The gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse

ABSTRACT

I urge more communication rhetoricians to devote scholarly attention to rhetorical education. Toward that end, this essay examines the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse. Pedagogical initiatives, while essential, must be complemented by scholarly work that conceptualizes, assesses, and contextualizes this gap.

KEYWORDS:

• rhetorical education
• pedagogy
• civic discourse
• deliberative democracy

Those who teach students how to think about and practice “serious thought” in the whole of their lives … are the ones who are most likely to produce the kind of improvement in public discourse that our society—both academic and non-academic—desperately needs.¹

—Wayne C. Booth

According to the most common origin story of western rhetoric, the development of democracy in ancient Greece created an opportunity and need for civic discourse. A public speaker—then confined to males—needed to be skilled to influence the outcome of a court case (forensic rhetoric), to affirm communal values and virtues during times good and bad (epideictic rhetoric), and to argue for change in the legislative assembly and public life more generally (deliberative rhetoric). The need for skilled speakers, in turn, created a need to theorize and to teach rhetoric. This task was taken up by Isocrates in Greece and Cicero and Quintilian in Rome, among others. This “pedagogical tradition,” according to historians of rhetoric such as Jeffrey Walker, was central to the development of rhetoric. Indeed, the “pedagogical enterprise is what ultimately makes rhetoric rhetoric.”²

Commitment to pedagogy was also central to the founding of communication studies in the United States. In 1914, teachers split from the National Council of Teachers of English to form the National Association for Academic Teachers of Public Speaking, which is today known as the National Communication Association (NCA). As William M. Keith reminds us, “We were, in the beginning, the speech teachers.”³ Before our flagship journal became the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1928, it was the Quarterly Journal of Speech Education, and before that it was the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking.⁴ Teaching “dominated the disciplinary conversation” early on; teaching “was so much the focus that a 1915 call for a symposium on methods in the journal referred exclusively to the pedagogical question: By what methods ought we teach public speaking?”⁵

As communication studies sought academic legitimacy, however, many left pedagogy behind as a “legitimate” area of scholarly inquiry. Communication rhetoricians, in particular, were guilty of this, even though many remained dedicated and even innovative teachers. In 1992, Michael Leff wrote, “During the past two decades, the academic study of rhetoric has passed through profound and revolutionary changes, and both theory and criticism now appear much different than they once were.” “Yet,” Leff continued, “they still teach public speaking very much as I taught it.”⁶ In 2002, Rosa A. Eberly wrote, “On the whole, communication does not theorize the basic course.” She continued, “communication’s bifurcation of theory from teaching is particularly unfortunate, given the potential of that discipline to study public rhetoric, and, at least potentially, to improve it.”⁷ This lack of scholarly attention to rhetorical education appears especially pronounced when comparing the work of rhetoricians in departments of communication to those in departments of English. Leff and Eberly note that rhetoricians in English have devoted significant scholarly attention to their pedagogy, particularly the first-year writing course, but this is not the case for communication rhetoricians and the public speaking course.

In 2016, my assessment is more complicated. On the one hand, some communication rhetoricians are clearly dedicated to rhetorical education. For evidence, we can read the report that emerged from the pedagogy group at the 2003 Alliance of Rhetoric Societies (ARS) Evanston Conference.⁸ We can look to the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), which has fostered ongoing conversations among scholars in communication and English about rhetorical education, conversations in RSA’s journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly ⁹ and at its conferences and institutes. One of the seminars at the 2013 RSA Institute, for instance, focused on “Rhetoric in/between the Disciplines.” Under the leadership of William Keith and Roxanne Mountford, participants in that seminar (myself included) from communication, English, and in-between collaborated on a manifesto calling for “a unified vision of rhetorical education.”¹⁰ In addition to the work of ARS and RSA, we can also find several edited collections focused on rhetorical education with contributions from communication rhetoricians.¹¹ And, as I will describe later in this essay, we can also look to several important pedagogical initiatives in the works, which, although they might not count as scholarship, nonetheless indicate commitment to rhetorical education.

Yet, on the other hand, there is also evidence indicating that communication rhetoricians have failed to devote significant scholarly attention to rhetorical education. Again, the comparison between rhetoric in English and in communication is instructive. Let me start with the personal. I completed my master’s degree in an English department. From studying rhetoric and composition, I learned that it was common to treat student writing as an object of scholarly study. When I transitioned to a doctoral program in communication, I realized that almost no communication rhetorician treated student writing or speaking as an object of scholarly study, nor were there any journals or anthologies of academic essays that did so. During the first year in my Ph.D. program, I told a faculty member that one of my research interests was rhetorical education. That faculty member was puzzled—and, in turn, I was puzzled. I remember struggling to explain what I meant by rhetorical education. Did I intend to take a critical perspective toward education policy speeches or debates?¹² No. Did I mean a historical survey of how communication courses have developed?¹³ Not really. Did I plan to study rhetorical education in ancient Greece and Rome?¹⁴ No, not quite that either. By rhetorical education, I meant what and how people teach and learn about rhetoric today in the classroom and beyond. I meant teaching and learning—and studying those processes of teaching and learning—rhetoric as an inventional, interpretative, performative, and productive art. I meant imagining what rhetoric and rhetorical education might hope to accomplish while also assessing what rhetorical education actually accomplishes and fails to accomplish.

