Mary Wendt

My Codex - AL805

"Re-Visioning Literacy" - AL887

Research Precis- AL885

This portfolio serves as a tour of my core graduate courses as a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Writing Program at Michigan State University. The links to the left are examples of some of my work during the past two years. I would not necessarily say that this work exemplifies my very best work; rather, it is meant to show the progression of my learning in three areas: theory, pedagogy, and research. The links can be viewed first, separate from my reflective narrative, or viewed as I discuss them by following the links in the narrative.

THEORY
Before taking Rhetoric Theory and History (AL805) with Damian Baca in the fall of my first semester, I (red-faced) admit that I knew very little about rhetoric. This course challenged me right from the get-go, as we were assigned a daunting text that required me to read with a dictionary because I could not understand half of what I read. I was nervous, felt quite silly and dumb, and wondered if I would ever get the hang of this idea of rhetoric. I had trouble even with the terminology, and I remember in class one day asking what the difference was between “rhetoric” and “a rhetoric”; turns out I was not the only one who didn’t understand. But by the end of the semester I had a pretty good grasp on the ideas, as I wrote about in my Manifesto. I came to understand rhetoric as an art form, where words and pictures and color, to name a few, all were mediums for this art. I also began to understand the power of rhetoric and how it has historically created division and oppression. I argue that rhetoric is not strictly Aristotelian and that our refusal to recognize other rhetorics results in injustices and lies that are perpetuated throughout history to accomplish keeping the powerful in power. Equality and justice will never be accomplished if alternate rhetorics—that is, non-Aristotelian—are not recognized, studied, and celebrated. I tried to express this in my “Codex Spanglinafranese,” which I created for AL805. While this piece is admittedly not easy to read, it expresses my understanding of rhetoric quite well.

This course became very crucial to my understanding of rhetoric, which I realized found its way into every aspect of my studies and every class I took. This became apparent during Composition Studies (AL878) with Nancy DeJoy my second semester as we worked on our literacy narratives. My narrative ended up being a theoretical look at the term “literacy” and arguing that our way of viewing this term (again) causes injustices and inequalities. If literacy is considered something that we can achieve, something one possesses or does not possess, then we have a split in the world: those who have and those who have not. This reminded me of literature I read in 805 (specifically Kennedy’s Comparative Rhetorics) that talked about “literate” (those who write) cultures and “illiterate” (those who do not write) cultures and whether or not they found evidence of rhetoric in these societies. While Kennedy’s purpose was to show that these oral cultures were still rhetorical cultures, there was an underlying implication that their rhetoric was inferior, that it lacked logic and was tightly connected to the barbarian. If we consider literacy this way, as something one has or does not have, then those “illiterates” will forever be connected to those who are barbarous, less developed, ignorant--a world of Calibans and Prosperos, the powerful and the powerless. This results in colonization, repression, and hierarchies of power.

On the other hand, as I argue in this literacy narrative cum article titled “Re-Visioning Literacy: Toward a New Horizon (or Untangling Our Trunks),” if literacy is re-considered as a different beast, something one neither has nor doesn’t have but rather is a human characteristic that is in a constant state of improvement, then we lose the dichotomous view of the literate and the illiterate: the term “illiterate” would no longer make any sense. I compare this to the term “intelligence”: while some might be considered relatively unintelligent, no one would claim that people have no intelligence. Even those with extremely low IQs have some intelligence and are capable of learning.
This became most clear to me as I thought about my own literacy and my struggle to consider myself “digitally literate.” While the digital rhetoric portion of my education was not part of my core coursework, it significantly affected my understanding of literacy. I constantly encountered new software, new struggles, and new ideas that made me feel digitally illiterate. That was when I realized that I was thinking of literacy wrong, that it was not a matter of “achieving” digital literacy; it was something I would always work on—and I already had this literacy, however underdeveloped.

