on teaching rhetorical criticism, again

Music: Neva Dinova: The Hate Yourself Change (2005)

And so continues a two-year-old conversation on teaching rhetorical criticism.

For decades Rod Hart taught the "Basic Rhetorical Criticism" seminar for graduate students here at the University of Texas at Austin. Now that Rod is the dean, the responsibility for teaching this most important of classes has fallen to Dana Cloud and me. I shall be teaching this course for the first time ever in the fall, and I'm more than a bit nervous about it. I'm nervous, in part, because I want to teach it as well as I was taught---and this requires assigning a lot of writing. I'm also just nervous because it's a new prep for me.

The first rhetorical criticism seminar I had at the University of Minnesota was with Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. We read a ton of things in addition to writing a bunch of mini-papers that we combined to form a major term-paper at the end. Four of us took the class together (three of us ended up publishing our seminar papers from the class). Karlyn commented copiously on every mini-paper and the final paper. I want to do that for my students as well, but unfortunately, expectations for enrollment are three to four times that of my experience. I simply cannot grade everything with that many students.

What I've decided to do is have the students also write the mini-papers, but then to provide feedback for each other. I will read the final two papers they submit. This will still require a ton of grading, however, I will only have to teach this class every other year (Dana and I alternate teaching it). I'm hopeful, however, that by continuing the "intensive" tradition a number of students will end up with publishable work.

Speaking of publishable work: I got a great idea from Rachel Smith that I'm going to use in this course. A number of folks teach the course with a sort of conference at the end, and students are asked to "respond" to their peers as if at a conference. Instead, we're going to run class like a journal: students will "submit" a draft of their final essay for review, which will then be "blind reviewed" by classmates. Then, I'll summarize the reviews in a cover letter and for the final project, students will have to "revise and resubmit" their essays, replete with the all-important cover letter response. I think ending this class this way will help to take a little of the mystery out of the publication process.

Anyhoo, I'll be tinkering on the syllabus all summer, but I did upload a draft for anyone interested (and I'd love some comments/feedback as well). The tentative syllabus is in PDF format here.