Internalizing Ethos: Reflection Piece
2004-2005 Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning Project
Jonna Gjevre
Department of English and
Philosophy
A.
Several methods were used to encourage deeper learning.
An attempt was made to encourage students to approach
the film’s personal and visual rhetoric. Students were encouraged to define
different persona embodied by McNamara such as the confessor seeking
absolution, the teacher seeking to educate and the community leader with pearls
of wisdom for the young. Some students were very active in defining distinct
persona of their own that they found in his rhetoric. Others were less
successful in that they sought to verify the validity of his claims rather than
to define his strategies. The central goal of the practice was to get a student
to not only be a critical consumer of information, but
to understand how to become one. By getting students to define the tools used
by McNamara, they become empowered to more critically
evaluate his arguments, but more importantly, they also enabled to
recognize and utilize the tools available for their own rhetorical strategies.
B.
The difference between a teaching question and a learning question is
contingent on perspective. A teaching question is more a question of “what,”
while a learning question emphasizes “how.” A question of “what” rhetorical
strategies are used by McNamara can simply be answered
with a list of devices, but the deeper question involves answering “how.” How
do those devices resonate with the listener, how do those devices succeed or
fail in solidifying the argument of the speaker, how can the students use those
devices to dissect his argument, and perhaps most importantly, how will
students utilize similar devices to promote or debunk ideas in their own lives.
Perhaps the final “how” is how can a teacher provide the necessary scaffolding
for this kind of learning to be supported.
C.
For a student to have learned deeply in this class he or she must be able to
discern the difference between content and the strategy of rhetoric.
Understanding that very little content exists in a vacuum is key.
Much like rhythm and dynamics giving a sense of direction and urgency to a
sequence of musical notes, the tools available to rhetoricians often seem
transparent or even absent to many students. To learn deeply from this class a
student needs to do more than merely see a car driving by. Rather, they should
‘look under the hood’ to see what makes it go; ideally, the student should get
their fingers greasy in the process. One example of a student failing to ‘look
under the hood’ involved a students merely writing down McNamara’s “Eleven
Lessons” from the film and restating them as “Eleven Things I learned from the
Film.” This failed to address rhetorical constructs of any kind; it merely
restated the rhetorician’s argument. It was fairly difficult
to assess whether the student understood McNamara’s argument at all, let alone
the strategies employed. In contrast, another student spent their entire spring
break dissecting the piece and bringing new insights regarding McNamara’s
rhetorical devices to the table.
While both students were able to write a paper on the film, the one who really
took the time to dissect and discern content from rhetoric will achieve a more
lasting life-long benefit by ‘getting under the hood’ so to speak.
D.
To continue the investigation I would like to explore adapting the advanced
rhetoric course to make it more explicitly engage with the rhetoric of politics
and public discourse. Political rhetoric resonates well with this generation of
students. One challenge, however, is to prevent the subject matter from up-staging the rhetorical constructs. While the “Fog of War”
succeeded in creating discourse between the students, some of them were so fascinated by the content (not having been
adequately exposed to the history of the war in
back to 2004-05 Projects