Time for some reflections on the Puget Sound/NCA Conference on Teaching Rhetorical Criticism and Critical Inquiry. In addition to blog posts from Oratorical Animal and Joshie Juice, you can also check out the more real-time response by searching #pugetsoundcrit on Twitter. Here are my thoughts on a few themes that emerged for me. (See my pre-conference hopes and dreams here).
1. Starting at the back of the CV helps us see "old" colleagues in new ways. One of my pleasurable tasks at the conference was to organize and chair one of the plenary sessions. Plenary chairs were encouraged to highlight our panelists' teaching in our introductions, which of course reflected the purposes of the conference. Although all of the plenarists in my session have distinguished research careers, and I mentioned some of that, I learned a lot about these folks by paying attention to the teaching sections of their CVs - not only what they taught but what awards they'd won, what kinds of students they advised, etc. Spending more time with the "back of the CV" than with the "front" gave me new insights into folks I thought I already knew pretty well. And made me appreciate them that much more.
2. Foregrounding teaching alters our conversations about theory and criticism. The conference was designed to get folks to talk about their teaching in ways both conceptual and pragmatic. The concurrent sessions, mainly designed as workshops, were where the more pragmatic work took place; here, folks very explicitly offered concrete examples of assignments, course design, and class activities. The plenary sessions focused on broader conceptual issues, but here too the focus was to be largely on teaching. A few folks, whether by explicit choice or unconscious inclination, downplayed the teaching aspect in favor of what might be termed more traditional research-focused presentations. This was a perfectly fine choice, but because we were at a conference about teaching, the audience pushed panelists in some cases to be more specific, more focused on pedagogy, more explicit about how ideas/concepts would work with students in the classroom. This produced some wonderful exchanges. I left wondering how many comm rhetoricians would have done this at a traditional research conference. Can you imagine standing up at one of those conferences and asking of a speaker, "What does this have to do with my pedagogy?" Making it "okay" to talk about teaching in scholarly contexts changes the conversation.
3. Our governing pedagogical practice seems to be that of imitatio. There was actually a session explicitly devoted to the idea of using imitation in our pedagogy, but the idea cut across the whole conference. References to emulation, models, and exemplars threaded through lots of sessions and conversations. We look for exemplary critical objects and scholarly essays to share with students, we model good critical practice for our classes so they see what is required to succeed, we emulate the ways we were trained by our advisors. On the one hand, the emphasis on imitation and modeling makes perfect sense in light of rhetoric's history as a civic and pedagogical practice. Also, it usually works really well! On the other hand, there is the worry that a focus on imitation might lead to moribund pedagogy: a desire to teach only those models sanctioned by authority (e.g., canonization), a circumscribing of critical invention, and, in the words of our luncheon speaker, a loss of "wonder." Lester Olson rightly noted in his presentation that the use of models doesn't have to entail canonization, so I don't want to put too fine a point on the negatives. But I left the conference wondering about the pros and cons of imitatio.
4. Lastly, two amazing rhetorical questions I am still mulling over. From Dan Brouwer: "Who does your syllabus think you are?" From Chuck Morris: "What would you say to a student who asks you, 'Why do you teach this class?'"
This week is bookended by two eagerly anticipated events, both of which tap into the non-research sides of my professional universe. This past Sunday I moderated another BAGNewsSalon. I fell in with the marvelous Michael Shaw and BAGNews about 4 years ago now, and have enjoyed watching (and occasionally helping) as Michael has both expanded the site and at the same time kept focused on its core mission: to read the pictures. His latest change is to partner the salons with Open-I, a photojournalism collective based in London. Sunday's discussion of the visual politics of the oil spill featured the usual amazing commentary from scholar-teacher-colleagues like Nate Stormer from Maine (Go Black Bears!) and Loret Steinberg from RIT, along with important insights from photojournalists who have been working in the gulf, including the Pulitzer-Prize winning John Moore, artist/activist Erika Blumenfeld, and gulf freelancer Kari Goodnough. It was my first time moderating with live audio, which was a fun addition. For those interested, the salon is archived here. In addition to leaving me with the best intellectual buzz ever, they are also important to my sense of myself as a teacher-scholar of visual politics. What I learn in the salons absolutely bleeds into my research and my teaching, and what I do in those other areas, I hope, allows me to bring something useful to the salons.
