Tag: transfer

What We Talk About When We Talk About “Exigence”

On By guitarsophistIn Modern Rhetoric, Pedagogy1 Comment

“Exigence” is a term that has recently become common in discussions of rhetoric and composition. It appears in the influential book Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing by Kathleen Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak as a term for transfer. ERWC has introduced it as a concept in the newest version of the curriculum (ERWC 3.0), and it is used in numerous articles about teaching reading and writing. In this long post I will outline the history of this concept and the conversation it has provoked over many decades.

Note: If you just want a handful of questions to help your students use this concept, perhaps without using the term itself, skip to the end of this post.

“The Rhetorical Situation”

“Exigence” was introduced into the conversation of the discipline of rhetoric and composition by Lloyd Bitzer in his article “The Rhetorical Situation” published in the inaugural issue of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric in 1968. Bitzer defines the rhetorical situation as having three components: the exigence that initiates the need for discourse, the audience to be moved to decision and action, and the “constraints which influence the rhetor and can be brought to bear upon the audience” (6).

Bitzer defines “exigence” as “an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be” (6). This definition is not the ordinary one. Dictionaries note that the adjective “exigent” means “demanding” and comes from the Latin exigere, which means “to demand.” The noun form is generally “exigency” and is usually in the plural, such as “the exigencies of war,” which could be rendered as “the demands of war.” These usages go back to the 15th century. The word “exigence” is more common in French than in English. As in English, it tends to to refer to a demand, either from a person or from a situation.

Going back to Bitzer’s definition, we could note the value judgments and ask, “Imperfect or defective by whose standards?” and “Other than it should be by whose judgment?” For Bitzer, the urgent “imperfection” is a disturbance in the way the true world ought to be. If there is a “demand,” for Bitzer the scene is making it.

An example: Let’s say there is a big pothole in the street in front of your house. You are worried that it will cause an accident, or damage your car, so you write an email to the city maintenance department asking them to send a crew to fix it. In a nutshell, that is Bitzer’s rhetorical situation.

Bitzer’s purpose in writing the article is to make a distinction between “rhetorical discourse” and non-rhetorical discourse. He says, “An exigence which cannot be modified is not rhetorical; thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed — death, winter, and some natural disasters, for instance — are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical” (6-7).

Bitzer argues by this logic that scientific and poetic discourse are not rhetorical because “neither requires an audience in order to produce its end; the scientist can produce a discourse expressive or generative of knowledge without engaging another mind, and the poet’s creative purpose is accomplished when the work is composed” (8). He acknowledges that scientists and poets have audiences, but that these are not “rhetorical” audiences because they are not capable of “making the change that the discourse functions to produce” (8).

If this strikes you as odd, it is because it is common these days to argue that all discourse is rhetorical, making such a peculiar distinction moot. However, this article started a conversation, mostly in the same journal, that was more about defining “the rhetorical situation” than about making distinctions between “rhetorical” and non-rhetorical discourse. Bitzer’s article had clearly made an impression and elevated the concept of “exigence” to rhetorical prominence.

After Bitzer

Bitzer has had many critics. In “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation” Richard E. Vatz asks “What is the relationship between rhetoric and situations?” and responds

I take the converse position of each of Bitzer’s major statements regarding this relationship. For example: I would not say “rhetoric is situational,” but situations are rhetorical; not “. . . exigence strongly invites utterance,” but utterance strongly invites exigence; not “the situation controls the response . . .” but the rhetoric controls the situational response; not “. . . rhetorical discourse . . . does obtain its character-as-rhetorical from the situation which generates it,” but situations obtain their character from the rhetoric which surrounds them or creates them. (158-59)

From Vatz’s point of view, the “exigence” is not found in the situation, but is constructed by the the rhetor through the way he or she defines the situation.

It is no accident that this conversation is largely occurring in a journal called Philosophy and Rhetoric. Beyond Vatz’s question about the relationship between rhetoric and situations is a question about how language constitutes the world.

In fact, the way this conversation has unfolded over decades in that journal was not so much about scholars disagreeing about how to define “the rhetorical situation,” but more about scholars inhabiting different world views. Bitzer is a Platonist and a realist. There is a real world and it makes us do things. Vatz is a social constructivist whose world is mostly cultural and manipulable by rhetoric. Scott Consigny, in “Rhetoric and Its Situations,” takes the position of a scholar of classical rhetoric who focuses on practical matters, and argues that “The real question in rhetorical theory is not whether the situation or the rhetor is “dominant,” but the extent, in each case, to which the rhetor can discover and control indeterminate matter, using his art of topics to make sense of what would otherwise remain simply absurd” (185).