Still, the idea of rhetoric and writing as a discipline sort of eluded me—not because I didn’t understand it, but because I still found myself struggling to articulate what I do. Just calling rhetoric “the art of persuasion” didn’t really encompass all that I had come to understand as a part of the field. And writing was more than simply words on a page. After all, it is no secret that our field has had to defend itself all along as being legitimate, so when I got asked what I do and had to explain, I didn’t just feel like I was explaining but defending. Some people have a way of making me feel that I have to justify what I do because it isn’t a “real discipline. ”

Not until my last semester, in Julie Lindquist’s Contemporary Rhetorical Theory course (AL887), someone (I can’t remember who) called rhetoric a “metadiscipline”; I thought about this for a while, and finally I understood rhetoric and writing in a way that made sense to me and in a way I felt I could articulate. I had been struggling to figure out why we had been assigned texts from many various fields in our rhetorical theory course, and, while reading, making connections to rhetorical theory. I had a hard time realizing that I was still making rhetoric an either/or kind of thing. As it turns out, rhetoric is part of every field, part of every discipline we could study, and part of everything we do. Of course, people have been arguing about this for quite a while, and this could arguably make this less of a field and more of a philosophy or something, yet what it meant to me was that rhetoric as a field was a way of understanding and analyzing how every one in every field uses this art of language. Simultaneously, writing (and its equivalents) is the expression, the medium of rhetoric, one that everyone uses.

At this point, some of this seems incredibly obvious: how could I not understand the infiltration of writing and rhetoric? I think, for me at least, it required this study, the exposure to the field that I had never had. I feel as though the last two years has shown me firsthand the metadisciplinary qualities of rhetoric as well as the practical, basic qualities of writing, how they both inform (rhetoric) and form (writing) all we do. I hope one day that our field is looked on more as one of the fine arts. There are so many parallels to them—the way they are taught, the difference between being able to produce/create and analyze, the terminologies used (I could go on)—that it seems to me that if rhetoric were celebrated as an art and writing the means to that art, then rather than being considered a “lowly” discipline, one relegated to adjuncts in the basement, it would be honored as the most important of disciplines and revered as the core of any education.

PEDAGOGY
I began my core with Bump Halbritter’s Composition Pedagogies course (AL833) and I’ll be honest here: I didn’t need this course. While I would argue that my master’s degree had some serious holes in it, one thing it did cover—almost ad nauseum—was composition pedagogy. Even a course I took called “Rhetoric and Composition” was a comp pedagogy course (sadly minus rhetoric). So most of what we studied in this course was a review for me. However, now that my core coursework is done, when I go back and read my Rationale for My Ideal Syllabus, I am surprised; my theories of writing, rhetoric, and pedagogy have changed. While my teaching has only changed slightly, my reasons for those changes are clear. At this point, I know I should have taken this course at the end of my core, not the beginning, where I could have applied my new understandings of the field.

For example, my emphasis in my rationale is on three things: discovery learning, process, and teaching as guiding rather than “depositing.” While I still practice these things to some extent, I theorize them differently now. One glaring admittance in my rationale is that I am aware of other rhetorics (because of 805) and would like to employ their theories, but didn’t have time. I need to take the time—hopefully this summer. Also I am amazed at how much I quote Peter Elbow, someone whom I now consider rather old-school, very process-oriented and expressivist, and not necessarily my favorite theorist in the field. Yet I quote him over and over. In this rationale I never really moved beyond process, never show an understanding of post-process and post-modernism, never really articulate the field’s current bent toward a social epistemic theory. Of course, process is still important, and I still use discovery learning all the time, but I was leaving out—and not articulating to my students—the importance of learning from one another. Fortunately, although I was incapable of articulating these ideas, I had a sense of how they played out in the classroom: a huge portion of my classes revolves around group work, class debates, even group conferences. So while my teaching was relatively sound and not too outdated, I was unable to articulate my theoretical principles as well as I can now.

