Teaching Arguments Rhetorically:Crossing the Threshold to

Deeper Learning

Jennifer Fletcher,California State University, Monterey Bay

@JenJFletcher | #TeachingArguments

Transfer of Learning &College, Career, and Community Readiness

From Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing Worldby David N. Perkins:

“Transfer means that the learner acquires knowledge and skills in one setting and carries them over to other settings that may be very different [...]” (2014, 111) (original emphasis).

Transfer of Learning

Acts of Transfer

• Reading to writing

• ELA classes to other content areas

• Literary texts to informational texts

• High school to college

• School to career

• ?

• ?

The High School to College Transition

A story…

One Size Does Not Fit All

John T. Gage notes that “no two pieces of writing arise from the same situations or need to satisfy the same conditions” (2005, 6).

The Art of Adaptation

“When we practice rhetoric,” writes Erika Lindemann in A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, “we make decisions about our subject, audience, point of view, purpose, and message. We select our best evidence, the best order in which to present our ideas, and the best resources of language to express them” (2001, 40-41).

The Art of Adaptation

• What am I being asked to do? What are my options for responding?

• What’s my purpose? What need, problem, or question am I being asked to address?

• Who’s my audience? What does my audience care about? What does my audience need to know to understand my position?

• What’s special or important about this writing situation? What do I need to pay attention to?

• Are there any limits on what I can say or how I can say it?

Seeing Past the Surface

Threshold Concepts

In “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge,” Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land describe a threshold concept “as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something” (1). Once learned, threshold concepts are difficult to unlearn because they transform the way we think about our subject matter--and sometimes our world.

E.g., Darwin’s theory of natural selection

Characteristics of Threshold Concepts

According to Meyer and Land (2003, 3), threshold concepts are generally…

• transformative• irreversible• integrative• counterintuitive or destabilizing (e.g., the

believing game)

Doorways to Deeper Understanding

Moving from Surface to Depth

Threshold concepts are "flexible tools for imagining a progression of student learning across a curriculum rather than at one specific moment or in one short period of time" (Scott and Wardle 2015, 123).

Threshold Concepts in Argumentation

• Reading and writing are social and rhetorical activities.

• Argumentation is a form of inquiry.

• Arguments address and create specific audiences.• The effectiveness of a writer’s choices depends on the

contingencies of the rhetorical situation.

John Singleton Copley’s Boy with a Flying Squirrel (1765)

See page 3 of Teaching

Arguments

At first glance, what do you notice?

Now, take a closer look…

Seeing Past the Surface

Table Discussion

•What was your first impression of college as a new student?

•What do you now understand about college readiness after completing your own degree(s) and working to prepare K12 students for the postsecondary world?

•At what point(s) in your experience did you feel you were crossing a learning threshold?

A Closer Look at Audience

“Writing addresses, invokes, and/or creates audiences.”—Andrea Lunsford, Naming What We Know (20)

“Writers are always connected to other people”—Kevin Roozen, Naming What We Know (17)

Analyzing Audiences

NeedsInterestsValues

ExperiencesCharacteristics

MotivesWorld view

Required response

Who’s the Audience?

“everyone”“anyone”

“everybody”“all the readers”“the general public”

Audience/Pathos

For Aristotle, effective rhetoric is about speaking to the unique needs and experiences of highly specific audiences.

Deborah Tannen Two Ways: Excerpt #1

“If you get your way as a result of having demanded it, the payoff is satisfying in terms of status: You’re one-up because others are doing as you told them. But if you get your way because others happened to want the same thing, or because they offered freely, the payoff is in rapport.”

—from You Just Don’t Understand

• What choices has Tannen made as a writer?• What are the effects of those choices?• Why do you think she made those choices?

Table Discussion

Deborah Tannen Two Ways: Excerpt #2

“Ironically, although many researchers have found that men tend to interrupt women more than women interrupt men, James and Clarke (1993), surveying studies of interruption and gender, note that researchers comparing all-female to all-male conversations found a higher rate of interruption in the all-female conversations.”

—from the TESOL Quarterly

Addressing and/or Creating Audiences

Consider “Hidden Intellectualism” by Gerald Graff

(See the ERWC module “What’s Next?”)

Graff’s Central Claims

From the Introduction to Clueless in Academe:

• “Academia makes its ways of thinking look harder and more confusing than they really are.”

• “Educated people need to know how to play the argument game, but academia hides its rules for playing.” (2003, 1-3)

Everyone knows some young person who is impressively “street smart” but does poorly in school. What a waste, we think, that one who is so intelligent about so many things in life seems unable to apply that intelligence to academic work. What doesn’t occur to us, though, is that schools and colleges might be at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such street smarts and channel them into good academic work.

Nor do we consider one of the major reasons why schools and colleges overlook the intellectual potential of street smarts: the fact that we associate those street smarts with anti-intellectual concerns. We associate the educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty and academic.

“Writing addresses, invokes, and/or creates audiences.”

Analyzing Target Audiences

The Challenge

Naming What We Know offers an important caution: "This type of learning is messy, time consuming, and unpredictable. It does not lend itself to shortcuts or checklists or competency tests" (Adler-Kassner and Wardle 2015, 9).

Teaching for Compliance vs. Teaching for Transfer

The National Research Council dryly notes in Education for Life and Work, “If the goal of instruction is to prepare students to accomplish tasks or solve problems exactly like the ones addressed during instruction, then deeper learning is not needed” (2012, 70).

Learning from my Teaching Fails

“I don’t understand what to do.”

“Just follow this structure, and you’ll be fine.”

Another Story…

“You  would  not  believe  what  I  just  did  at  work  today  […]  My  team  is  putting  out  a  ‘thought  paper’  to  persuade  different  departments  and  services  (Army,  Navy…)  to  use  this  new  technology.  I  was  sent  an  article  about  converging  technologies.

To  the  point.  I  was  able  to  critically  analyze  the  structure  of  the  article,  the  ebb  and  flow  of  ethos/pathos  and  logos,  and  even  some  of  the  grammatical  elements  enhancing  the  rhetoric.  […]  My  teammate  was  very  impressed,  and  now  I  get  to  take  the  lead  on  the  paper.

I  just  wanted  to  share  this  with  you  because  this  is  exactly  what  I  wanted  to  get  out  of  the  class.  Thank  you  for  the  tools.”

References

Adler-Kasnner, Linda and Elizabeth Wardle. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Boulder, CO: Utah State University P, 2015. Print.

Aristotle. Rhetoric. W. Rhys Roberts, trans. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. Print.

ERWC Task Force (California State University, Task Force on Expository Reading and Writing). Expository Reading and Writing Course. 2nd ed. Long Beach: California State University, 2013. Print.

Gage, John. The Shape of Reason. NewYork: Pearson, 2000. Print.

Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Print.

Hairston, Maxine. Contemporary Composition. Florence, KY: Cengage, 1986. Print.

Lindemann, Erika. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Meyer, Jan and Ray Land. “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines.” Occasional Report 4. Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses Project, 2003. Web.

National Research Council. Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferrable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2012. Print.

Nowacek, Rebecca S. Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Print.

Perkins, David N. Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014. Print.

Tannen, Deborah.. ”Researching Gender-Related Patterns in Classroom Discourse.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, 1996, pp. 341-344.

Tannen, Deborah.. You Just Don't Understand : Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine, 1990. Print.