Educational policy is often dismissed as simply rhetoric and a collection of half truths. However, this is to underestimate the power of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetorical strategies are integral to persuasive acts. Through a series of illustrative chapters, this book argues that rather than something to be dismissed, rhetorical analysis offers a rich and deep arena in which to explore and examine educational issues and practices. It adopts an original stance in relation to contemporary debates and will make a significant contribution to educational debates in elucidating and illustrating the pervasiveness of persuasive strategies in educational practices. Rhetoric and Educational Discourse is a useful resource for postgraduate and research students in education and applied linguistics. The book will also be of interest to academics and researchers in these fields of study and those interested in discursive approaches to research and scholarship.

Casts a revealing light on modern cultural conflicts through the lens of rhetorical education. Contemporary efforts to revitalize the civic mission of higher education in America have revived an age-old republican tradition of teaching students to be responsible citizens, particularly through the study of rhetoric, composition, and oratory. This book examines the political, cultural, economic, and religious agendas that drove the various—and often conflicting—curricula and contrasting visions of what good citizenship entails. Mark Garrett Longaker argues that higher education more than 200 years ago allowed actors with differing political and economic interests to wrestle over the fate of American citizenship. Then, as today, there was widespread agreement that civic training was essential in higher education, but there were also sharp differences in the various visions of what proper republic citizenship entailed and how to prepare for it. Longaker studies in detail the specific trends in rhetorical education offered at various early institutions—such as Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and William and Mary—with analyses of student lecture notes, classroom activities, disputation exercises, reading lists, lecture outlines, and literary society records. These documents reveal an extraordinary range of economic and philosophical interests and allegiances—agrarian, commercial, spiritual, communal, and belletristic—specific to each institution. The findings challenge and complicate a widely held belief that early-American civic education occurred in a halcyon era of united democratic republicanism. Recognition that there are multiple ways to practice democratic citizenship and to enact democratic discourse, historically as well as today, best serves the goal of civic education, Longaker argues. Rhetoric and the Republic illuminates an important historical moment in the history of American education and dramatically highlights rhetorical education as a key site in the construction of democracy.

In nineteen essays illustrating its many aspects, this book offers an argument for what it takes to construct a complete rhetorical education. The editors take an approach that is pragmatic and pluralistic, based as it is on the assumptions that a rhetorical education is not limited to teaching freshman composition (or any specific writing course) and that the contexts in which such an education occurs are not limited to classrooms. This thought-provoking volume stresses that while a rhetorical education results in the growth of writing skills, its larger goal is to foster critical thinking.

Discourses of Denial explores the myriad ways that the labor of those employed by universities is situated as somehow distinct from ordinary labor. Focusing on a variety of sites where academic labor is discursively constructed in popular consciousness including among the professoriate itself, its critics and detractors, the unionization struggles of graduate students, the invisibility of contingent academics and the resistance to the unionization of student athletes. Merging Critical Rhetoric (CR) with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) this study examines myth that "academic work is not the same as other labor" (Pason, 2011, p. 1786). The denial of academic labor functions to underwrite an attack on labor in all of its variations producing what Berardi (2009) calls a "new kind of worker [who] value[s] labor as the most interesting part of his or her life and therefore no longer opposes the prolongation of the working day but is actually ready to lengthen it out of personal choice and will" (p. 79). The professoriate is, therefore, not a retrograde figure of more genteel times but the emblematic figure of late capitalism’s transition to cognitive labor and with it an unceasing colonization of the human lifeworld.

On the Politics of Educational Theory considers the political significance of educational theory as a specific genre of public discourse. Rather than understanding educational theories solely as addressing issues of childrearing and instruction, this book aims to view educational theories in a broader socio-political context. It explores the role of educational theories in the construction of collective and political identities, and analyses them as rhetorical strategies operating as political discourses. Defining the methodological framework through the perspectives of Michel Foucault and Ernesto Laclau, each chapter examines the ways in which theories of education contribute to the creation of social realities and identities. Such issues as the construction of visibility and invisibility of power, the tropes of temporality, or the use of postulational language where theorists say what ‘should’ be done in and by education, are some of the threads that weave through particular theories – from Rousseau to the discourse of education in the knowledge-based society – analysed as ontological rhetorics constitutive of political identities. This book suggests a direction for a more conscious way of dealing with the political in education. As such, it will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of educational research, philosophy of education, curriculum studies, social and political theory, and theory of education. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315712505, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

The argument of this book is that the earliest tradition of Western rhetoric, the classical perspective of Aristotle and Cicero, continues to have the greatest impact on writing instruction--albeit an unconscious impact. This occurs despite the fact that modern rhetoric no longer accepts either the views of mind, language, and world underlying ancient theory or the concepts about discourse, knowledge, and communication presented in that theory. As a result, teachers are depending on ideas as outmoded as they are unreflectively accepted. Knoblauch and Brannon maintain that the two traditions are fundamentally incompatible in their assumptions and concepts, so that writing teachers must make choices between them if their teaching is to be purposeful and consistent. They suggest that the modern tradition offers a richer basis for instruction, and they show what teaching from that perspective looks like and how it differs from traditional teaching.

Comprised of a study spanning over five years, this text looks at four engineering co-op students as they write at work. Since the contributors have a foot in both worlds -- work and school -- the book should appeal to people who are interested in how students learn to write as well as people who are interested in what writing at work is like. Primarily concerned with whether engineers see their writing as rhetorical or persuasive, the study attempts to describe the students' changing understanding of what it is they do when they write. Two features of engineering practice that have particular impact on the extent to which engineers recognize persuasion are identified: * a reverence for data, and * the hierarchical structure of the organizations in which engineering is most commonly done. Both of these features discourage an open recognition of persuasion. Finally, the study shows that the four co-op students learned most of what they knew about writing at work by engaging in situated practice in the workplace, rather than by attending formal classes.