Academic conferences and journals provide further evidence that communication rhetoricians might devote more scholarly attention to rhetorical education. A search of the 2015 NCA Convention program, for instance, reveals that of the over 1,100 sessions, only three panels focused on rhetorical education.¹⁵ As to journals, Communication Education is highly quantitative, and the last article that focused on rhetorical education was published there in 2007.¹⁶ In the last five years, the Quarterly Journal of Speech—one of the most prestigious in communication rhetoric—published only one article focused on contemporary academic rhetorical education.¹⁷ There were two published in The Review of Communication.¹⁸ Among the NCA journals, Communication Teacher seems to be the one place to find work on rhetorical education, and that work fills an important need. Yet the articles typically focus on an isolated assignment or an in-class activity, without systematically engaging broader questions about the purposes of an entire course or of rhetorical education more generally. By contrast, pedagogy and rhetorical education are central to the work of many rhetoric scholars in English, as is evident by their conference programs and the pages of their flagship journal, College Composition and Communication. It is not unusual to see a university press book with a concluding chapter on classroom application, even if the preceding chapters have had little to do with the classroom. This “pedagogical imperative” has become so pronounced that some rhetoric scholars in English have offered a countermantra: “Stop talking about teaching.”¹⁹

The comparison between rhetoricians in communication with those in English is of course imperfect. It is also important to acknowledge that communication rhetoricians’ general failure to devote scholarly attention to rhetorical education is not only a matter of personal choice; that choice is and has been shaped by complex institutional politics, economic constraints, and disciplinary habits and histories. Understanding those forces is important, especially for those urging rhetoricians in English and communication to reunite.²⁰ For the purposes of this essay, however, I simply want to acknowledge that rhetoricians in communication are what they are for reasons—some good and some bad—and that it is neither possible nor desirable for rhetoricians in communication to transform into compositionists or social scientists. Given these caveats, I want to suggest the following: more—though surely not all—communication rhetoricians should devote scholarly attention to rhetorical education. Doing so need not constitute a betrayal of communication rhetoricians’ scholarly identity; on the contrary, it can actually help us become better versions of ourselves.

Toward that end, the remainder of this essay examines one aspect of rhetorical education that requires further study—what I call the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse. When communication rhetoricians do talk about rhetorical education, they routinely assert that rhetorical education is uniquely suited to help students develop the habits and skills necessary for democratic citizenship. Some scholars have even promised that a rhetorical education can ameliorate problematic elements of civic life, such political dysfunction and demonizing discourse. Indeed, William Keith has referred to the civic mission of rhetorical education—the belief that rhetorical education offers a “practical and cultural basis for Democracy”—as communication rhetoricians’ “animating myth.”²¹ Keith believes in this “myth,” and so do I. I have argued for the civic mission of rhetorical education in some of my previous work,²² and I want to see that mission flourish. But rather than treat the civic mission of rhetorical education as an article of faith or as an assumption taken for granted, we should carefully account for what we do and do not mean.

The gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse is by no means simple, so it is worth examining how we might expect to move between point A and point B. What, precisely, do we mean when we claim that rhetorical education, and, in turn, rhetorical engagement is essential to the functioning of a free and democratic society? Public speech and other forms of rhetorical practice are necessary for the functioning of a democracy because of uncertainty and the need to make collective decisions, but the potential for rhetorical education to influence rhetorical practice is unclear. To what extent—and in what respects—can rhetorical education shape civic discourse, and to what extent can it not? What other forces contribute to civic discourse besides rhetorical education, and how much influence does rhetorical education have in the face of those forces? And if rhetorical education does have at least some influence, what aspects of rhetorical education transfer outside the classroom and beyond the semester, and which do not? How do we know that these elements of rhetorical education are transferrable? What forces make such transfer or adaption difficult, perhaps even impossible? And finally, given our answer to these questions, which ways of undertaking rhetorical education are best suited to fulfilling the civic mission of rhetoric and rhetorical education?

Answering these questions about the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse can help ensure our long-term credibility and success. Rhetorical education’s civic mission is especially potent today, given concerns about U.S. civic disengagement, political dysfunction, and polarization. The civic mission also helps rhetoricians make a case for rhetorical studies within departments, colleges, universities, and the broader culture. This form of public relations—of “selling” rhetoric—is particularly urgent when the value of higher education and especially the humanities seem to be under assault by those wishing to defund education, to mandate “accountability,” and to transform all of higher education into job training. In addition to these strategic reasons, the civic mission of rhetorical education is important because it is how many rhetoricians understand the value of their academic work.

Although many rhetoricians are committed to the civic mission of rhetorical education and rhetoric more generally, this commitment is by no means unanimous or unproblematic. Some scholars critique rhetoric’s “citizenship narrative” and others outright reject it.²³ Still other scholars urge rhetoricians to identify the limits of citizenship and civic discourse.²⁴ Although debates about “citizenship” and “civic discourse” are important ones and ones that I encourage, they are not ones that I wish to engage here. Regardless of whether the purported goal of rhetorical education is to foster civic discourse or something else—such as academic and career preparation or social critique and agitation—rhetoricians have not done a very good job of accounting for how rhetorical education might achieve such goals. In short, we can all benefit from studying rhetorical education.

The first section of this essay explores important pedagogical initiatives that can help bridge the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse; I focus on public speaking textbooks and courses that integrate written and oral communication. While I encourage more such pedagogical initiatives, they alone are not sufficient to realize the civic mission of rhetorical education. The second section traces communication rhetoricians’ recurring appeal to the civic mission of rhetorical education and identifies a need for further research to account for this gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse. In the final section, I argue that more communication rhetoricians should conceptualize, assess, and contextualize the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse by indicating what they do and do not mean, by clarifying the extent to which rhetorical education might improve civic discourse and the extent to which this probably will not or cannot happen, and by studying whether these goals are actually met. I point to work on “transfer” and “effect” as potentially helping us with this task. Overall, then, I identify potential ways for communication rhetoricians to devote scholarly attention to this gap, thus supporting further pedagogical initiatives and helping us to rethink our recurring promise that rhetorical education might transform civic discourse.

