.” (from The Daily News, 1905)
I believe that good teaching equips the student to reach beyond the bounds of the textbook or lecture, externally out to the worlds around us, and internally into the minds and imaginations of the students themselves.
- I believe good teaching encourages the student to see applications, recognize principles, and identify patterns in the “real world” outside the classroom.
- Likewise, I believe good teaching helps students use their course learning as a “scaffold’ to develop habits and systems to continue to learn on their own after the classroom experience has ended.
- Furthermore, I believe one duty of the teacher is to help students see learning as a lifelong integrated process rather than a constrained temporal activity limited to a class time or a term on the calendar.
In the Storytelling: Narratives Across Media course, I provide students with a list of Narratological Terms without definitions. During the course of our class, as students engage lectures, assignments, and discussions, the class collaborates to compile working definitions for the terms. At course end, students have constructed their own “dictionary” of narratalogical terms ranging from tritagonist and mise en scène to epideictic rhetoric and the proairetic code. To complete this dictionary, the class analyzes actual stories in various media, ranging from oral storytelling (e.g. Jesus and Socrates) and written narratives (e.g. O. Henry and Poe) to screen storytelling (e.g. Rod Serling and Steven Spielberg) to storytelling in song (e.g. El Paso and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.) Because the learning is situated in actual storytelling, students report to me long after taking the class that they cannot watch a movie without being aware of the effects of the score, lighting, camera angles, title sequence exposition, etc.
In Digital Communication classes, our early discussions acknowledge that communication has seen a sea change due to its increasingly digital nature. Our students recognize we must develop new models and new methods for engaging, evaluating, and creating in light of these changes. These exigencies also raise important questions for the teacher: How do we teach students to work in new media environments – and how do we evaluate such work? John Paul Gee, in his New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and "Worked Examples" as One Way Forward, draws the conclusion that work in new areas (such as new media studies, in any of its academic identities,) gains traction through the use of exemplars. These exemplars or “worked examples” provide a starting point for cross-disciplinary discussions about modeling, evaluation, SLO’s, and more.
I believe students and faculty must work together to discover and propose new practices by interactive collaboration via remediation, creation, repurposing, and analysis. “New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.” (McLuhan & McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science) The adventure of good teaching in our current age includes helping students discover and articulate these grammars and this syntax. Students in these classes use “play exemplars’ not only to discover grammars and effective practices, but also to discover how to discover such principles, providing them with tools for yet-to-emerge communication platforms.
I have led students in projects involving Digital Aggregation and Curation, Installing a “Smart Layer” of Digital Storytelling in Museum Spaces, and Building Virtually Reality Tours. In each of these projects, student researchers developed a workable approach that proposed grammars, methodologies, heuristics, and suggested best communication practices in the field. In short, students were actively involved in creating new literacies for the new media in which they operate, and wrote reflective papers on their processes and discoveries.
What resources can we use to teach students in our brave new digital world?
I believe that we, like Chesterton, are “sitting on an immense warehouse” of material. Everywhere we look are opportunities for inspiration, instruction, and discovery. I believe teachers should be attentive to all of these emergent opportunities, perhaps reflecting the practice of that great storytelling teacher who once said, “Consider the lilies of the field…”
