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Review of Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground
Discussion with Banks
The following are excerpts from an asynchronous discussion on Blackboard that Banks engaged in with a small graduate course of mine in the spring of 2006, called Rhetoric, Racism, and the Teaching of English. The Blackboard discussions were meant to be informal and reflective, dealing with each week’s readings. I present here just a part of our late-semester, week-long discussion on Banks’s book, in which I told the students to expect Banks to read and engage with them. I place bracketed ellipses ([ . . . ]) where I’ve condensed the posting since several writers use ellipses in their postings.
These discussions offer a sampling of the themes, ideas, and concepts that my M.A. graduate students found interesting, intriguing, or confusing. They give a general sense of how applicable they found Banks’s book to their own teaching and to the larger discussions we were involved in during the semester. I offer these excerpts in this review as one more way to consider the pedagogical usefulness of the book.
The students excerpted here are Jane Bullard, Melissa Braunschweig, Arthur Muro, and Shannon Philpott, whom I am grateful to for allowing me to use their work in this review.