Pedagogical initiatives

National reports such as A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future have called for “investing in higher education’s capacity to make civic learning and democratic engagement widely shared national priorities.” The authors of the report further explain that

the competencies basic to democracy cannot be learned only by studying books; democratic knowledge and capabilities are honed through hands-on, face-to-face, active engagement in the midst of differing perspectives about how to address common problems that affect the well-being of the nation and the world.²⁵

Rhetoricians have been eager to claim that rhetorical studies can help answer this call, and some have offered a comprehensive overview of initiatives meant to fulfill the civic mission of rhetorical education.²⁶ Rather than duplicate those overviews here, I briefly want to describe two pedagogical initiatives and their potential to bridge the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse: public speaking textbooks that emphasize rhetoric’s civic mission and courses that combine oral and written communication.

A recent conversation about “The Future of the Basic Course in Communication”—through a special session at the Eastern Communication Association Convention and consequent white paper—revealed that there is substantive disagreement about what the “basic course” should accomplish and concluded that there “could be no ‘one size fits all’ approach.”²⁷ Yet reviewing public speaking textbooks shows that for those interested in the civic mission of rhetorical education, there are several textbooks that emphasize putting “the public back in public speaking.”²⁸ Public Speaking and Civic Engagement, for instance, covers typical ground about preparing and performing speeches, but also extends beyond other textbooks by focusing on civic engagement in each chapter. Students are guided through the process of “developing significant topics,” encouraged to uphold ethical speech and deliberation while distinguishing these from more pernicious forms of rhetoric, and reminded of the role that rhetoric has played throughout history and continues to play in national and local issues. Rich in insights from rhetorical scholarship and examples from the history of public address and social movements, the book insists on the promise of civic discourse while also acknowledging its challenges. The book integrates general advice with real world examples by describing Town Hall Meetings and National Issues Forums in the chapter on speaking and deliberating in groups and by including speeches from local leaders and students on pressing public issues in other chapters, among numerous other examples. Textbooks such as Public Speaking and Civic Engagement can help students and instructors make clearer connections between their work in the classroom and their opportunities for civic engagement.

A second pedagogical initiative is courses that integrate oral and written communication. Such integrated courses are not entirely new,²⁹ although public speaking has tended to be the domain of communication and writing has tended to be the domain of English since the disciplines split in 1914. Fueled in part by recent efforts to bridge the divide between rhetoric in English and communication—as expressed succinctly in the “The Mt. Oread Manifesto on Rhetorical Education 2013”³⁰—these pedagogical initiatives have promised to help students become more skilled and capable communicators. At places such as Iowa State,³¹ Penn State,³² and the University of Kentucky,³³ courses and curricula have been designed to provide unified training in speaking and writing. While integrated courses are not without drawbacks and challenges, such courses take seriously the art of rhetoric by unifying several modes of communication (including written, oral, visual, and electronic). Such courses also take seriously the communication needs of the 21st century by acknowledging that one mode might be more effective than others to achieve a particular goal, so, perhaps more than ever, students need to be nimble rhetors. At times writing an essay might be the most effective way to communicate an idea or motivate others to act, but at other times, one might be more effective by posting to a blog, designing a poster, performing a talk, composing and sharing a short video, or initiating a deliberative conversation among community members. And while there is value in traditional public speeches—highly structured informative, persuasive, or ceremonial speeches delivered extemporaneously at the front of a classroom—there are also moments when it is more effective to record and upload one’s “speech” as a video or a podcast to distribute more broadly. This broad based training is meant to help students develop what Gerard A. Hauser calls “rhetorical competence.”³⁴

One course that focuses explicitly on rhetoric’s civic mission is Penn State’s first-year honors course, “Rhetoric and Civic Life.” The course was created by Debra Hawhee, with support from Penn State’s Center for Democratic Deliberation. During my graduate study at Penn State, I had the opportunity to teach a section of the class during the 2012–2013 school year. In considering the connections between rhetorical education and civic discourse, the course does three things particularly well. First, the course is a year long, not just a semester, so there is ample opportunity for analyzing, practicing, and learning about multiple modes of communication. Even though a yearlong course cannot provide a thorough rhetorical education, there is nonetheless time to extend beyond traditional writing and speaking assignments so students can engage in other modes of communication.

Second, the class provides explicit instruction in rhetoric and deliberation, beyond just Aristotle’s three rhetorical appeals and Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation. When I taught the class, the standard texts for the year were Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students, Anne Fraces Wysocki and Dennis A. Lynch’s Compose, Design, Advocate: A Rhetoric for Integrating Written, Oral, and Visual Communication, and John Gastil’s Political Communication and Deliberation.³⁵ Such immersion in classical and contemporary concepts offered the potential for students to see rhetoric’s historical connection to civic discourse while simultaneously offering language for moving between rhetorical education and contemporary civic discourse.

