RSA Panel, Pedagogy of Advocacy: A New Media Argument

Two friends and I recently developed a conference proposal for the Rhetoric Society of America's biennial conference, a panel titled "Attending to New Media: Identification, Style, and Advocacy." We should know in December whether or not it has been accepted for the May conference in Minneapolis.

Below is my portion of the presentation. Fingers crossed.

Speaker 3: The Pedagogy of Advocacy: A New Media Argument

First-year students enter composition classrooms well equipped to use (and change) many new media and emerging technologies. Their experiences with advocacy--real or conceptual--however, are often more limited, at least in their eyes. In their first-year composition textbook, Compose, Design, Advocate, Anne Francis Wysocki and Dennis A. Lynch outline for students the parallels between argument and advocacy; all argument, they maintain, is advocacy--neither “left” nor “right” politically, but a matter of community health and one’s own happiness. The problem for many instructors of first-year composition quickly becomes one of merging two essential elements for student growth: new technologies (and the literacies therein) and rhetorical awareness. In this talk, I argue that one useful goal is to help students realize and appreciate the act of advocacy as both civilizing and expressive using Wysocki’s pedagogy and theory as a model. Essentially the pedagogical moves toward advocacy are queries on identification--who writers identify with and who dis-identifies with their writing. The communication between two or more people expresses values, beliefs, and concerns that help shape one’s sense of identification internally and in the eyes of others. Therein continues the growth of concord and controversy in our students, and as much in ourselves. In Compose, Design, Advocate, Wysocki and Lynch write that, “To talk about argument, and so to talk about advocacy, is to talk about how we can and should live our lives” (112). My talk promotes advocacy as a pedagogy and the benefits found in new media and emerging technologies toward that end: specifically, materiality and composition, user-centered web designs (often called Web 2.0), media convergence at grassroots and corporate levels, and how new media productions build relationships among people.