Composing a Rhetorical Education for the Twenty-First Century: TakingITGlobal as Pedagogical Heuristic

Abstract

The online activist site TakingITGlobal offers teachers of rhetoric a pedagogical heuristic that enables us to rethink and revise rhetorical education. More specifically, the site raises questions concerning what the “civic” means inside a global rather than a national context. It revitalizes thinking about how students might “go public” in both online and offline spaces. And it challenges ideas about the traditional rhetorical practice in which an individual rhetor composes a single document for a specific audience.

Notes

¹My thanks goes to RR reviewer David Fleming for his thoughtful revision suggestions.

²For examples of scholarship in composition studies and education that considers the ways globalization affects writing pedagogies, see articles by Michael Pennell, Kiwan Sung, Andrea Gerbig, Anja Muller-Woods, and Xiaoye You.

³Philip Burns and Matthew Barton are just two scholars who have evaluated the ways that blogs, discussion boards, and wikis educate students in the possibilities for “rational-critical debate” and is preserved at the following website: http://www.cwru.edu/UL/preserve/stack/Delsarte.html.