Third, there is an explicit emphasis on the “civic” in the design of the course and assignments. In the first semester of the yearlong course, students read essays about the “civic,” and the class discussed different representations of civic engagement. Extending those conversations, students delivered their first speech based on their analysis of a civic engagement artifact or their interview of someone who they considered to be civically engaged. Starting the class in such a way showed the presence of the “civic” in their everyday lives yet also highlighted that what constitutes “civic” and “civic engagement” is itself a product of debate and disagreement. Through the remainder of the year, students were encouraged to become civically engaged by addressing issues of common concern and by sharing their work to broader audiences. Students regularly blogged about civic issues and commented on each other’s work. In a unit in the second semester, students deliberated civic issues using the National Issues Forum model, and then compared that face-to-face experience with their attempts to translate deliberative principles into online spaces. In another assignment, groups researched a history of a public controversy, created a video that contextualized and analyzed that controversy, and then shared that video through Youtube. At the end of the year, students wrote a persuasive essay and then transformed their claims into an advocacy project in a mode of their choosing, which they attempted to engage the campus community or wider audiences.

Public speaking courses that emphasize the “public” and integrated writing and speaking courses that emphasize rhetoric’s civic mission, among other pedagogical initiatives, should continue. Yet pedagogical efforts alone are not enough. We need scholarly work that accounts for the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse. While there is arguably an implicit theory about the relationship between rhetorical education and civic discourse within the very design of the textbooks and courses that I have described—and hopefully in classes as they unfold—rhetoricians could benefit as scholars and teachers by making such implicit connections explicit and by devoting scholarly attention to rhetorical education. In short, they could benefit from questioning the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse.

Questioning the gap

Although the commitment to rhetorical education and its civic mission was once prominent, contemporary rhetorical scholars claim that this commitment has weakened if not been lost. Writing on behalf of the pedagogy group from the 2003 Alliance of Rhetoric Societies’ meeting, Gerard A. Hauser claimed that rhetorical scholars needed a “manifesto recovering the value of rhetoric education as central to civic education.”³⁶ Hauser’s conclusion, which has been cited by other advocates of rhetorical education, is worth quoting at length:

Free societies require rhetorically competent citizens. Without rhetorical competence, citizens are disabled in the public arenas of citizen exchange—the marketplace, the representative assembly, the court, and public institutions—and democracy turns into a ruse disguising the reality of oligarchic power. Capacitating students to be competent citizens is our birthright. It has been since antiquity. Modern education has stripped us of it. We need to reclaim it.³⁷

Claiming that “capacitating students to be competent citizens is our birthright” sounds hyperbolic, but this is nonetheless a commonly expressed sentiment. “Rhetorical training,” Jeremy Engels suggests, “is the foundation of civic engagement and democratic deliberation.”³⁸ By offering “our undergraduates the best rhetorical education possible,” Denise M. Bostdorff claims, we might “improve the quality of democratic practices.”³⁹ According to J. Michael Hogan, rhetorical scholars must “embrace civic education as a top priority.”⁴⁰ “A revival of our civic culture must begin with the basics: teaching young people about the ethics of public advocacy and the responsibilities of citizenship.”⁴¹ Robert E. Terrill similarly argues that rhetorical scholars must “reclaim more fully for rhetoric its traditional role in citizen education.”⁴² Scholars appealing to the civic mission of rhetorical education regularly invoke rhetorical education in ancient Greece (paideia) or the work of early pragmatists such as John Dewey (or attempt to combine these traditions, as is evident by Brian Jackson’s coinage “paideweyan pedagogy”).⁴³ But as the previous citations indicate, such appeals are made not just by scholars of pragmatism or classical rhetoric, but extend to other areas of rhetorical studies.

David Zarefsky’s chapter “Two Faces of Democratic Rhetoric” is instructive because he offers a sustained argument for the potential of contemporary rhetorical education to transform civic discourse. Noting that “most of us harbor some anxiety about the state of contemporary rhetoric, or of contemporary democracy, or perhaps even both,” Zarefsky argues that “democratic rhetoric has two faces—one benign, one threatening—that exist in tension, that the balance between them is jeopardized, and that our active efforts are needed to restore it.”⁴⁴ He describes the “threatening” face of democratic rhetoric as the “engineering of consent”—rhetoric that is “manipulative rather than deliberative,” rhetoric of the “closed fist, not the open hand.”⁴⁵ To restore the balance between the two faces of democratic rhetoric, and thus to create a more deliberative democracy, Zarefsky offers two suggestions. First, he claims that “leaders must become more sensitive to their role as rhetorical leaders. This is about agenda setting, setting forth templates for understanding issues, modeling reason-giving, and inviting participation.”⁴⁶ Second, Zarefsky points to rhetorical education:

It is in our classrooms that we can best cultivate what Walter Lippmann called “the public philosophy.” That involves addressing significant public issues. It involves exploring why they are uncertain and controversial. It involves recognizing and appreciating the competing values and beliefs that underlie different choices. It involves deciding upon a position and trying to justify it in the face of critical scrutiny. It involves revising our understanding based on what others might have to say. It involves effective advocacy that is sensitive to audience beliefs without pandering to them. And it involves prompting students not to sit on the sidelines, but to be actively involved as members of a deliberating and decision-making public.⁴⁷

Zarefsky provides a valuable account of the orientation and practices that rhetorical education might instill. Yet the link he makes—and that others have made—between problems in public discourse and the solution of rhetorical education should give us pause. A charitable reading suggests that Zarefsky is doing what a scholar ought to do: he delimits the scope of potential solutions by focusing on what rhetoricians are most qualified to speak about—the promise of rhetoric and rhetorical education. Since he does not have space to write about everything—and given his audience and purpose—it makes sense that he chose to focus on rhetorical education.