The other bookend to the week is a trip to the University of Puget Sound (Go Loggers!) in Tacoma, Washington, for the NCA Summer Conference on Teaching Rhetorical Criticism and Critical Inquiry. The conference has been in the works for about three years, so those of us on the planning committee are thrilled that we're finally all gathering for what looks to be a great weekend of conversation about pedagogy. Our fearless leader Jim Jasinski has been the engine driving this train, and I'm hopeful that after we all leave Tacoma he can sit back, enjoy the accomplishment, and take a deep breath or two (until his new gig as editor of RSQ begins, that is...).
The idea behind this conference is simple: rhetoric scholars in communication LOVE to talk "meta" about criticism, but (unlike our friends in rhet-comp) that conversation is almost never about how we actually teach. While rhetorical criticism courses are utterly ubiquitous (most brand-new Ph.D.s will be expected to teach criticism in their first jobs, regardless of the type of institution), our teaching of criticism is at the same time nearly invisible in our routine scholarly engagements. The conference is designed to bust up that paradox, in a sense, by putting all manner of teacher-scholars together for a weekend in sustained, collaborative, pragmatic conversation about a variety of topics. And we're going to be doing it all dressed in t-shirts and shorts and sandals. What could be better than that?
Overall, we hope that the conference becomes a forum for all of us, especially our primary audience of junior folks, to have an opportunity to engage others about pedagogy. This engagement will certainly invite people to try new things; my colleagues helping me plan a session on teaching context/archival analysis, for example, have already given me a bajillion ideas that I can't wait to try out with my own students. We're also hoping folks will be able to connect with one another in informal networks. With 140 people in attendance, all kinds of collaborations could emerge from this event.
Finally, and I'll confess this is one of my primary dreams for the conference, we're hoping that the conference might spur a greater valuing of rhetoric as a pedagogical practice. This is important not only conceptually to our sense of ourselves as rhetoricians, but also pragmatically as folks who work in the institution of the university. These are trying economic times for universities right now (we're sure feeling it here at Illinois). In stressful times it's tempting to draw fault lines between practices, fields, and ideas that "really matter" and those that "don't." Sometimes this conversation falls down along the lines of pitting research "vs." teaching, which is not only just plain wrong, but also pragmatically unwise. Even research institutions like mine recognize that teaching matters and they are increasingly developing schemes to reward those programs and departments that do it well (and, to be blunt, that rack up the most students in their classes). In such an environment it behooves us to pay attention and strategize about how best to position ourselves as teachers of rhetoric.
FYI, for those who are interested in following from afar, I hope to tweet a bit from the conference using the hashtag #pugetsoundcrit. I can't promise tons of stuff (I am not good at listening and typing at the same time), but perhaps a few others at the conference will tweet as well. Further down the line, we are hoping to make materials publicly available via the web, but that's a longer-term plan.
The new cap is still holding, for now, at least according to this image captured from CNN's live feed a few moments ago. Certainly a good sign after nearly three months. But the environmental, economic, and policy questions remain. And the visual politics remain compelling, too.
Join BAGNewsNotes and host Open-i (Open Photojournalism Education Network) this Sunday at 1 pm CST for a live, online salon on the visual politics of the oil spill. We'll be discussing an edit of nine images with a number of fabulous guests, including photographers actively working in the gulf. Full lineup of guests, images, and login info here.
Smithsonian's Bigger Picture blog discusses a University of Illinois research project that's archiving the earliest video games.
Nina Berman fondly remembers Big Jesus at BAGNewsNotes.
Also at The BAG, Alan Chin photographs the oil spill with his usual amazing vision.
I just discovered Composing with Images, a lovely photoblog in which two photographers offer their individual takes on a different theme each week. They recently announced a new book series.
Last but not least, The Onion reports that President Obama's gone avant garde in his weekly video addresses. Watch out, Jenny Holzer!
The New York Times LENS blog has a nice essay today about the role the digital camera plays in our experiences of culture and place. Seth Mydans (son of FSA and LIFE magazine photographer Carl Mydans) describes an upcoming documentary called "Camera, Camera" which argues that "the world as a whole is being altered by the colonization of fragile cultures by camera-carrying travelers." Mydans offers the above photo as an example of the odd impulse to capture instead of experience. One of the commenters suggested this 2007 New Yorker cover as a nice example of the same idea.
If you follow the link to the Mydans essay, be sure to watch the film clip of a morning procession of Buddhist monks in Laos being photographed by tourists. It's creepy but yet totally familiar. On the one hand, Mydans and the filmmakers are simply pointing to the old problem Susan Sontag observed years ago: "The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own." But I do think there is something different lurking here, too. In the kinds of images Mydans points us to, production and reception collapse into one another.
What does a viewer look like anymore? Increasingly, it's someone with head bowed, checking out the tiny screen on the back of a camera.
image credit: Lydie France/EPA via The Guardian