Fall 2006

As we note in the first of our six philosophical foundations of the FYP, reading remains central to what it means to be liberally educated in the 21st century, but the ability to be attune to the rhetorical dimensions of communication, whether that of others or our own, has become at least as important in a world where interpreting the barrage of information that we are faced with moment to moment remains a constant challenge. Much of that information is formulated to persuade us in one way or another, thus cultivating the ability to recognize and critically dissect these attempts at persuasion and the techniques, both appropriate and inappropriate, being made use of in those processes, should be central to liberal education’s role in creating informed and engaged citizens. Individuals who are sensitive to the rhetorical dimension of other people’s communication and aware of the ethical issues involved will, in turn, be better able to create written, spoken, and/or performed texts of their own that articulate their own voice and ideas and also responsibly and accurately represent the works of others in the process. We see the work of the FYP College in the fall and the FYS in the spring as gradually and progressively building up the basic communication skills necessary to do this work while also introducing students to the questions of voice, audience, rhetoric, and representation that must be considered as they write, speak, and/or perform. The critical inquiry and research skills of the FYS can, in a number of ways, be seen as the culimination of this work in the FYP.

Below, we provide additional detail on these elements of our pedagogical approach to teaching rhetoric and communication to first-year students. We start with students’ ability to interpret the texts of others, then move to the creation of texts of their own, and then finish with the integration of these two sets of skills in students’ engagement with critical inquiry and research.

Reading, listening, and viewing

Helping students to develop more sophisticated abilities in writing, speaking and research must go hand-in-hand with the cultivation of parallel abilities in reading, listening, and viewing. Just as designing and constructing messages are rhetorical endeavors, so too is the process of interpretation that renders messages meaningful. Understanding a text is not an automatic process; it involves a critical assessment of medium, tone, audience, and purpose. As teachers, we often focus on whether-or-not students understand, not on how they understand. To be able to become more aware of their own choices when they learn and practice different ways of constructing and presenting messages, they must also learn and practice ways of deciphering and analyzing a variety of texts from multiple sources, and in diverse contexts, in order to understand and assess the choices those texts reflect.

Critical reading
Effective pedagogies in the FYP include engaging students with the arguments presented in a written text. As we expect students to create different messages for different audiences, we must also ask them to learn to identify the rhetorical strategies incorporated in the writing they read. In addition, they will be expected to become increasingly able to recognize in others’ texts the various conventions and elements of good writing that they are asked to produce as writers themselves. The ability to read a text critically is essential to producing the written, spoken, and performed work that the FYP communications skills goals require. Additionally, the ability to read in ways that move beyond understanding to critical assessment is an essential component of engaged citizenship. Achieving these learning goals is done most effectively when faculty devote classroom time to close analyses of texts.

Critical listening
Hearing is passive; listening is active. For what do we ask students to listen? What do we expect students to understand or learn from a performed text? How do we ask them to listen to us, to one another? What do we ask them to do with what they’ve heard and understood? How do we demonstrate that we value their thoughtful, engaged listening? Teaching critical listening means being clear as teachers that critical listening and understanding are not automatic processes; they are variable skills that must be cultivated and practiced. In the FYP students will be expected to learn to become increasingly able to listen carefully to others’ oral/aural presentations, both formal and informal, creative and scholarly, and understand effectively their arguments, while also improving their ability to recognize the conventions and elements of good communication that they are expected to learn to produce as speakers and/or performers themselves. Helping students become good critical listeners is best forwarded by a pedagogy that offers a variety of listening opportunities to students, including lectures, large class discussions, performances, small-group work, and one-on-ones with faculty, peers, and mentors as appropriate.

Critical viewing
As more of our courses include film, visual and performing arts, cultural geography, and other forms of visual rhetoric (and as students’ lives inevitably include multiple, visual messages), it is imperative that we engage students with the notion that viewing is a rhetorical process: that undergirding all visual images are designed intentions and arguments. Habituated to often passively “experiencing” visual messages, students will be expected to learn to step outside of the flow of visual stimuli and improve their ability to recognize and analyze the rhetorical strategies and specific arguments used by the creators of visual images and texts. As with reading, these learning goals are best achieved through conscious attention to the skills of visual interpretation in the classroom.