Yet a more critical reading should make us wonder whether Zarefsky—and others committed to the civic mission of rhetorical education—are offering education solutions to non-education problems. Such a mismatch can elide structural and collective problems and solutions while wrongly placing responsibility on education and individual effort. Zarefsky entertains the possibility that there might be structural causes to explain why the two faces of democratic rhetoric are out of balance and why public discourse has tilted toward the threatening face. He considers the “corporatization of the media” as a possible explanation for this imbalance. He notes that some claim that “mergers and acquisitions have made media organizations parts of larger conglomerates whose corporate values, ideology, and self-interest restrict the content of what is broadcast.”⁴⁸ Yet Zarefsky concludes that he is “not too worried about the charge of excessive media influence.”⁴⁹ And while some blame the Internet, Zarefsky concludes, “If the Internet recapitulates shallow discussions, unreflective judgments, and stereotypes, it will be the fault not of the technology but of the lack of demand for anything else.”⁵⁰ Ultimately, according to Zarefsky, it is individuals who are responsible for the character and quality of civic discourse.

Such an account of rhetorical education and civic discourse is potentially inspiring yet potentially overwhelming. Without contextualization and conceptualization, such an account can also be downright confusing. Writing for scholars of rhetoric and composition, John Duffy laments the disconnect between actually existing public argument and what rhetoric and composition scholars in English study and teach:

Despite the sustained scholarship devoted to the study and teaching of writing, despite the highly trained Writing Studies faculty leading writing programs across the nation, and despite the impressive numbers of students completing our courses each year, we seem to have little influence on the conduct of American public argument. The principles we teach are largely absent from the public square, and our conceptions of rhetoric as a method of inquiry and community building seem so much folklore, appealing mythologies that have little purchase in the worlds beyond our classrooms.⁵¹

To some extent, what Duffy says of the writing classroom does not apply to public speaking classrooms, or rhetoric courses more generally: civic discourse is often the impetus for performance-based courses such as public speaking, and it is often the object of study in courses in rhetorical criticism, public address, and social movements. Yet there is also a sense in which Duffy’s lament ought to lead communication rhetoricians to be concerned—or, at minimum, to offer a response. Do we expect that a single course in public speaking or first-year writing—or even an advanced course in rhetorical performance, criticism, history, or theory—is capable of transforming “American public argument?” I suspect not, since that would grossly overestimate the power of one course—or of a series of courses, or probably even of higher education—and underestimate the power of other forces shaping civic discourse. But what, precisely, do we mean when we assert the civic mission of rhetorical education?

Some scholars offer a model of rhetorical education as civic discourse, rather than a model of rhetorical education and then civic discourse.⁵² Jenny Edbauer, for instance, asks us to reimagine linear, “one-way flow” models of rhetoric and rhetorical education. She encourages “a rethinking of the ‘in order to later’ model, where students learn methods, skills, and research in order to later produce at other sites (other sites in the university or workplace, for example).”⁵³ Similarly, pragmatist rhetorical scholars emphasize the process of rhetorical education—not just the end goal or product—by suggesting that the kinds of rhetorical engagement and community building that happen within rhetoric classrooms are themselves a kind of civic discourse.⁵⁴ At their best, classrooms can foster deliberative communities and function as what Eberly calls protopublic spaces.⁵⁵ Together, these scholars illustrate that rhetorical education is not simply the teaching of something to be used later; rhetorical education, as it is happening, can be a kind of civic discourse.

Yet those who invoke the civic mission of rhetorical education nonetheless depend on a linear model—rhetorical education and then civic discourse—which promises that the things learned in rhetoric classrooms can be useful later. However, it is not exactly clear how this process happens. To put the matter crudely, how do students move from point A to point B? How is it that rhetorical education gets beyond the confines of the classroom and extends beyond the scope of a semester? The language we typically use to describe rhetorical education offers a partial answer: we claim that rhetorical education fosters habits and skills,⁵⁶ rhetorical competence,⁵⁷ and capacities.⁵⁸ The point of rhetorical education is not to offer a template to be exhumed from one text or rhetorical situation and dropped into another, nor is to provide a list of rules to apply dogmatically, nor is it even primarily to provide a series of names, dates, and definitions to memorize. Rhetorical education instead offers a unique way of encountering and engaging the world. In this understanding, “the person becomes rhetorical.”⁵⁹ If, as Thomas W. Benson claims, rhetoric offers “a way of being, a way of knowing, and a way of doing,”⁶⁰ then we might adapt his insight to say that those who are committed to the civic mission of rhetorical education seek to foster civically oriented ways of being, knowing, and doing. Although I find this answer partially satisfying, our long-term credibility and success require a fuller answer.

Moving forward: Scholarly study of the gap

Arguing for a return to the civic mission of rhetoric and rhetorical education is not enough, since, among other reasons, times have changed. “It is simply unfair and unreasonable,” Robert Danisch explains, “to expect American democracy to replicate the social structures of Athens and then teach the same form of rhetorical education.”⁶¹ William D. Fusfield suggests that the transformations are so dramatic that we must radically rethink the civic mission of rhetorical education: “we live in a society where deals are cut rather than issues deliberated.” In such a society, “what is most needed are shrewd bargaining skills backed by big bucks, useful connections, political muscle, and eristical virtuosity, not traditional critical, argumentative, or oratorical skills.”⁶² Rather than “refusing to believe” the “social, cultural and educational realities of our age,” Fusfield recommends coming to terms with them and “get on with improving the things we can.”⁶³ “We can ill afford to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that a rehash of classical liberal arts pedagogy will magically address the unique education problems of our age.”⁶⁴

We need to acknowledge the unique demands of the 21st century, to acknowledge the complexity of the very terms “rhetorical education” and “civic discourse,” and to acknowledge the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse. We need to conceptualize, assess, and contextualize this gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse so that we might account for why the movement between point A and point B is by no means simple or guaranteed. (Along the way, we might also consider whether there are better ways for imagining and talking about this relationship than “gap,” “movement,” and “point A and point B.”)