Postmodern and Posthuman Readings

In “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of ‘Différance'” Barbara Biesecker performs a postmodernist reading that sees the world as a text and the rhetor making a cut that constitutes a speaker-audience-world relation. Diane Davis,  in “Rhetoricity at the End of the World,” provides a summary of the conversation about the rhetorical situation up to that point and, building on Biesecker, expands that view to include non-human participants and even non-human languages, such as DNA, chemical reactions, and physical forces. In this perspective, we take into account not only the pothole and the city maintenance department, but also the nature of the asphalt, the rain, temperature fluctuations, and the passing vehicles that caused the pothole to appear.

Another example: let’s imagine that a pair of birds has decided to build a nest in the housing that protects the red light in a traffic signal (I have actually seen this). The go, slow, stop of the traffic light’s sign system is easily interpreted by almost all humans, but meaningless to birds. The birds have read other aspects of the situation to indicate a well-protected nesting site of the appropriate height and size. In fact, the location and design of the traffic light may have seemed to be an invitation to build.  However, their exigence, the demand of instinct to build a nest and the invitation to build one, is in conflict with the human exigence in installing the traffic light, the desire to control traffic flow in a safe and convenient way. As the traffic light continues in its mindless signifying, the nest may in fact block the view of the red light and cause an accident. The perspective Davis adopts would see all of this as connected and rhetorical, without privileging the human point of view.

What About the Classroom?

But you may be asking, “How is this useful for teaching reading and writing?” It is always perilous to move from philosophy to pedagogy. Let’s see what we can do.

As I see it, the concept of rhetorical exigence splits one question, “Why am I writing?” into two: “What moves me to write?” and “What am I trying to accomplish by writing?” These are productive questions for students because of all the time they have spent in academic settings where the “exigence” for writing comes from the assignment and the demand of the teacher. It is time for them to see that the real world often demands writing. For the same reason, it is time for them to understand that audiences other than teachers exist, audiences that have needs and characteristics that must often be researched, recognized, or intuited. Writing is an act that occurs in a context and has purposes and audiences.

Do we need the term “exigence” to teach this? It is probably handier for philosophers and theoretical rhetoricians than for students. Many of the people using the term as part of this rhetorical conversation have lost the connection to “demand” that is implicit in the Latin root and common usage in English. Bitzer himself sees the term as more important for rhetorical analysis than for the production of discourse, for he says

The exigence may or may not be perceived clearly by the rhetor or other persons in the situation; it may be strong or weak depending upon the clarity of their perception and the degree of their interest in it; it may be real or unreal depending on the facts of the case; it may be important or trivial; it may be such that discourse can completely remove it, or it may persist in spite of repeated modifications; it may be completely familiar — one of a type of exigences occurring frequently in our experience — or it may be totally new, unique. When it is perceived and when it is strong and important, then it constrains the thought and action of the perceiver who may respond rhetorically if he is an a position to do so. (7)

In other words, plenty of discourse happens in the real world without anyone perceiving or thinking about exigence. Would we write more effectively if we thought about it? Perhaps. If we want students to use concepts related to exigence without being confused by the term itself, we might have them ask

  • What aspect of the situation calls out for change?
  • Who could help bring about this change?
  • What factors in the situation (both in the world and in the audience) do I need to consider in making my case for change?
  • How can I persuade this audience to work toward this change?

I think that these questions will help students explore the concept of “exigence” no matter what world view or philosophical perspective we take up.

Works Cited

Biesecker, Barbara A. “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of ‘Différance.'” Philosophy and Rhetoric vol. 22, no. 2, 1989, pp. 110-130.

Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 1, no. 1, 1968, pp. 1-14.

Consigny, Scott. “Rhetoric and Its Situations.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 7, no. 3, 1974, pp. 175-186.

Davis, Diane. “Rhetoricity at the End of the World.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol 50, no. 4, 2017.

Vatz, Richard. E. “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 6, no. 3, 1973, pp. 154-161.

