Você está na página 1de 2

William C.

Kurlinkus
The University of Oklahoma
Teaching Philosophy
Rhetorical Design
My cardinal ambition in any course I teach (whether digital composition, introductory writing, professional writing,
or rhetorical theory) is helping students become rhetorical designers, composers who know that texts will not just be
passively received by a static audience but actively used in specific literacy ecologies. Rhetorical-designers see that
texts always benefit from tackling the diverse assets and challenges of user networks. Given that communicative
designs increasingly span geopolitical, socioeconomic, and linguistic borders, the skill of yoking community-defining
rhetorical logics is key. Thus, I encourage students to analyze user-audiences pre-existing writing culture and invite
audiences to argue with, collaborate in, or refuse textual designs. In teaching rhetorical design, I start from three
concepts: democratic design, the cybernetics of writing, and tactical resistance.
I. Democratic Design: Working with Multiple Discourse Communities
One of the primary theoretical engines driving my writing courses is democratic design, the concept that the audience
of any text already critically negotiates communication and has in-depth user know-how that writers must learn to
harness (see Aristotles audience centered enthymeme). As an instructor, this concept means that I continually try to
capitalize on students expertise, asking them to teach one another specific composing strategies theyre skilled at.
For instance, in a new media composition course I might ask students familiar with Photoshop to plan an activity,
honing their skills at technical presentation while aiding the rest of the class. But its vital to me that all students be
positioned as experts in literacy. So, if students feel they are not familiar with any cutting-edge techno-composing
skill, they might teach an array of techno-social skills: the best places to find free Wi-Fi around campus, how knitting
is like coding, etc. Broadening definitions of relevant multimodal composing experiences is central to this task. I
want all students to link to the communicative cultures that inform their writing identities because, as multiliteracy
scholars Cope and Kalantzis (2012, n.p.) summarize, education succeeds or fails to the extent that it engages the
varied subjectivities of learners. Engagement produces opportunity, equity, and participation. Not engaging produces
failure, disadvantage and inequality. Similarly, I ask students to seek out, mediate, and harness the diverse
composing resources of pre-existing user-audiences that they might not encounter every day. For instance, I currently
ask students (whether college writers or English language learners at the Columbus Literacy Council) to explore the
composing resources of the different neighborhoods of Columbus, Ohio, where our class is located. Students catalog
the resources they find in different communitieslibraries, rec centers, low-cost photocopiers, etc.and then
compose using only those assets. Such an activity prompts students to think about how writing is always bound in the
politics of access to time, technology, money, literacy, and humans. Im careful, however, to position writing with
specific communities not as hampering but rather, like writing in a sonnet or haiku poetry form, as a chance to engage
a new set of resources that changes the way students think about writing. In this way composing becomes not only
about a student posing her unique authorial identity but also about understanding that texts always are dialogic
constructions of a composing self (identity) against an audience distinct from oneself (alterity). Students, thus,
become expert novices who can adapt and compose successfully in any situation, not just the safe space of our
composition classroom.
II. The Cybernetics of Writing: Fostering Dissent and Mediating Conflicts
The effective rhetorical-designer never composes in isolation but constantly responds to the changing needs of
her user-audience, writing in a cybernetic feedback loop of designuser feedbackredesign. Another of my goals as
a teacher of writing, then, is encouraging students to examine where and how to seek and respond to feedback. Such a
view necessarily involves the oft-neglected rhetorical canon of delivery, teaching students that design doesnt end
after the last word is typed on the page. For instance, I encourage writers to deploy usability testing to generate a
context of informed dissent around their compositions. The ethical rhetorical-designer, I believe, shouldnt assume
that users will automatically come to her with concerns and contributions. Indeed, lack of feedback is rarely a sign of
good design. Rather, a tactful rhetorical-designer must know the ideologies of an audience and suggest how
her proposed design could alter that audiences current way of life and communication values. I call this process
informed dissent because its incitement of critical debate might be likened to informed consent in human research
studies. Medical researchers, for instance, dont just offer the possible benefits of their procedures but are obliged to