If we envision rhetorical education as providing a particular orientation to the world and strategies for engagement, for instance, then how are these expressed outside the walls of the classroom and beyond the course of a semester? Is there a direct translation, where the same ways of rhetorical being, knowing, and doing—the same orientations, habits, and strategies—that are studied or enacted in a rhetoric class can be repeated? Or must these be extended or refined? In either case, how does this process of adaptation work? And are there ways to modify our teaching to better support such adaptation?

While these are big questions, there are two bodies of scholarship that can help rhetoricians conceptualize and assess the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse. First, we might look to existing research in rhetorical studies on “effect.” Introducing their recent collection of essays on effect, Amos Kiewe and Davis W. Houck acknowledge, “the story of rhetoric’s effects has a tortured history in rhetorical studies.”⁶⁵ Until quite recently, questions about a speech’s effect have been assumed, relegated to the background, or outright ignored. A central instigator for the revival of “effect” in rhetorical studies is the political scientist George C. Edwards III. He “raised critical questions about the gap between the stated purpose of rhetoric to influence and the lack of such evidence in the work of some of the field’s most distinguished scholars.”⁶⁶ Edwards goaded rhetorical scholars to account for rhetoric’s effects. Mary E. Stuckey, among many others, responded by suggesting that presidential speech—and rhetoric more generally—indeed does make a difference in the world. The problem was not a lack of effect, but instead that “skeptics and critics [of effects] have an overly narrow view of the functions and power of presidential speech.”⁶⁷ Stuckey’s answer is instructive because she did not dispute the data that Edwards offered (or, more precisely, his charge that rhetoricians lacked empirical data). Rather she made her case on conceptual grounds by arguing that there are alternative ways for understanding effect:

Such effects might be more long rather than short term; they might involve reinforcement rather than changes in opinion; they might involve determining which issues get on the national agenda; or they might concern how those issues are defined, understood, and debated.⁶⁸

While Stuckey was making the case for the effects of presidential rhetoric, her insights might be adapted to help conceptualize and assess the effects of rhetorical education. Rather than expecting rhetorical education to transform civic discourse and public argument, we might find other ways of understanding how rhetorical education fulfills its civic mission by recognizing, for instance, that some effects might be long term and subtle.

Work on “transfer” offers a second body of scholarship that can potentially help rhetoricians conceptualize and assess this gap. Studies of transfer began in developmental psychology and have since been developed in other academic disciplines, including rhetoric and composition in English. Scholars of transfer point out complications that come with the term “transfer,” and some identify alternatives such as “recontextualization”⁶⁹ or “repurposing.”⁷⁰ But regardless of the name, the same problem is at stake: how does a person take what they have learned—whether that is knowledge, an orientation, habits, strategies, etc.—from one context and use it in another? Rebecca S. Nowacek highlights that “too often, teachers assume that transfer will simply happen.”⁷¹ Yet transfer is a complicated process that warrants scholarly research and careful pedagogical planning.

Current research on transfer does not offer complete answers for rhetoricians to conceptualize and assess the gap but this research does offer several clues. First, scholars of transfer point to meta-awareness for helping individuals transfer. For example, while public speaking teachers often ask students to assess how they performed on a speech, moments of reflection might be integrated more purposefully throughout a student’s rhetorical education to help them become more adept at assessing rhetorical situations and more skilled at thinking about their ways of rhetorical knowing, being, and doing. Second, scholars of transfer offer a nuanced vocabulary for conceptualizing transfer. For example, David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon distinguish between near and far transfer, high road (or mindful) transfer vs. low road (or reflexive transfer), and between positive and negative transfer.⁷² Third, and perhaps most importantly, scholars of transfer remind us that students are not simply conduits for teachers’ words and lessons. There is no “the Student,” only students. And these students, to greater and lesser degrees, have agency. Students can accept or reject our purported lessons of rhetorical education; they can understand or misunderstand them; they can pick some parts over others; they can integrate rhetorical education from our classes with their other experiences, or they can keep the two realms separate. Moreover, each student has multiple identities; the “engaged citizen” identity is not the only identity and, for most students most of time, probably not even the primary one.

Scholarship on effect and transfer might help us conceptualize and assess the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse, but we must also contextualize this gap by identifying what rhetorical education can and cannot accomplish. In their own analyses of civic discourse, rhetorical critics carefully describe the context to which and in which a speaker, group, or message responds. Doing so highlights that what is said and sayable, and that what is done and doable, are not unconstrained. Instead, a given statement or action is enabled and sometimes even intensified by a host of factors, while another statement or action is constrained and sometimes even thwarted by a host of factors. Identifying these contextual factors is crucial for doing rhetorical criticism, and rhetoricians should also identify such contextual factors when describing the civic mission of rhetorical education and assessing its promises and perils. Even for individuals who are well trained in rhetoric and well motivated to engage in civic discourse, there are obstacles that limit, prevent, and sometimes punish them from enacting the ideals they were taught in the classroom. How, for instance, do symbolic and structural forces—including cultural, economic, political, and technological forces—invite or support civic discourse in some contexts but not others? How do symbolic and structural forces invite or support civic involvement from some bodies but not others? How do symbolic and structural forces invite or support civic involvement through some means of expression, while discouraging or demonizing other modes of expression? What are these factors generally, and what are they in a particular context? And to what extent can these factors be addressed through rhetorical education and rhetorical engagement, and to what extent not? Central to answering these questions is to remember that not all rhetorical problems can be solved through rhetorical education, and that not all problems are rhetorical problems.

