It's been a while since I've posted, and I've had multiple adventures since then (travels to Malang, Massachussetts, Colorado, South Dakota, Makassar, and Solo took up my last six weeks). But since today was the first day of class back at ICRS, I thought I'd write a bit about teaching. Because teaching is an adventure too, right? :) I'll post more on other adventures later.
So here goes:
I've been teaching for 8 years now, and I still get nervous. Last night I had a dream that I was wearing a sleeveless shirt (taboo when teaching here) and, rather than having my usual 10 students, 40 showed up... and I just happened to lose my voice, which would have been OK had the microphone they gave me worked. Luckily absolutely none of that happened today.
Instead, all 10 of my intelligent, hard-working students showed up smiling and ready to work. To begin our unit on the editorial/opinion piece, I introduced them to ethos, pathos and logos. Then I had them analyze an Anderson Cooper blog post about his heroic saving of a young looter from other looters in Haiti (full of imagery and laden with pathos) in conjunction with an NPR opinion piece by Spence that criticizes the media's move from last week's focus on disaster to this week's focus on looting (a more balanced piece that uses all three appeals to actually critique pathos in Cooper's piece). Here's the links to both:
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/18/anderson-in-the-midst-of-looting-chaos/. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122814817
They really got into it and we had some great conversations about pathos preying on unconscious racist tendencies; Haiti's connection to Indonesia (the different colonial systems but shared infrastructural problems both countries face); why Spence used Katrina as an example (they thought it was a good example for an American audience, since it reminded them of a tragedy in the U.S. and thus shared suffering); and how the mention of no electricity and no running water (!) in Haiti might be a more effective use of pathos for an American audience, since people in Indonesia are already used to that. Indeed!
Hopefully, by introducing the rhetorical appeals, students can begin to analyze the ways arguments work and, with that, they can begin to use appeals effectively. In fact, several students wondered last semester whether the emotional connection they feel to their research topics can play a part in Western academic writing; perhaps an increasing awareness to pathos will allow them to see that although logos and ethos reign in most academic texts, pathos also plays a part. I think this might be especially important to my religious studies students, who, in their roles as community activists and in their conversations with me, seem to connect what they study here in the academic ivory tower to "real" social good and the personal connections they feel towards the people they work with.
In any case, my new class schedule has me teaching for an hour rather than an hour and a half per class, which might be a good thing, or, when things get busier, a bad thing. I guess we'll find out. Today's activity ended right on time, though...
So sorry about the theoretical rambling and all that. I'm just thinking about my research and writing and my first day of class and everything just came out in my blog! I have to plan my TOEFL class tomorrow (yuck!), and this blog may be symptomatic of my urge to procrastinate.
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A meaty approach to an editorial/opinion piece.
ReplyDeleteAbout the role of pathos in academic research dominated by ethos and logos, I think of Max Weber's famous, and famously hard, (long) article (or short book) "Objectivity in the Social Sciences". Objectivity has really nothing to do with where ideas come from nor with the reasons we might find a topic interesting to research. There pathos is given almost free rein.
Objectivity comes into play in the way that the investigation is handled. So students (anyone) are certainly free to select a topic based on subjective reasons. In fact, the very concept of "interesting" or "worthwhile" is inherently subjective. But if they are then speaking in a social science voice, the conduct of the research and the presentation of the results must be done objectively or, in the terms you established, according to ethos and logos.
I admire the intellectual challenge you've given your students!