“A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust” -Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 42
This is one of those quotes that haunt me. Is this radical trust realistic? Is it possible? What would this look like? In my teaching, I seek ways to trust students with more, to more fully consider them co-learners and co-teachers. My ultimate goal is to invite students to take more control of their own thinking, to build their own theories of how writing and rhetoric works by making and studying choices.
One of the ways I encourage student agency and self-directed learning is by providing students with regular opportunities to choose their own journey and contribute to the design of a course. For example, in my rhetorical theory course I present students with lists of readings and ask them to decide which ones we will focus on for a given week. This means that one week we may be discussing what Aristotle actually said about the rhetorical situation, while another week we may be reading about Hawaiian and Navajo indigenous peacebuilding. Whatever the case, students come away with an understanding that rhetoric is a diverse and capacious concept. I also aim to build choices into our assignments. At times, this means surveying students and voting on which assignments we will do. Other times, like in my digital rhetoric and rhetorical style courses, this involves providing students with lists of project options for demonstrating learning. For example, for a unit on tropes and schemes, students could choose to submit a report on an article, a stylistic analysis paper, a figure glossary, a comparative analysis of a figure in two traditions, or a selection of the students’ choice. Building on Jody Shipka’s work on assessing multimodal projects, I then grade these submissions using student reflections and rubrics that focus on rhetorical principles rather than on genre-specific requirements. I believe students will be more motivated and engaged when they are included in the design process.
"The need for metacognition assumes special importance when writers find themselves required to work in unfamiliar contexts or with forms with which they are unfamiliar. In those cases, metacognition allows writers to assess which skill and knowledge sets apply in these novel situations and which do not. In the end, while cognition remains critical to effective writing, it is metacognition that endows writers with a certain control over their work, regardless of the situation in which they operate" -Howard Tinberg
Another way I promote student agency is by guiding my students to develop metalinguistic awareness, to inductively come to their own understandings of how language works. I work to provide students with examples that both follow and flout expectations. My “Composing Responsive Refutation Sections” activity, for example, shows students that counterarguments can be addressed in many different places in an essay, not just toward the end. My “Beyond Transition Words” activity similarly works to invite students to think of cohesion and coherence more broadly. By presenting students with a variety of examples and asking them to consider how these examples are composed and how they could be composed, these students move toward an awareness that discourse is dynamic. This metalinguistic awareness goes hand in hand with developing, in Bakhtinian fashion, our own meanings for the concepts we study. In my rhetorical grammar course, for example, I encourage students to not only name grammatical structures but to also practice articulating the effect of these choices in their own words. We try out our articulations with one another, practice them with roommates, and repeatedly ask the question, “When might we want to write this way instead of that way?”
"Writing involves ethical choices because every time we write for another person, we propose a relationship with other human beings, our readers" -John Duffy
Developing agency, of course, must come with a growing awareness of community, of meaning making as a social act with consequences for relationships. As John Duffy argues, this awareness of writing as an ethical act influences how we compose our thoughts and our words. In my courses, students encounter readings from a wide variety of cultures and time periods. Drawing on Ann Berthoff’s insight that composing is something we do all the time, I begin semesters with readings and discussions on perspective, positioning, truth, lies, and this thing called rhetoric. We then address insights from comparative rhetoric that encourage us to move away from essentialist and stereotyped readings to more reflective encounters. As we write and respond to writing, I coach students to move toward nuanced readings, to think more deeply about the power dynamics of construal, comparison, and composition. In terms of writing, my courses feature many opportunities to give and receive feedback. For example, in an online first year composition course, a typical week might include a discussion board where students ask and answer one another’s answers, followed by collaborative reviews of example papers, peer-reviews of different segments of their current projects, and another discussion board where students can share what new revision strategy they will try out on their project. Through assignments such as these, students come to recognize the centrality of feedback to writing. And I prompt students to not only play the “doubting game” but to also play the “believing game”: What are your peers doing well? What are some parts of their writing that have a lot of potential? Good writing, I believe, is not only a matter of writing to readers’ expectations; good writing is also bringing those reader expectations into conversation with the writer’s purpose and vision.
There are many different ways to enable student agency and to teach them to use this agency ethically. As I learn more about trusting students and giving them more opportunities to participate, to choose, and to engage, I believe I will be on track to becoming a better teacher.