Conclusion

This essay has offered more questions than answers. The answers that I have offered are meant not as final ones but as initial ones to invite further scholarly conversation. Accounting for the gap between rhetorical education and civic discourse, as I have suggested, requires scholarly study that conceptualizes, assesses, and contextualizes this gap (which, to be more precise, consists of several smaller gaps). I have offered a partial account here. With a fuller account, we can strengthen existing pedagogical initiatives and support new ones. Such an account can better equip us to help students develop ways of rhetorical being, knowing, and doing that they can use to create, interpret, and engage civic discourse. Finally, such an account can also bolster our long-term credibility and success. By acknowledging and explicating the limits of rhetoric and rhetorical education, we can better affirm both the potential and actual contributions that rhetoric and rhetorical education can make to civic discourse, democratic engagement, and public argument.

Acknowledgment

An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 2015 NCA Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, and benefited from the audience’s and the respondent’s feedback. The author would also like to thank Laura Michael Brown, Ben Crosby, Maggie LaWare, Pat Gehrke, and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback.

Notes

1. Wayne C. Booth, “Forward,” in The Realms of Rhetoric: The Prospects for Rhetoric Education, ed. Joseph Petragalia and Deepika Bahri (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), viii.

2. Jeffrey Walker, The Genuine Teachers of this Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 3.

3. William M. Keith, “We are the Speech Teachers,” The Review of Communication 11.2 (2011): 87.

4. Gerry Philipsen, “Paying Lip Service to ‘Speech’ in Disciplinary Naming, 1914–1954,” in A Century of Communication Studies: The Unfinished Conversation, eds. Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith (New York: Routledge, 2015), 52.

5. Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith, “Introduction: A Brief History of the National Communication Association,” in A Century of Communication Studies, 7.

6. Michael Leff, “Teaching Public Speaking as Composition,” Basic Course Annual (1992): 116.

7. Rosa A. Eberly, “Rhetoric and the Anti-Logos Doughball: Teaching Deliberating Bodies the Practices of Participatory Democracy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5.2 (2002): 292.

8. Gerard A. Hauser, “Teaching Rhetoric: Or why Rhetoric Isn’t Just Another Kind of Philosophy or Literary Criticism,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (2004): 29–54.

9. See, for example, Robert Terrill, “Mimesis, Duality, and Rhetorical Education,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41.4 (2011): 295–315; and Matt McGarrity and Richard Benjamin Crosby, “Rhetorical Invention in Public Speaking Textbooks and Classrooms,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42.2 (2012): 164–186.

10. “The Mt. Oread Manifesto on Rhetorical Education 2013,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44.1(2014): 2.

11. See, for example, Joseph Petraglia and Deepika Bahri, eds., The Realms of Rhetoric: The Prospects of Rhetoric Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Todd F. McDorman and David M. Timmerman, eds., Rhetoric & Democracy: Pedagogical and Political Practices (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008); and Jim A. Kuypers, ed., Purpose, Practice, and Pedagogy in Rhetorical Criticism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).

12. For example, Mark Hlavacik, “The Democratic Origins of Teachers Union Rhetoric: Margaret Haley’s Speech at the 1904 NEA Convention,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15 (2012): 499–524.

13. For example, Pat J. Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009).

14. For example, Takis Poulakos and David Depew, eds., Isocrates and Civic Education (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).

15. These three panels were titled “Rhetorical Education and the Pragmatist Tradition: Pedagogical Opportunities for Building Democratic Communities,” “Teaching the Undergraduate Rhetorical Criticism Course,” and “‘Embracing’ Kenneth Burke as Pedagogical Equipment for Living: Burkean Pedagogy in the Next Century of NCA.” The NCA program is currently available online: https://ww4.aievolution.com/nca1501/index.cfm?do=ev.pubSearchEvents (accessed December 9, 2015).

16. Dale Cyphert, “Presentation Technology in the Age of Electronic Eloquence: From Visual Aid to Visual Rhetoric,” Communication Education 56.2 (2007): 168–192.

17. E. Johanna Hartelius, “Revising Vico’s Pedagogy of Invention: The Intellectual Enterpreneurship Pre-Graduate School Internship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98.2 (2012): 153–177.

18. Johanna Hartelius, “Models of Signification and Pedagogy in J.L. Austin, John Searle, and Jacques Derrida,” The Review of Communication 13.1 (2013): 23–47; and Lester C. Olson, “Concerning Judgment in Criticism of Rhetoric,” The Review of Communication 12.3 (2012): 251–256.

19. Sidney L. Dobrin, Postcomposition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 190.

20. See, for example, Roxanne Mountford, “A Century After the Divorce: Challenges to a Rapprochment Between Speech Communication and English,” in The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, eds. Andrea A. Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa A. Eberly (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009), 407–422.

21. William Keith, “Identity, Rhetoric and Myth: A Response to Mailloux and Leff,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30.4 (2000): 100.

22. Craig Rood, “Rhetorics of Civility: Theory, Pedagogy, and Practice in Speaking and Writing Textbooks,” Rhetoric Review 32.3 (2013): 331–348; and Craig Rood, “‘Moves’ toward Rhetorical Civility,” Pedagogy 14.3 (2014): 395–415.

23. Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101.1 (2015): 162–172.

24. Kenneth Rufo and R. Jarrod Atchison, “From Circus to Fasces: The Disciplinary Politics of Citizen and Citizenship,” The Review of Communication 11.3 (2011): 193–215.