Yancy, Kathleen, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak. Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. Logan, UT: Utah State Univ. Press, 2014.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

On By guitarsophistIn ERWC, Pedagogy, Writing an ERWC Module1 Comment

In a previous post I described a “Flexible Module Planner” that introduces a bit less linearity to module design. My colleagues saw this planning document not only as a guide for designing new modules, but also for planning how to teach an existing one. This post is an expansion of that one, providing some background questions for discussion. The problem is, none of these questions have right answers. They all require decisions, sometimes made on the fly.

Here is a list of important concepts in ERWC (and teaching in general) that we often talk about in isolation though they overlap, interact, and sometimes contradict. For each one, success is about hitting the sweet spot for students, but those sweet spots can be different for different students even in the same classroom.

  • Backwards mapping (We plan the beginning with the end in mind. How much should we preview the end at the beginning?)
  • Gradual release of responsibility (If the goal is independent learning, when does scaffolding help and when does it hinder? How do we know?)
  • Self-teaching (What you teach yourself, you remember for a lifetime. How can we facilitate such independence?)
  • Connection (We want connections in all directions—text to text, reading to writing, student to issue, strategy to task, present task to future problem-solving. How do we make those connections, yet stay focused?)
  • Perceived Utility (We attend to and value what seems useful, but the use of a strategy is not always immediately apparent. How can we cultivate persistence in the face of a lack of perceived utility? How can we make the utility of a strategy appear?)
  • Engagement (Is engagement the product of a formula, i.e. Connection + Strategy + Utility + Goal? How do we implement this formula in the classroom?)
  • Transfer (Is transfer a product of sustained engagement? How do we design lessons with engagement in mind?)

I’ll discuss them one by one.

Backwards Mapping

We begin with the end in mind. A teaching unit is somewhat like the Midgard Serpent from Norse mythology, a snake eating its tail. The head and the tail are in the same place. When we begin a journey, we want to know where we are going, even if when we arrive it is not exactly as we imagined. Seeing the summit, even dimly through the clouds, inspires us to move on. I think that too many teaching modules, including some of my own, don’t reveal enough of the destination to inspire students to want to go there. We know what the writing task is. Why not show it to them? (One answer is that we want them to value the reading for its own sake, which is a valid point. So, a decision must be made.)

Gradual Release of Responsibility

This is a tough one. How much scaffolding is enough? How much is too much? How do we know? Formative assessment can help, but sometimes it is too late to change a decision. Even subtle hints can imply a reading and deny a student an opportunity to think for themselves. For example, in my seminar this semester, one group of students decided that they were against “prereading” activities and the “Preparing to Read” section of the ERWC template. Why? Because they were English majors and they thought that students had a right to their own interpretation. I argued against this because I think that prereading activities make a big difference in how students respond to reading. Activating background knowledge is an important reading strategy and students also want to know why they are reading something and what the teacher thinks is important to attend to. However, my students had a point. Everything we do before they read influences their interpretation.

For example, in my first mini-module built around two tiny stories written by Lydia Davis, my prereading instruction was simply, “As you read the following stories, think about relationships.” I gave them a theme for the stories. Without that theme, they would struggle longer, I think, to make sense of the stories, but would that struggle be productive? By giving them a push toward a particular reading, am I taking their own reading away? But perhaps they would give up on the odd little stories entirely? Again, it’s a decision. Even one word has consequences.

My students in “Advanced Expository Writing” had to research a topic of their own choice and create a website to present their findings. One task was to create a literature review. I did not tell them how many sources they needed to have. I said it was a rhetorical decision. They kept asking me, so often that I finally got mad at them (never a good development). I said, “It would be a lot easier for me if I just told you exactly what to do.” They answered, almost the whole class in unison, “That’s what we are used to!” I asked, “If you were going to your site for information about this topic, would you be satisfied with two sources?” They agreed that they would not. “How about three sources?” They got the point. And they agreed that they learned more this way. I was trying to get them to actually do the task of informing their readers, while they were looking for completion criteria so that they would know when they could stop pretending to do the task.

The model that Fisher and Frey discuss in Better Learning through Structured Teaching: A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility is basically “I do, we do, you do together, you do alone.”  In this .pdf from Doug Fisher, this translates to an instructional template with the following stages: Focus Lessons, Guided Instruction, Collaborative Learning, and Independent Tasks. The decision-making and control move from the teacher, to groups of students working collaboratively, and finally to the individual student.  Teacher lore says that it is better to be a “guide on the side” than a “sage on the stage.”  In the gradual release model, this is not a binary.  The teacher shifts her role from sage to guide to inspirational presence over time, as needed.