It was toward the end of my core work that this became more clear to me. During Julie Lindquist’s Contemporary Theories of Rhetoric course (AL882), I wrote an “exam question” on the connection between the principle of kairos and pedagogy. As I worked through this idea, I realized many pedagogical connections to the theories that I believed in, and at the same time realized that I have never articulated these well at all. That was when I went back to my 833 Rationale and heard this uneducated voice blabbing on and on about Peter Elbow—and that was when I realized how much I had learned and how differently I had begun to view things. My brain has undergone quite a renovation.

RESEARCH
My research, too, has been renovated: I began my coursework with creative nonfiction stuck in my brain, but what I wanted to research is eerily resonant of where I ended up. This excerpt is from my Research Precis from AL885:

"I envision my research involving learning what program goals exist in [small] colleges, how they implement these program goals, finding out whether or not they believe that their students are getting enough writing experience from an emphasis in literature courses, what their graduates are doing with their English degrees, and whether or not their bachelor’s degree in English gave them the writing experience they needed. My desire is that eventually this research will lead to a shift in emphasis in English degrees away from literature as the only avenue to pursue at a small college, away from the privileged position of literature and toward an understanding of writing and rhetoric as a field in its own right with incredibly valuable content for those students pursuing a degree in English who want to go on and do something with their degree besides teaching literature. The goal is lofty but something I believe needs to happen at these institutions that are years behind the larger colleges which offer a wide variety of writing courses and emphases for English majors."

While I didn’t follow this exact trajectory, the idea is very similar: the emphasis is now on writing in various modes and media and not just on writing itself—although the basic question is the same: is it enough? I only became interested in asking this question because of my core coursework at MSU. As an undergrad, I had no idea that there were so many opportunities for writers, that there were so many jobs one could pursue with an English degree. I only knew that I didn’t really want to teach literature. So I thought my only other path was to teach writing—and creative nonfiction was my passion. So that was what I clung to. Even throughout my master’s degree, because my emphasis was on creative non-fiction, I was unaware of the myriad possibilities with writing, all the theory behind it, and its connection to rhetoric (which, as explained above, I was pretty ignorant about). Then, in one short semester, things changed. Because of the three courses I took that first semester, I discovered a world of writing and rhetoric I never knew existed. Now I don’t consider myself terribly stupid, so if I was unaware of all that writing has to offer, I can only imagine that there are many more like me who are simply in the dark. When I combined this deficit I became aware of with the even more stark deficit in digital literacies, I knew I had found my research.

Of course, knowing how to research is another story. I began my research just stabbing in the dark—a perfect example of practice without theory (much like my teaching had been). I knew what I wanted to accomplish and had an idea of how to get there, but really had no clue of the many research possibilities, the various approaches and methodologies, nor even the practical things like analyzing data. I just jumped in and started thrashing. Then I took Bill Hart-Davidson’s Research Methods course (AL870) and realized what I was up against: there was much more than I had imagined. But this course did more than simply tell me how to research or give me ideas about my dissertation; it solidified for me that rhetoric and writing is indeed a field, a valuable and legitimate field, and that the possibilities for research and discovery are myriad. It’s a new field (comparatively speaking) yet as old as any discipline there is.

So all of what I have learned and expressed here fits nicely into my research: my passion for the liberal arts, my love of writing, my greater theoretical understandings, my discovery of rhetoric and “alternative” rhetorics, my new interest in digital rhetoric, my concern over the labels of the “literate” and the “illiterate,” and, of course, my love of teaching. When I began my matriculation at MSU, I had no idea what to expect, but thought it would be more of the same from my master’s program. What I have learned is that this field is so huge, so diverse, and so important that I am proud to consider myself a writer and rhetorician—and pleased that I am able to articulate what I do without feeling the need to defend myself. But with knowledge comes responsibility, one that I am daunted by and eager to take on. As Gloria Anzaldua says, "Knowing is painful because after it happens, I can't stay in the same place and be comfortable." I am happy to say that I will never be comfortable again.