American History through American Lives

IV:  Teaching Strategies

Looking back at where we’ve been, the questions get more psychological as they progress.  I think this is OK especially because inference is central to both historical and literary thinking.  The theory behind the questions are not the questions, but the theory behind them enriches them.

The actual moment of persuasion is hard to predict, but it’s important to recognize that people who are oppressed by hegemonic discourse are more likely to consider changing beliefs, and single-minded people, made possible by isolation or privilege, are less likely to change.¹²³ But a rhetor can try by providing examples of witness, by demanding attention, by valorizing stories of inclusion, by clarifying how values interface with policy, and by recontextualizing with vocabulary shifts.¹²⁴ Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth did all of these things.  As teachers, we must create a culturally responsive classroom to transfer the responsibility for learning to students and empower them.  This builds agency, and good questions help us get there.  By studying rhetoric we are picking apart social situations and building capacity and skills for effectively participating ourselves.  This is working toward competence, which confers status enough to speak without consequence.  In addition, we need students to collaborate which helps build an audience, and we need a classroom culture where debate is central.  We arrive at positions together, and this builds resilience.¹²⁵ Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth are our mentor texts, and I hope you see this inquiry approach to rhetoric as complicated and clear enough to be a moral method to lead students into and out of a text.

History is the study of change, and we have our change agents.  The primary intervention of this unit is to look at the language and actions of people who are change advocates.  The set of rhetorical inquiry questions and a bundle of activity ideas help us analyze audience-centered communication and how rhetors set up and then surprisingly complete the patterns they initiate.  Students will analyze persuasive writing, narrative writing, revisions of autobiographical accounts, speeches, versions of anecdotes, primary vs. secondary sources, problematic sources, out of context appropriations, photographs, paintings, and even a statue.  Special care has been taken to keep sources short and thinking long.  The teaching should be done in scenes.

Thinking through what would be most helpful for teachers, I am going to provide resource and activity suggestions, sometimes with answer keys of a sort.  Look for learning to be self-directed and collaborative, interpreting social and persuasive situations.