Writing, speaking, and performing/creating

Writing, speaking, and/or performing are ways students enter into conversation with their peers, their instructors, and the larger academic community. Students should understand that writing, speaking, and/or performing—joining this conversation—are rhetorical acts, whether they are making a scholarly argument or creatively expressing their experiences and opinions. Speaking, writing and/or performing give voice to thought, enable one to share thoughts, and are ways for us to create knowledge and communicate our values. Good communication involves the communicator deciding on a voice, a purpose, and a thesis (or controlling idea), as well as a recognition of his or her audience and having a command of the conventions of the mode(s) of communication being used. Being a good writer, speaker, and/or performer means thinking rhetorically and making communicative choices based on the following kinds of questions:

Who am I in this context?
All writers and speakers employ different voices in different situations: formal voices, informal voices—voices that muse, voices that prove, voices that dissent. Communicators must decide which voice they will use to accomplish a given writing task. What experiences and knowledge give writers or speakers the authority to discuss certain subjects and make certain arguments? What level of discourse should they use to express their ideas? Are experiences told in the first person relevant, or should writers maintain a more objective point-of-view? Students will be given opportunities to practice and develop various academic and/or creative voices through a variety of assignments and expected to learn to understand some of the potential consequences of employing any given voice or mode of expression.

What is the question I am being asked to address?
Sometimes the purpose of an assignment will be implied in the wording of the assignment itself: speakers, writers, and performers may be asked to analyze, evaluate, propose, describe, argue, demonstrate, and more. At other times, communicators have to define that purpose themselves and decide their intention and approach as they converse with certain concepts and ideas. Thinking more intentionally about the purpose of writing and speaking means that communicators must also consider the ethical dimensions of the choices they make. Students will be expected to learn how to differentiate purposes—for example, how is evaluating a poem different from analyzing it or from making an argument about it?—and how to choose appropriate content and style for each rhetorical situation. Determining the purpose of a speech or a piece of writing will also help students learn to shape the thesis that will guide the choice of evidence, organization, and development of ideas, and will enable them to develop more sophisticated abilities in interpreting the arguments of others.

Who is my audience?
Because communication necessarily involves more than one person, speakers and writers must always remain aware of their audience. Students should be encouraged to see their audience as more than just an instructor or grader and rather to recognize their audience as a group of peers and others interested in contributions to the body of knowledge on any given subject. They should consider questions such as: For whom is this message designed? How will this particular audience hear and understand this message? What might be the most effective ways to communicate the information to this audience? Faculty can help students do this work by designing assignments that either call for a specific audience or explicitly indicate that students must consider who they imagine their audience to be. Students will be expected to learn to consider what effect they intend their writing and speaking to have on this particular audience, such as to persuade, entertain, inform, or call to action, and should demonstrate this learning in the work they produce.

How will my audience read what I write or hear what I say?
Writers and speakers who decide to enter into a scholarly conversation should realize that their audience has certain expectations for the way orators speak, writers present their writing, the way that writing looks on the page, and how speakers appear and sound to an audience. We expect certain kinds of speaking and writing in a formal assignment and expect other kinds of communication in an informal class discussion. Conventions for academic writing include appropriate diction, smooth quotation integration, proper citation format, and attention to sentence-level grammar and punctuation concerns, just to name a very few. Conventions for more formal, academic speaking include, but are not limited to, appropriate use of language, diction, volume, rate, smooth signposts and transitions, an interesting introduction and a reiterative conclusion. Students should both learn these conventions and become aware that they can vary across disciplines, and the cross-disciplinary nature of the FYP should ideally expose students to more than one set of disciplinary writing, speaking, or creative conventions. Students will be expected to learn to refine the college-level writing, speaking and/or performing skills their audience expects through much practice, including low-stakes or informal speaking, writing, and/or performing with a focus on the processes of drafting/rehearsal and revision.