Of course, the “gradual” part of gradual release means that we scaffold more at the beginning, but less and less as students learn more and more to work independently as they internalize concepts and strategies. The Fisher and Frey model shows that it is not only the amount of scaffolding that should change, but also the way it is offered and by whom.  Again, formative assessments, formal and informal, will help, but this is largely a matter of listening to and observing your students. In focus groups, ERWC teachers have reported that students sometimes say, “We have done this a million times [referring to an ERWC strategy], can’t we just read it?” This means they have internalized the strategy.  It’s time for a decision.

Self-Teaching

What we are taught by others often lasts only until the test, but what we teach ourselves or teach others remains for a long time. When I started learning music theory I wanted to write songs in modes other than major or minor. I spent half a day building triads on each degree of modal scales only to find that they were the same as the harmonized major scale, just starting in a different place. Then I turned to the next chapter in the music theory book and found that the author presented everything I had just discovered on my own. However, I still remember it, 40 years later. I remember little else from that music theory course. This is clearly related to the “gradual release” issue. Teaching yourself is the ideal, but it is not always possible. We all need guidance and help. But when should we step out of the way?  It’s a decision.

Connection

Probably the most important connection to be concerned about is the connection to the student’s lifeworld. We are interested in what seems real to us. But texts, issues, strategies, and writing tasks should all seem connected. When students get a worksheet on this and another on that, then a reading on lizards in Guam and another on a boy in Afghanistan, followed by an essay on “My Spring Break,” it all seems random, perhaps even postmodern. When you think about introducing a worksheet, a strategy, a reading, ask yourself, “How does this connect with what they are doing right now? How will it connect with what they are going to be doing tomorrow?” It’s a decision.

Perceived Utility

Here I might bring up what I call the “effort to benefit” ratio. We are usually willing to work to learn something that looks useful for the current task. If it also looks like it might come in handy for future imagined tasks, we might even put in more effort, and we might remember what we learned. However, if the strategy or tool appears very difficult and time-consuming to learn, and the benefit looks small, we might pass on it. I had this sort of experience when I first encountered Microsoft Excel. Learning to use formulas in spreadsheets was tough. I avoided it. Word processing was much more useful. However, when I started running a writing center and I had to make budgets and cost out proposals, I learned quickly. I realized that the first time I created a spreadsheet, it was a lot of work, but after it was created, I could use it over and over.

I think perceived utility is the first necessary condition to what people are now calling “transfer.” We need to help students see how the strategies we teach are actually useful, not meaningless rigmarole that they are being forced to learn. Here, the students make the decision, but we have to persuade them.

Engagement

“Engagement” is a hot topic in educational circles, but it is somewhat mysterious. Sometimes it is confused with “relevance,” and sometimes “entertainment.” Your mileage may vary, but I think it is actually a product of the right combination of the five factors described above.

Transfer

Transfer, in my view, is not just a matter of reinforcing the same limited number of concepts and strategies over and over. It is a matter of sustaining engagement over time so that the concepts are not only reinforced, but valued, perceived as useful, even loved because they solve problems and reduce anxiety.  It’s all about making the right decisions, in the right places.

Transfer and the ERWC Template

On By guitarsophistIn ERWC, Pedagogy2 Comments

The concept of educational “transfer” is a hot topic in composition and rhetoric circles these days. Much of this interest is inspired by a recent publication, Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing by Kathleen Yancy, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak. Yancy and her co-authors ask “Do the knowledge and skills learned in a writing course transfer to other courses and workplaces?” and is it possible to “teach for transfer”?

Yancy et al found that college students tended to rely on what they had been taught in high school when writing for college courses rather than what they learned in their First Year Writing course. They redesigned the FYC course to emphasize a limited number of concepts:

  1. Audience, genre, rhetorical situation, and reflection
  2. Exigence, critical analysis, discourse community, and knowledge
  3. Context, composing, and circulation
  4. Knowledge and reflection (57)

To me, these concepts appear to be a mix of categories and of varying utility, though it is a positive step to look beyond the immediate course to the student’s future rhetorical situations.

ERWC and Transfer

ERWC has been interested in transfer from the beginning. In the ERWC document “Transfer and Engagement: From Theory to Enhanced Practice” Nelson Graff cites Smith and Wilhelm, who argue that four factors make it more likely that students will transfer concepts and strategies from one context to another:

  • Students have a command of the knowledge that is to be transferred.
  • Students have a theoretical understanding of the principles to be transferred.
  • The classroom culture cultivates a spirit of transfer.
  • Students get plenty of practice.

