Deanna L. Fassett

“You Get Pushed Back”: the strategic rhetoric of educational success and failure in higher education

We explored Nakayama and Krizeks (1995) notion of strategic rhetorics—i.e., the persuasive discourses that function hegemonically to continually re-secure the power of institutions by permeating the mundane talk of individuals—in relation to a series of focus group interviews with university undergraduates and instructors about the nature of success and failure in education. Our analysis revealed three strategic rhetorics: (1) individualism, or the notion that it is only, or primarily, through individual action or choice that one might succeed or fail in schools; (2) victimization, the abjection of individualism, which suggests that one is at the mercy of social systems for assessments of success or failure; and (3) authenticity, in which students and teachers gauge success or failure by how ones intentions measure up to some idealized other. Although students and teachers both expressed frustration with aspects of the educational system, we found that these strategic rhetorics functioned to reassert the dominance of existing educational practices, eliding the role language plays in re-imagining possibilities of educational change.

Between the Structural and the Personal: Situated Sense-Makings of “Race” This research was supported by a grant from the MOSAIC Multicultural Center at San Jose State University.

Using a critical intercultural communication perspective and cultural studies interviewing method, this study traces individuals’ subjective sense-makings of diversity through the trope of “race.” Such sense-makings represent the key (and taken-for-granted) locus of the structural and personal where social actors live out the constructions of diversity and race in deeply felt ways. Our study reveals how individuals articulate and understand race via raceless diversity encodings (whereby race is seemingly stripped of its power inequalities, and all racial/ethnic groups are made equal) and racial pivoting (whereby participants both discursively pull away from and move toward race to suit their individual experiences).

The Strategic Rhetoric of an “At-Risk” Educational Identity: Interviewing Jane

This essay explores how communication research on “at-risk” students relies on under-theorized understandings of identity as seemingly stable traits and characteristics. In this sense, “at-riskness,” as a cultural identity, is dangerous precisely because it encourages researchers to link identity difference with failure, rather than to explore the presence and perpetuation of particular ideologies. We illuminate such ideological tensions through our analysis of a complex educational identity—an in-depth interview with an “at-risk” student—where we locate strategic rhetorics (i.e., discursive constructions that reify normalized assumptions about educational success and failure) that demonstrate how ideology constitutes the phenomenon of educational risk.

Subverting Whiteness: Pedagogy at the Crossroads of Performance, Culture, and Politics

Students in our classes, which focus on communication and cultural/sexual difference, performance studies, and communication and the classroom, often ask about the end of political critique—that is, to what future do we do this critical work? For instance, when we talk to our students about current events in class (i.e., the lynching-style murder of James Byrd, Jr., the beating-execution of Matthew Shepard, or the shooting death of Amadou Diallo on the streets of New York by police), we try to understand not only the effects of these instances of cultural violence (how it shapes and produces a public), but to also ask questions about the contexts that breed these tragedies. Thus, our effort is to locate the specific events within larger, more systemic social systems. For instance, can we understand the Matthew Shepard incident as a result of a social system of heterosexism, homophobia, and straight supremacy? Can we see the death of Diallo not as an isolated instance of racial violence, but as part of a larger social system that has produced deaths in places like Cincinnati and Los Angeles?

Remote Control: Identity, Power, and Technology in the Communication Classroom.

Instructional communication researchers, by focusing attention on “how-to” matters and forays into conventional areas of study (i.e., immediacy, apprehension), neglect a nuanced treatment of student and teacher identity. Such a perspective is relatively disembodied and fails to engage actual classroom interactions. By engaging in autoethnographic analysis of their experiences with instructional technology, the authors reveal a more complex understanding of how instructional identities interact. In particular, the authors advocate an understanding of power that is distributed, embodied, and malleable.

Inception: Beginning a New Conversation about Communication Pedagogy and Scholarship

Drawing on past pedagogical and scholarly lines of inquiry, this article advances—in a dialogic form—several questions for future research and practice in areas of communication, teaching, and learning. The dialogic form of this article offers a metamessage, inviting colleagues to consider creative approaches to inquiry and collaboration in the 21st century. The ideas and questions presented in this essay serve to push the field beyond disciplinary silos, advance research and pedagogy about teaching and learning, and offer thought-provoking insight into what scholars and practitioners who explore communication, teaching, and learning can contribute to those inside and outside of our discipline.

Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom

When I was writing my dissertation, I was stunned to hear a colleague, a fellow communication educator, exclaim, “I’ve read all the sanctimonious critical pedagogy dreck I want to read—I hope that’s not where you’re thinking of going . . .” To my thinking at that time, such a claim was tantamount to accepting defeat, to assuming that social inequity was natural and that there was little communication scholars could do to effect wide-spread educational reform. Admittedly, I’ve always been a utopian, but later, when I became an assistant professor, I began to struggle with putting my ideas about critical pedagogy into practice. I began to question what counted as liberatory, and for whom; I began to see students engage issues of power and privilege only to become more disheartened and less willing to attempt change to what they were coming to see as insurmountable, inequitable social systems. And, perhaps most disturbing, I came to suspect that for students to do well in my courses, I was subtly demanding that they embrace my own vision of Marxist, feminist cultural critique. Wallace and Ewald, composition studies scholars, advance as a result of their own similar struggles with critical pedagogies an “alternative pedagogy” of how to engage and transform our students and ourselves through communication. Though they do not explicitly say so, Wallace and Ewald offer a compelling vision of post-critical pedagogy—a pedagogy where communication scholars are central to challenging the limitations of critical pedagogy and extending that body of scholarship in new, productive directions in the classroom. Wallace and Ewald acknowledge that it may seem as though they are “co-opting,” or undercutting, the critical pedagogy movement in their approach to alternative pedagogy (p. 21). The authors suggest that most efforts at critical pedagogy merely supplant the dominant cultural ideology with a critical perspective without inviting learners to participate in the process of generating/evaluating knowledge. Wallace and Ewald take inspiration from Paulo Freire (1974), arguably the most influential of critical educators, foregrounding a pedagogy that strives for mutuality, which may “be understood as teachers and students sharing the potential to adopt a range of subject positions and to establish reciprocal discourse relations as they negotiate meaning in the classroom” (p. 3). This is to say that in a classroom characterized by mutuality, teachers and students understand themselves as co-authors of disciplinary knowledge and course procedures. Such a premise is key to a Freirean critical pedagogy: To effect change in our world, we must first see ourselves as subjects—as people who help to create, define and challenge what counts as true. Freire extends this argument by noting that attempts made by oppressors (or the dominant culture) to liberate the oppressed often constitute acts of false generosity—acts that further reinscribe oppression by rendering the processes of knowledge construction vague and seemingly unassailable. It is worth noting the authors’ implicit indictment—that the work of critical pedagogy, however well-intentioned, may constitute such false generosity. However, it is in part because Wallace and Ewald’s alternative pedagogy emerges from a Freirean critical pedagogy, that I argue the authors have not abandoned critical pedagogy, but instead have begun the important work of extending it into the post-critical. Wallace and Ewald’s slim monograph serves to account for the authors’ attempts to engender mutuality in their own classrooms—an entry-level course in writing, and a graduate seminar in communication theory. Throughout the semester, the authors observed in each other’s classrooms and interviewed (and built case studies from) two student participants in each course. It is from their own observations, struggles and successes that Wallace and Ewald offer us a series of three principles or guidelines for alternative pedagogy: (1) we should seek to change classroom speech genres; (2) we should redesign classroom architecture to give rise to mutuality; and (3) we should draw a distinction between agency and interpretive agency in order to engage and celebrate the latter. In effect, the authors’ vision is to develop a pedagogy for all disciplines, a pedagogy that asks us to see ourselves and our students as subjects, as the people who shape and define our own disciplines. First, Wallace and Ewald argue that in order to engage our students as subjects (and not objects), we must seek to redefine classroom speech genres. Here the authors invoke their understanding of Bakhtin to suggest that our students have come to anticipate genres or conventional, reified approaches to instructional communication. In particular, the authors address what they describe as IRE conversation, where the instructor initiates talk with her/his students, solicits a response, and then immediately evaluates that response (i.e., the response is either correct or incorrect). Wallace and Ewald argue that the IRE genre encourages student compliance and complacency; however, in order for students to see