Students may well notice that these questions, and their answers, are necessarily interrelated: for example, communicators must have an idea of their purpose before they can choose their most appropriate voice; they must know who their audience is in order to work with the most effective set of discursive conventions. As a communicator’s answer to one question changes, the answers to others may also shift, requiring re-thinking and re-working of the text at hand. Students will be expected to learn that making such adjustments and changes is an important and even desirable part of the process of writing and speaking, and should be presented with assignments that incorporate drafts/rehearsals and revision in significant ways.

Critical inquiry/research

Critical inquiry and research asks students to combine their roles as constructors of messages with their ability to interpret the messages of others. This work demands that students make use of their skills of critique. Our understanding of “critique” and “critical” involves their ability to analyze the intended purposes and functions of written, spoken, or visual messages. Thus, the faculty of the FYP see “research” in the broader context of “critical inquiry,” and we therefore believe that research is more than just gathering citations, formatting them properly, locating the sources, reading them and either welding, sewing, or fashioning the information together to yield a research paper or research project.

Research understood as critical inquiry is, instead, a way students become participants in an ongoing conversation among various people or groups with interests and/or expertise in a topic or subject area of mutual concern. Students must begin to think of themselves as part of a changing audience, listening to various opinions, focusing on different aspects and interpretations, and seeking out voices that are often not heard. One does not have to form an opinion on a controversial topic to start one’s own inquiry, and students can seek out new approaches to issues, find new data that support their own predilections, or even find material that causes them to change their minds.

Students will be expected to learn that when they engage in research, they are the active agents in determining who will partake in the conversation they are beginning. It is the student who gathers ideas, opinions, and facts about the subject. Students must learn to start as a silent partner in the conversation by balancing, refuting, accepting and synthesizing the conversations to which they are listening. They should also understand that to do a thorough job, they must include as many voices as possible, striving to omit no one who has something to say about the issues.

The communities, constituencies or voices students will be listening to while engaged in critical inquiry will generally fall into three broad categories: the scholarly community, the mainstream audience, and the viewpoints of those whose voices are often not heard but will have important things to say about an issue. However, regardless of who is “speaking,” students must learn to evaluate critically what they are saying. What is the basis upon which the arguments supporting the various views are based? Are seemingly factual statements correct? The critical inquiry and research process thus ask students to bring together in one place the rhetoric and communication work of the whole first year.

Learning to understanding the research processes by which these questions and others can be answered is a major goal of the FYP, particularly in the spring FYS course. Specifically, students will:

• Be introduced to ways of conducting productive and imaginative inquiry and research in order to become a part of the various conversations surrounding issues.

• Learn to differentiate among the various ways that information is produced and presented, between popular and scholarly journals and books, between mainstream and alternative publications, between primary and secondary sources.

• Learn how to evaluate and synthesize information, whether gathered from traditional sources, e.g., books and journals, or from websites or electronic media.

• Begin to develop the skills of critical analysis in the interpretation and use of information gathered from any source.

• Be introduced to the ethical obligations that scholars have to both responsibly represent their sources and inform their readers of the sources of their information, as well as learning, and being held responsible for the proper use of, the conventions of scholarly citation and attribution.

Resources for help

Students should be aware of the numerous resources available to them to help achieve these learning goals. Currently writing mentors in both the fall FYP College and the spring FYS who are trained as peer tutors and familiar with the course material can help students plan, write, and revise with attention paid to all of the rhetorical issues raised above. In addition, mentors are increasingly being trained to assist students with their speaking and critical inquiry/research projects so that mentors can provide peer feedback on all of the elements of their communication competencies. Peer response, done effectively, can expose communicators to even more opportunities to reconsider their rhetorical, stylistic, research, and organizational choices, as well as enhancing their ability to listen actively and interact intellectually with peers.