Graff notes that that is why ERWC repeats the same strategies across modules. ERWC is certainly an ideal environment for creating the conditions for transfer.

What Actually Transfers?

However, if we look at what kinds of concepts and strategies powerfully transfer from high school to college, the list is pretty small. In my experience, it includes the five-paragraph essay, Toulmin argumentation (in a simplistic and reduced form), and more recently, ethos, pathos, logos. I have a suspicion about why this is so.

In Thinking and Writing in College: A Naturalistic Study of Students in Four Disciplines, (a very interesting book, available here at the WAC Clearinghouse) Barbara Walvoord and Lucille McCarthy describe longitudinal studies of four classrooms. They collected assignments and student writing and interviewed instructors and students. One of their findings was that

Students in all four classes typically used the assignment sheet as a kind of recipe for completing the assignment. The sheet seemed often to supersede other models or instructions given in class or remembered from other situations. Students usually kept the assignment sheet beside them as they composed, consulting it frequently,especially when they felt confused. They tended to see themselves as following step-by-step the explicit instructions contained in it, and they often interpreted it very literally. (57)

This led to serious miscues. In the business class they studied, the students were asked to go to two different fast food restaurants and observe how they dealt with customers. At the bottom of the sheet, the instructor had written “Chapters 7 and 8 in the Stevenson text can provide guidance” (62). Because this instruction was at the bottom, many students made their observations before reading the chapters, but the categories they were supposed to use were in the assigned reading, so their data was almost useless.

This finding indicates that when students are confronted with a task, especially a task they have not done before (a common experience in higher education), they look for a step-by-step solution to the problem of doing the task, one that they can deploy in the moment. Eventually they realize that some of the tasks in their discipline, such as writing a lab report in biology or analyzing a case study in business, are recurring problems that require them to develop routine strategies.

Rhetorical Strategies as Solutions to Recurring Problems

However, before they get to that point, essay-writing in Language Arts is the most common recurring writing task they have encountered. The five-paragraph essay provides a solution to the recurring problem of “how to write an essay.” The Toulmin model, presented as a checklist, offers a solution to the “how to structure an argument” problem. It doesn’t really matter that students often fill in the checklist incorrectly, citing warrants that aren’t really warrants and backing that is just further supporting evidence rather than reference to a body of knowledge or a system of rules, as Toulmin intended. The model still serves as a content-generating device for making claims and supporting them.

Recent changes in standards for Language Arts have made rhetorical analysis assignments much more common. The Aristotelian appeals have become the standard solution to that recurring problem, generating a paragraph about each appeal.

ERWC 3.0 attempts to teach a broader range of rhetorical concepts, such as audience, purpose, exigence, kairos, rhetorical situation, and stasis theory. I do not think that these concepts will transfer unless students see them first as solutions to doing the immediate task at hand, and second, as possible solutions to recurring problems they will face in the future. We cannot teach them as simply content to be mastered.

What to Do?

How do we help them see these new strategies as useful? The ERWC template as currently structured does not reveal the writing task until the middle of the module, in the “Connecting Reading to Writing Section.” Though we may see the reading tasks as at least equal in importance to the writing task, the students are unlikely to see it that way. They think that the culminating task is the problem they have to solve. They will be thinking, “How will this weird new concept of ‘kairos’ help me write this essay? Will the essay be about kairos?”

The ERWC template is still one of the best vehicles we have for designing teaching units and courses that are conducive to transfer. It just needs a little adjustment. If the writing assignment is at least previewed in the “Preparing to Read” section, it will give the students a clear idea of where they are going, making the tools and experiences that are provided by the module more relevant to doing the task as they perceive it. Second, if the new concepts and strategies are presented in the context of possible future tasks and problems to which they may be relevant, students are more likely to remember them.

I am still exploring how this might be accomplished. But as a first step, I created a Flexible Module Planner that is a bit less linear than the current template. Comments and suggestions, as always, are welcome.

Works Cited

Smith, Michael W., & Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. Going with the Flow. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006. Print.

Walvoord,Barbara and Lucille McCarthy. Thinking and Writing in College: A Naturalistic Study of Students in Four Disciplines. Colorado State Univ. WAC Clearinghouse. Accessed 2 Dec. 2018.

Yancy, Kathleen. Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. Logan, UT: Utah State Univ. Press, 2014. Print.