An Invitation to Participate: Student Centered Pedagogy and the Rethinking of Rhetorical Theory

My posts seem to be taking on a theme. My interests seem to come back to questions of practice and how I can integrate the ideas from these articles into my own teaching practices. It reminds me that teachers and rhetoricians have a lot in common.

The role of a rhetorician is to craft ideas and convince others of their value—and the same can be said of a teacher. As teachers, we play the role of persuader. We persuade our students that the ideas we are sharing with them are valuable and worth learning. And this can be difficult at times, but if our students are going to trust us enough to do the difficult work of learning, then we must take the responsibility seriously.

So as we think through the strategies and implications of rhetoric, we should also be thinking about how we can apply these ideas to the classroom. Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin suggest that we should adjust our views of rhetoric to include an invitational rhetoric, which they set in contrast to a persuasive rhetoric.

They explain that the goal of invitational rhetoric is to create a space in which marginalized voices can be expressed and heard. They go on to explain, “Although invitational rhetoric is not designed to create a specific change, such as the transformation of systems of oppression into ones that value and nurture individuals, it may produce such an outcome” (16).

An invitational rhetoric, as Foss and Griffin explain it, appears to be deeply humanistic (It also seems to relate views supported by the first sophists). Treating students like equal participants in the meaning making process of the classroom is much different than the model of teaching that places the teacher in the role of persuader, indifferent to the values, perspectives, and identities of the audience. .

When we invite students to take on a more active role in their own education through the use of student centered pedagogies, we are asking students to participate in the existing intellectual communities that make up a university. We are asking our students to try to understand the perspectives and roles of various intellectuals even though, for many of them, academic culture is very different from what they are used to. And we are validating the backgrounds and knowledge that students bring into the classroom.

The more different academic life is from their lives outside the university, the more difficult the transition is likely to be. Yet, we know, that if our students are going to be ‘successful’ in the university system, they need to find ways to become a part of the academic community.

One questions that is likely to come up if this line of thinking is continued is whether or not the university system as an established institution with existing interests and values can ever fully accommodate an invitational, or student centered approach.

The protestors described by Kevin Michael DeLuca, in particular the Earth First! Organization, highlight the importance of rethinking entire organizational structures:

Dave Foreman explains ‘We felt that if we took on the organization of the industrial state, we would soon accept their anthropogenic in paradigm’(9).

While DeLuca is discussing the “power and possibilities of bodies in public argumentation” (10), the ways in which existing organizational patterns of the education system operate may lead to an inevitable paradigm of the educator as authority and the student as receptive and subordinate. Invitational rhetoric and student centered learning require us to not only rethink our approach to teaching content by asking for student participation, but it may also require us to rethink the spaces and hierarchies embedded in our institutions.

Given social constraints and a lack of resources, working within the existing framework may be the only option available. So my question then becomes what are the practical, everyday changes that I can do to promote a participatory, invitational, socially aware and fair classroom or program.

So here are a few ways that I may already be working in that direction:

• I favor discussion over lecture and questions over answers
• I avoid making definitive assessments of meaning when discussing texts
• Content is selected that represents a wide set of perspectives (not just privileged voices in privileged positions)
• I invite critique of classroom activities, readings, and policies while encouraging students to imagine better practices.
• Whenever possible, I enact the suggestions of my students by introducing new readings or tailoring activities to their interests.

Some of these things I do well, some I could do better. One of the difficulties of these strategies, however, is that students have expectations of what a class is supposed to look like and supposed to do. Some students rely on those expectations. Changing the rules of the game can frustrate players, and changing the expectations of the classroom is likely to encounter resistance. What happens when students don’t want to discuss or ask questions? What happens when students want firm answers? They have learned the role of a teacher, and if I complicate that role…

Perhaps that’s the point of education though, in an invitational sense. We are inviting our students to move beyond their roles as learner and become a participant and an equal—a process that is, and will continue to be, difficult.