inform participants of the possible risks of their treatment design. Such a process also illustrates reciprocal education,
wherein the composer educates his audience about design options and the audience educates the composer about what
would work for or fail their community. Again, this type of feedback is at the heart of emancipatory compositions that
seek to work with rather than for an audience (Freire, 1968).
Part of the process of informed dissent, then, involves welcoming and mediating conflictsharnessing the resources
of cultural contact zones. Because different user-audiences want different results from texts, the rhetorical-designer
needs to learn to reconcile multiple audience interests rather than assuming uniformity. For instance, in a web design
project in my Business Writing course, students design sites for client teams who have a diverse set of business goals.
One client-member may demand a beautiful image-based website whereas another desires a text-heavy site with long
narratives about the company. The student-design team, like all composers creating products for a varied audience,
must learn to reconcile these needs, coming back multiple times to the client for feedback. In such design diplomacy,
I also encourage students to foster productive agonism (Mouffe, 2000), aiding conflicting audiences in becoming
direct collaborators who see one another not as enemies to be defeated but as sparring partners whose jabs and hooks
will make designs stronger. Indeed, in my own grading and commenting I try to act as this type of agonistic partner,
always offering alternative views, which I welcome students to critically incorporate, alter, or refuse.
III. Tactical Resistance: Refusing and Changing Pre-Existing Standards
Though one of my primary goals as a writing educator is to teach audience analysis and adaptation, the flipside
of rhetorical adaptation is critical instruction on ways students might resist audiences, ideologies, and other restrictive
systems in order to more fully participate in democracy. Students need to be aware that, like all designers, their
unique experiences might lead to rejecting some audience opinions. Indeed, to always ask students to accede to the
teachers, institutions, workplaces, or audiences communicative logic misses the point. Better texts and designs
dont always stem from deferring to audience values.
In practice, my instruction of rhetorical resistance focuses on a brand of de Certeauean tactic in which I try to teach
defiance from within pre-existing institutions, revealing the values of an audience and then using resources at hand to
change/subvert that audience. For instance, in freshmen composition classes I offer my students the opportunity to
remix one of their previous essays into a feasible protest in which they can only use resources to which they have
access (they cant say I will get a million people to show up at a protest, but they can say I will get all my Facebook
friends to come). In response to this assignment students have created objects from remixed cereal boxes critiquing
sugary foods by adding images of rotting teeth to rap videos commenting on the risks of winning the lottery. But,
what makes this assignment really shine, I think, is that students have to create delivery plans for their designs
thinking about how their audience will encounter their text and in what way that context of delivery will affect their
argument. For instance, the student who created the cereal project planned on buying the cereal, changing the box,
and placing it back in the store for the unsuspecting consumer to find (a method known as shop- dropping).
Essentially, then, she took the power and resources of the cereal manufacturer and turned them against that
institution. Because the goal of the rhetorical refusal (Schilb, 2007) is to capture an audiences attention through
refusing its standards (warping the genre standards of the cereal box, for instance), this assignment also highlights the
need to teach multimodal, interactive, and popular forms of composing beyond the alphabetic essay.
In the end, the goal of teaching rhetorical design as a commitment to equity and the unearthing of diversity in the
rhetoric, composition, and literacy classroom is critical engagement with diverse user-audiences; not unreceptive
tolerance; not passive moral relativism which automatically defers to an its their culture, let them do what they
want justification; and not a multiculturalist flanneury, which thoughtlessly appropriates the cultural signifiers of the
other rather than engaging with theorizing subjects. I strongly believe that having students actively and critically
engage the diverse critical resources of a wide array of audiences, who have a wide array of critical composing assets,
will lead to better (more functional, profitable, and equitable) compositions and designs in the future.

Você também pode gostar