Baby's first post!: What's wrong with teaching arguments in higher ed?

As of today, I'm pretty behind on giving feedback to students' essays and my own work of making reading lists for next year's PhD exams, so naturally--I decided on a whim to put another thing on my plate that I've been mulling over for a while, which is creating this online space of writing and reflection that I devote to an open-ended audience which might include my family and friends, people in the fields of language, rhetoric, composition, higher education, and hopefully, just anyone who finds any of my posts interesting or relatable for some reason. (Please see the full narrative on why I have this website on the About page!)

In this first post, I want to talk about something that has been irking me in 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 :( Just this Saturday, the UW Seattle campus hosted the first ever conference for graduate & professional students on the theme of "Our Work Now." The idea is to critically think about our role as grad student scholars, researchers and teachers especially now that we're deep in Trump presidency, at least for these four years (omg, how we gonna make it thru?).

I'm writing this post drawing on the presentation I did at the conference. My observation, an "argument" if you will, that I want others to also notice is that the way we've been teaching argumentation (aka. 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 strong evidence, and in the process of doing that, we score extra points if we manage to deconstruct or tear down a counter-argument from the side that we don't agree with. (Side note: of course, I don't think Trump ever got a briefing on this model of how to make an argument. Sigh.) Anyways, my point is that even though this model sounds pretty darn good, 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 a couple of years, it dawns on me to rethink, "Do I really want to teach this way to my students? What for?" Especially in the post-election conversations in academic and local communities about how folks have been increasingly polarized, I want to take this kairotic moment and say that we need to decolonize what we view as argument 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. I'm here to throw my hands up in the air and say that that's the monstrous neoliberal culture shaping who we are becoming in the eyes of each other. As composition scholars such as Miller and Ratcliffe argued and as some of us have noticed from time to time in everyday life, the complexity we live is that our voice is never truly ours alone. We are our communities' voices. We are our communities' ways of knowing and believing. Since most of us belong to multiple communities we identify with, we often have multiple voices that can contradict with one another which can be fascinating. The more I think about contradictions in our and others' beliefs and arguments, I think they are something not to be afraid of, but to be marveled at and taken a closer look at.

Instead of giving in to the urge of neoliberal culture that tempts us to see those who hold different arguments as a simplistic, lesser other, we can learn to pause our judgment and try to see multiple voices that are moving in an argument that we don't agree with. What kind of nuances and complexities can those multiple voices teach us? The more we understand that people make arguments from the hybrid place of their intersectional identities and the associated multiple communities they belong to, the more I think we're capable of seeing 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.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be criticized or held accountable for their words and actions. Of course they need to be! (starting from the President, perhaps?) What I'm saying is that, when we end up yelling at each other or leaving each other because we can't continue a dialogue and that perpetuates the polarized culture of society, we might learn to do something different with the way we talk to each other and persuade one another on important issues. For example, on the discourse of "free speech" that is a hot topic these days in light of the recent cases on inviting certain controversial speakers on college campuses like Milo Y. (whatever his last name is, I don't care) and Ann Coulter canceling her event at Berkeley, when we talk to our opponents (for lack of a better term) on this issue, we would benefit from looking at the inherent contradictions that have always been present in the larger discourse of free speech. As someone who would always oppose inviting speakers from the populist right, I'm still trying to engage with some compelling aspects of the "right of speech" arguments that folks put forward, all the while engaging with the discrepancies and hypocrisies of the "right of speech" discourse.

So there's that--that's my point. Gosh, I'm awkward at conclusions or closures. But what I want to leave with you, my reader, is that there is something weird AF about the white and male Western way of making arguments. It's self-indulging, territorial, and ego-expanding to just focus on one's argument and not make a sincere effort to learn from another person's argument. We need to DECOLONIZE this. As a writing teacher, I want to see myself and my students increasingly capable of engaging with contradictions, tensions, and ruptures in our own voices and others' that we make an effort to hear. So that we can cultivate our humanity to have mindfulness and bravery in rejecting purity and living with chaotic but real complexity.

Thanks for tuning in to my first blog post!