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Articles Conference Reviews |
Session F10Making Waves/Managing Waves, and Becoming Active/ists: Recasting Campus Crisis into Written Reflection The panel opened with a greeting from the panel chair, Mr. Ben Sword of Tarleton State University. He apologized for the absence of two of the three panelists (Lisa Kirby and Purna Banerjee), stating that they had been unable to make the trip to San Francisco, but that Dr. Brian Fehler was ready to begin his presentation. Only a handful of audience members were at the start of the presentation, but a few others came in during the presentation of the paper, so that the audience was a good size for an 8am presentation. Fehler’s presentation, “The Mirror and the Screen: Active/ist Reflection: When Private Images Become Public” discussed his use of the rhetorical theory of Chaim Perleman with freshmen. He argued that when a topic is controversial, using rhetorical theory might go a long way to helping students argue their views without the discourse becoming angry and vindictive. The incident Fehler described in his presentation was an off-campus party that had occurred on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2007, in Stephenville, Texas. A gathering of students at a fraternity house got together for a party and according to Fehler, most of the students who attended the party did not dress in anything other than casual clothes. Some students dressed up in stereotypical costumes, such as young men coming as gang members, and one young woman dressed as Aunt Jemima, and when pictures of these party appeared on Facebook, the uproar was fierce, and it led to a campus-wide dialogue about what had occurred at the party. In Fehler’s own first-year composition course, he encouraged a dialogue among students, asking about their reaction to these events. He pulled on the rhetorical theory of Chaim Perlman’s Realm of Rhetoric to help with this dialogue. Fehler sought a way to encourage a way for students to express their views about the event without the dialogue disintegrating into invective, and he also wanted to address the privacy issues facing students when they posted comments and pictures on what is in essence a public forum. Although Fehler reported that using a rhetorical framework like Perlman’s brought more of a framework for talking about values, he found that the results of his classroom dialogues were somewhat mixed. A lively Q&A followed, and the session came to a successful conclusion. |