Note: This post was written in 2018 as a short blog post, but it has been a bit more fleshed out with a few more thoughts and resources linked in.
I want to talk about something that I’ve been reflecting on my work as a writing/composition teacher especially in light of the 2016 post-election climate in the U.S: the way I’ve been taught how to argue/persuade and that same way now I’ve been teaching to my students.
I’m writing this post drawing on the presentation I did at a local conference. My observation, an “argument” if you will, that I want others to also notice is that the way we’ve been teaching argumentation (otherwise known as persuasive writing) in higher ed mirrors how people persuade and argue in everyday social, political and public life. In the best case scenario, the model of argumentation as we know it is to put our best foot forward, which means to present an argument supported by credible evidence, and in the process of doing that, we can score extra points if we manage to deconstruct or tear down a counter-argument we don’t agree with. Even though this model works pretty well for the Western cultural values in rhetoric and communication, it makes us focus on only one part of the puzzle–how to persuade others. What about how to be persuaded by others? What to learn from others’ arguments and how they make those arguments?
In White Western academic culture, we’re so hung up on making arguments for the effects of immediacy and efficiency–to quickly score points and come out on top. And now that I’ve been a composition teacher for several years, it dawns on me to rethink, “Do I really want to teach this way to my students? What for?” Especially in the Trump-era conversations in academic and local communities about how folks have been increasingly polarized, now would be a good time to really think about how we can decolonize the normative way of conceptualizing what an argument is and how we practice it.
In the current framework of making arguments, it’s almost a reflex to individualize or privatize arguments in the heat of the moment and start seeing who says what as one and the same. As composition scholars such as Miller and Ratcliffe argued and as we sometimes have noticed in everyday life, the complexity of our discourses is that our voice is never truly ours alone. We are our communities’ voices. We are our communities’ ways of knowing, believing, and discerning. Since most of us belong to multiple communities we identify with, we often have multiple voices that may contradict with one another which can be fascinating to look at.
What kind of nuances and complexities can those multiple voices teach us? If we understand that people make arguments from the often convergent place of their intersectional identities and the associated multiple communities they belong to, we can be reminded to see an argument we don’t agree with as part of historically ongoing larger voices that have often been there even before the immediate person who voiced that argument. Decolonizing our argument pedagogy would mean to teach argument-ing less as a “who wins this debate” and more as a mutual conversation in which listening dispositions are just as important as assertive speech acts and going deeper with one’s line of inquiry and perhaps even ending with more informed and situated questions might be appropriate in some situations than settling on an assertion/argument. Decolonizing argument pedagogy would also mean to train ourselves and students to learn to see arguments in various modes and genres that go beyond the normative argumentative writing in the academy such as arguments in multimodal compositions and arguments in narratives, stories, and counterstories.