25. National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagements, “Highlights from A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future,” Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2012, http://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/crucible/highlights.pdf (accessed December 9, 2015), 1.

26. Denise M. Bostdorff, “Preparing Undergraduates for Democratic Citizenship: Upholding the Legacy of William Norwood Brigance through Rhetorical Education,” in Rhetoric & Democracy, 39–74; J. Michael Hogan, “Rhetorical Pedagogy and Democratic Citizenship: Reviving the Traditions of Civic Engagement and Public Deliberation,” in Rhetoric & Democracy, 75–98; and J. Michael Hogan, “Rhetorical and Civic Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: A Neoclassical Rhetoric for the Digital Age,” in Purpose, Practice, and Pedagogy in Rhetorical Criticism, 53–67.

27. J. Michael Hogan and Jeffrey A. Kurr, “The Future of the Basic Course in Communication,” Center for Democratic Deliberation, 2015, http://cdd.la.psu.edu/education/future-of-the-basic-course-white-paper (accessed December 9, 2015).

28. William Keith and Christian O. Lundberg, Public Speaking: Choice and Responsibility (Boston: Wadsworth Publishing, 2012), xii. For two additional examples, see: Steven Schwarze, Speaking in the Public Sphere (New York: Pearson, 2012); and J. Michael Hogan, Patricia Hayes Andrews, James R. Andrews, Glen Williams, Public Speaking and Civic Engagement, 3^rd ed. (New York: Pearson, 2014).

29. See Sharon Crowley, “Communications Skills and a Brief Rapprochment of Rhetoricians,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.1 (2004): 89-103; Mountford,“A Century After the Divorce”; and Cara A. Finnegan and Marissa Lowe Wallace, “Origin Stories and Dreams of Collaboration: Rethinking Histories of the Communication Course and the Relationships Between English and Speech,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44.5 (2014): 401–426.

30. “The Mt. Oread Manifesto on Rhetorical Education 2013,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44.1 (2014): 1–5.

31. For more information, see http://www.engl.iastate.edu/isucomm/.

32. For more information, see http://rcl.la.psu.edu/.

33. For more information, see https://wrd.as.uky.edu/.

34. Hauser, “Teaching Rhetoric,” 52.

35. Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, 5^th ed., (New York: Pearson, 2012); Anne Frances Wysocki and Dennis A. Lynch, Compose, Design, Advocate: A Rhetoric for Integrating Written, Oral, and Visual Communication, 2^nd ed., (Boston: Pearson, 2013); and John Gastil, Political Communication and Deliberation (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2008).

36. Hauser, “Teaching Rhetoric,” 40.

37. Ibid., 52.

38. Jeremy Engels, The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 160.

39. Bostdorff, “Preparing Undergraduates for Democratic Citizenship,” 66.

40. Hogan, “Rhetorical and Civic Literacy in the Twenty-First Century,” 65.

41. J. Michael Hogan, “Public Address and the Revival of American Civic Culture,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, eds. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 436.

42. Robert E. Terrill, “Rhetorical Criticism and Citizenship Education,” in Purpose, Practice, and Pedagogy in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Jim A. Kuypers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 174.

43. Brian Jackson, “Cultivating Paideweyan Pedagogy: Rhetoric Education in English and Communication Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37.2 (2007): 181–201.

44. David Zarefsky, “Two Faces of Democratic Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric & Democracy, 115–116.

45. Ibid., 123–24.

46. Ibid., 133.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., 127.

49. Ibid., 127.

50. Ibid., 128.

51. John Duffy, “Ethical Dispositions: A Discourse for Rhetoric and Composition,” JAC 34.1 (2014): 211.

52. I encourage scholars to consider other possible relations. Civic discourse as rhetorical education, for instance, directs our attention to the often-informal yet nonetheless powerful moments of rhetorical education that happen throughout a person’s life, which can be an asset or a counter-force to the formalized rhetorical education in classrooms.

53. Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situations to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.3 (2005): 23.

54. For example, Robert Danisch, Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007).

55. Rosa A. Eberly, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

56. Hogan, “Public Address and the Revival of American Civic Culture,” 440.

57. Hauser, “Teaching Rhetoric,” 52.

58. Walker, The Genuine Teachers of This Art, 290.

59. James J. Murphy, ed., A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America, 2^nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 75.

60. Thomas W. Benson, “Rhetoric and Autobiography: The Case of Malcom X,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60.1 (1974): 1

61. Robert Danisch, Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 212.

62. William D. Fusfield, “The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Renewing Rhetoric Education in an Age of ‘Big Rhetoric,’” in The Realm of Rhetoric, 123.

63. William D. Fusfield, “Refusing to Believe It: Considerations on Public Speaking Instruction in a Post-Machiavellian Moment,” Social Epistemology 11 (1997): 266, 297.

64. Ibid., 291.

65. Amos Kiewe and Davis W. Houck, “Introduction,” in The Effects of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Effects, eds. Amos Kiewe and Davis W. Houck (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015), 1.

66. Ibid., 2.

67. Mary E. Stuckey, “Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and Instrumental Effects of Presidential Rhetoric,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, 294.

68. Ibid.

69. Rebecca S. Nowacek, Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 21.

70. Elizabeth Wardle, “Creative Repurposing for Expansive Learning: Considering ‘Problem-Exploring’ and ‘Answer-Getting’ Dispositions in Individuals and Fields,” Composition Forum 26 (2012), http://compositionforum.com/issue/26/creative-repurposing.php (accessed December 9, 2015).

71. Nowacek, Agents of Integration, 15.

72. Cited in Kathleen Blake Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak, Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2014), 7.